House DOGE Panel to Examine Billions in Improper Payments by Federal Officials

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) speaks at a hearing in Washington on June 3, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

WASHINGTON—When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) convenes Wednesday’s House subcommittee hearing on improper payments by federal agencies, the panel will take aim at a target-rich environment.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the congressional investigative agency, has for decades been calling attention to the reality that every year, hundreds of billions of tax dollars go to dead people, incorrect names or addresses, perpetrators of fraud, mistaken contractors, fictitious business fronts, and a host of other recipients who shouldn’t be getting the checks.

In its most recent report to Congress on the problem, the GAO pointed to the fact that federal officials cannot “determine the full extent to which improper payments, including fraud, occur and reasonably assure that appropriate actions are taken to reduce them.”

Even so, GAO investigators have found enough evidence on which to base their estimate of the scope of the improper payments problem at $233 billion to $521 billion for the period from 2018 to 2022.

That’s an average of $130.6 billion annually that could have been spent on worthy causes. To cite just one example, there are 35,574 homeless veterans in the United States, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Each of those homeless veterans could receive a yearly check in the amount of $3.7 million.

The total loss estimate by GAO for the past 20 years is $2.7 trillion.

Inspectors general (IGs) in departments and major agencies are also shining a spotlight on improper payments by the federal government. At the Social Security Administration (SSA), for example, the IG has identified improper payments as a major management challenge every year since 2002.

In its most recent report on the issue, the SSA IG estimated that the agency had made nearly $72 billion in improper payments from 2015 to 2022.

A nonprofit watchdog, Open the Books, will issue a report on Wednesday that, among much else, estimates the total of improper payments under President Joe Biden at just under $1 trillion.

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) speaks during an interview with The Epoch Times on Capitol Hill on Jan. 21, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

But the problem may be even worse than previously thought. Greene’s Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency was formed by House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) specifically to coordinate and assist President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

DOGE is headed by billionaire Elon Musk, who has brought in an estimated 100 mostly young “whiz kids,” formed into small teams and inserted into agencies armed with the most advanced tools of forensic auditing.

After just one week of work, DOGE claimed in a post on X to be saving the taxpayers $1 billion daily “mostly from stopping the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, deletion of DEI and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations.” It described the first week as “a good start.”

Witnesses scheduled to testify before the hearing include Stewart Whitson, a former FBI agent who is now senior director for federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability.

Also scheduled to testify are Haywood Talcove, chief executive officer of Lexis-Nexis Risk Solutions, and Dawn Royal, director of the United Council on Welfare Fraud.

There is a possibility the hearing will be rescheduled due to a snowstorm expected to dump four to six inches on the Washington region by early Wednesday morning. Committee officials had not announced a decision on the issue by publication time.