Showing posts with label government waste. Show all posts
Showing posts with label government waste. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Never Ending Government Corruption, Part Three - USAID, PPP, Obama Care, and Medicaid

 Sadly, the wasting of taxpayer wealth and tax dollars seems to be a never ending  saga, as the following instances of waste reinforce the reality that Washington politicians either do not care that your hard earned tax dollars are wasted or they are not smart enough to stop it:

1)We have done a number of posts on how the USAID Federal government organization has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on absolutely stupid, unneeded, wasteful and money laundering projects over the past few years. I came across another list of wasted dollars on stupidity that are listed below along with  some favorites we have previously discussed:

  • $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid using “binary gendered language.”

  • $20 million for a Sesame Street play in  Iraq.

  • Over $4.5 million to “combat misinformation" in Kazakhstan.

  • $2 million for sex change operations  and “LGBT” activism in  Guatemala.

  • $2.1 million to help the BBC  "value the diversity of Libyan  society.”

  • $10 million worth of USAID funded meals went to the al Qaeda terror group.

  • $25 million for Deloitte to  promote "green transportation" in the country of Georgia.

  • $2.5 million to  promote “inclusion” in  Vietnam.

  • $5 million to the EcoHealth Alliance, one of the NGOs that funded the Chinese lab where the Covid virus research was developed.

  • $1.1 million  to  an Armenian “LGBT group.”

  • $1.2 million to the African Methodist Episcopal Church Service and Development Agency to build a “state of the art 440 seat auditorium" in DC.

  • $1.5 million  to promote “LGBT advocacy”  in Jamaica.

  • $500k to solve sectarian  violence in Israel

  • $2 million  to promote “LGBT  equality through entrepreneurship”  in  Latin America.

  • $2.3  million for “artisanal and small scale gold  mining” in the Amazon.

  • $3.9 million for “LGBT causes” in the western  Balkans.

  • $5.5 million of LGBT activism in Uganda.

  • $6 million for advancing LGBT  issues in “priority countries around the world.”

  • $8.3 million of “USAID Education: Equity and  Inclusion.”

Keep in  mind that while  the Federal government and  the Biden  administration were spending these  millions of dollars around the world:

  • 770,000 Americans were homeless.

  • Millions of Americans were  having trouble feeding their families.

  • Over 20 million  Americans still do not have  health  insurance.

  • Thousands of Americans die every month  from drug overdoses  because they do not get the addiction help they need.


Thus, if you think that spending $20 million in Iraq for a Sesame Street play is  more important than sheltering homeless Americans, then you and I have a radically different set of human priorities. If you think that spending millions of dollars around the world on  LGBT mythical issues is more important than helping to feed America’s  hungry, then you and  I have a radically different set of human  priorities.  If you think that spending $25 million on green  transportation halfway around the world in Georgia is more important than helping Americans get addiction help before they die, then you and I have a radically different  set of human priorities.


Also, ask yourself, how much of  this funding do you think  actually gets to where it is supposed to be going and being used for the stated purpose?  Government  NGOs have to first skim off their expenses, costs, and profits. Then once in the country, crooked native politicians and others have to get their cut/kickback in order to cooperate with the NGOs. And finally the NGOs probably have to have a slush fund to kick back to the politicians that made the expenditure happen in the first place, a process called money laundering. 


Do you really think it takes $20 million to put on a Sesame Street play in Iraq? The cost to produce a Broadway play costs about a fourth of $20 million. The difference goes for kickbacks  and  other corruption.


2)We have often discussed the reality that the programs that the Federal government  put in place during Covid to help out struggling Americans and businesses was one of the most corrupt and  criminally infested government programs ever produced. The fraud and stealing of taxpayer wealth allocated to the Covid programs was  monumental. And recently another criminal fraud operation that stole millions of dollars was uncovered:


  • One of the most criminally infested Covid programs was the Paycheck  Protection Program (PPP).

  • As a result, the Department  of Justice recently reached a settlement with three Chinese owned real estate companies that will  require them to return $7.3 million from the PPP that they stole.

  • In exchange for the repayment, criminal charges will  not be pressed.

  • This fraud is part of the estimated overall $1.4 billion that was stolen from the PPP.

