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One thing I’ve learned over the past 30 years as an investigative editor and reporter is that there is a lot of waste, fraud and abuse in government agencies. The problem is finding it. Understanding how a system actually works makes sense that there are seemingly doubts. And understanding that won’t be easy.
If you want to identify serious shortcomings with an agency that can reach millions or billions of dollars, you must immerse yourself in the complexities of how Medicare pays for prescription drugs. Immerse yourself in such fine details is inevitably a process of trial and error, and only appears after a journey through multiple, first promising paths where insights lead to dead ends.
This really helps explain some of the well-known stumblings of the Elon Musk and Cyber Command team of government efficiency who took a chainsaw approach to spending based on a rough inspection of federal government records. Here is just one recent example. No, Social Security doesn’t pay a lot of money to people over the age of 150. The discovery, trumpeted by Musk, turns out to be a glitch in the Social Security Bureau’s recordkeeping, rather than evidence of a massive fraud by the super-senior zombie army.
Despite the methods that are sometimes portrayed in films and television, the work of investigative reporting moves slowly, with several hours of boredom being interrupted by moments of exhilaration that are sometimes cancelled by further research. It may seem like the Internal Revenue Service is spending a ton of money to hire sophisticated auditors to handle complex returns. But as I recently pointed out, reducing these salaries could result in loss of tax revenue and cost government money.
I’ve never seen things work smoothly like in the pilot episode of the HBO series The Newsroom. The producers understand in just a few hours the major companies and government failures that contributed to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The producers just happen to be sitting in BP’s control room and crack the case because they have friends who are willing to relay newsworthy information in real time. I had my front row seating on how the story was actually covered, and it took a PropoPublica reporter months to confuse what was revealed in just a few minutes of the episode.
Signal chats with fully placed acquaintances and random invitations categorized are rare in real life, so Propublica relies on a simpler playbook to find WFA (waste, fraud, abuse). It is hardly similar to the approaches developed by Team Doge to institutions such as the Social Security Agency and the US International Development Agency. Pro Tips for Chainsaw-Wielders: You can barely understand what’s going on within a complex organization from the first pass and document.
Rather, the pass raises more questions than answers about how and why agents spend an incredible amount of taxpayer money. To find the real answer, we look for people who are most likely to know where their bodies