  • There have been over 100 other settlements regarding their fraud infested program.


Another example where a Federal  government program has been implemented with barely any audit or crime prevention processes in place. As a result, criminals around the world feasted on American taxpayer wealth.


3)But it is not only criminals that waste and  steal  taxpayer dollars, the Federal  government itself is  often the source of taxpayer dollar waste  as we see now relative to Obama Care processes and failures:


  • Audits have found  that at least 160,000 Obama Care  applications were altered without government authorization by health insurance brokers and agents, allowing  eligible people  to get Obama Care subsidies.

  • Over 1.5 million households earning  over the 400% of the Federal Poverty Level, making them not qualified for the Obama Care policies, received taxpayer subsidies.

  • The audit checks in the Obama Care world were so bad that people earning  over $600,000 a year were somehow able to get taxpayer subsidies for their health insurance coverage.


What a mess and what a failure. Remember ,Obama claimed that 1) if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor, 2) if you like your insurance policy you can keep your policy, and 3) every American will get health insurance coverage under Obama Care. Everyone of those promises failed miserably once the legislation took effect. Millions of people lost access to their doctor, millions lost access to their preferred insurance policy, and over 20 million Americans still do  not have health insurance coverage.


All  of these Obama  Care failures came at a cost of over $1.3 TRILLION, a tremendous waste of epic proportions.


4)One last episode of government fraud and  the stealing of taxpayer dollars:


  • Ten years ago, the Judicial Watch organization reported that one state had sent $26 million of Medicaid benefits for dead people.

  • Unfortunately, nothing came of their fraud finding since Judicial Watch recently uncovered the reality that Medicaid currently still  sends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to “deceased enrollees.”

  • 18 audits of the Medicaid program identified about $289 million in payments to dead people.

  • These payments are dressed up and called  “unallowable payments” which sounds better than  fraud and incompetence.

  • But these are just a small portion of the Medicaid  fraud that goes on since it was recently uncovered that the state of Illinois had sent over $9.5 million of Medicaid benefits to inmates in prison.

  • In total,  the General Accountability Office found that Medicaid had made a whopping total of $31.1 BILLION in  total improper payments in  one year, 2024.


What a mess, a mess that has been  recognized for at least ten years and which never got resolved. If anything, the improper payments of taxpayer wealth got worse over time.


So any wasted dollars and  so many different ways to waste it: Medicaid, PPP, Obama Care, and USAID.  No wonder the national debt is quickly approaching $40 TRILLION while millions of Americans suffer so many hardships.


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Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Wastebook 2019 - The Washington Wasteful and Stupid Spending Machine Marches on

For years, various Republican Senators have published an annual report on wasteful spending by the Federal government. That’s the good news. The bad news is that these annual disgraces have done nothing to deter Washington politicians and bureaucrats from continuing to waste our hard earned tax dollars on nonsensical programs and projects.

The 2019 “Wastebook” has recently been published. As you read just a very, very small sample of the wasteful spending outlined below, keep in mind the following realities:
  • The country is rapidly heading towards a whopping $23 TRILLION national debt, a lot of which was driven by stupid projects like the ones listed below.
  • These program examples below serve very few Americans and in some cases serve no Americans at all.
  • Social Security and Medicare are hurtling towards fiscal collapse, wouldn’t the money wasted below be better spent to help fix these programs that affect tens of millions of Americans?
  • Millions of Americans are homeless, hungry, drug addicted and facing other crises, wouldn’t the money wasted below be better spent to help these Americans in need?
Keep these points in mind as we review seven incredible wastes of taxpayer money which help no American in need and fix none of the Federal government’s financial crises:

1) Washington sent $708,466 to England to study how zebrafish react once they are addicted to nicotine. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded a five year project “that involves actively addicting its subjects, zebrafish, to nicotine.” The objective of the study was supposed to “identify genes affecting vulnerability to addiction by screening lines of mutagenized zebrafish for core behaviors associated with addiction: sensitivity to drug reward and impulsivity.”

How matter how fancy you write the objective it is still a waste of tax dollars. Plus, even if you were going to waste over $700,000 on stupid research at least the NIH could have done was waste it on American scientists doing stupid research and not pay foreign scientists doing stupid research.

2) The State Department bought a statue created by Bob Dylan for $84,375 that was displayed at the U.S. embassy in Mozambique. Seriously? An $84,000 statue to be displayed thousands and thousands of miles away in a third world country? Who came up with this stupid idea and worse, who approved it? Bob Dylan is an American rock and roll star. He is not a famous sculptor who could justify such a purchase and I would bet that just about every citizen of Mozambique has no idea who Bob Dylan is.

3) But the NIH was not done wasting our money. It wasted a whopping $4,658,865 to study the connection between drinking alcohol and ending up in the local hospital emergency room. Heck, I you could have answered this “research” question for far less money: the more alcohol you drink, the higher the probability you will be ending up in an emergency room.

Back in college, myself and others conducted this experiment many times using our own beer money. And yes, drinking a lot of alcohol leads to stupid decisions which sometimes gets you hurt. But according to the NIH report: “Most recently, the researchers have pursued three goals. The first includes looking at alcohol use in the six hours before an injury, as well as the type of injury that brought patients to the ER, such as “traffic [accidents], falls … near drowning,” etc., in consideration of several factors in different countries, including legal restrictions on alcohol. Second, they are “estimat[ing] relative risk (RR) of injury related to alcohol consumption volume (dose-response relationship) by cause of injury,”. Lastly, they are “estimat[ing] alcohol attributable fraction (AAF) by cause of injury…” 

In layman’s terms: are you more likely to hurt yourself if you drink alcohol? Of course you are. And even more disgusting is that some of that $4 million was spent in foreign lands (“several factors in different countries”) getting foreigners drunk. The least they could have done is keep the drinking domestic.

4) The State Department spent $300,000 on something called the “Debates and Model U.N. Competitions in Afghanistan.” I have no idea what these debates are but come on, who thinks that these debates are necessary? Plus, the grant stated that the debates had to be conducted in English in Afghanistan where far less than 10% of the population speaks English. 

5) Even though some would claim that the D.C. metro subway system is the best in the country, those who ride it everyday, including my relatives, would strongly disagree with that statement. Flooding, service outages, fires, and often massive delays are a regular part of the Metro experience.

And to reward those operating such an inept system the Washington politicians gave the Metro $153 million this past year. If the system is so great, let the riders of the system pay to cover its operating costs. No need to burden taxpayers form Montana, Kansas, or anywhere else to pay for the operations of the local D.C. Metro.

6) The American taxpayer spent $33,921,175 to provide textbooks for Afghanistan students. Education is a great thing but should the American taxpayer be putting out over $33 million in a single year to educate students halfway around the world?

To add insult to injury, many of the textbooks never got out of the warehouse where they sat useless to any kid. Additionally, reports showed that the textbooks, used or sitting idle, were of the poorest quality from an education and physical quality perspective.

7) Not content to waste American taxpayer dollars in a failure to educate Afghani kids, the Washington bureaucracy spent $22 million trying to improve the education system in Egypt. Again, the basic question is WHY? Given the sad state of public education in this country, why didn’t those dollars stay in this country and fix our education system?

There you have it, just seven examples among the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars wasted every year by Washington. Consider a few alternative examples where this money could have actually benefited Americans:
  • The above wasted dollars of just these seen examples add up to about $214 million.
  • We have previously cited sources that estimated, on average, it costs about $2.80 to feed an American homeless person.
  • Thus, the money wasted on the above seven projects could have provided over 73 million meals to American homeless and hungry citizens.
  • If we assume that the average salary for an American teacher is $60,000 then the $55 million wasted on failed education efforts in Afghanistan and Egypt could have hired over 900 teachers for a year to help with our failing public schools.
  • Since the average annual treatment for an opioid drug addict is about $6,500 a year, that $214 million could have treated about 33,000 Americans struggling with a drug addiction for a year.
You get the idea. So much could have been done for so many needy Americans instead of wasting $214 million on stupid science experiments, failed education programs around the world and other worthless efforts. This happens every year and still the American political class does nothing to stop the waste. They are too concerned with their own careers, their own greed, and their next election to really do the right thing for America and hard working American taxpayers.

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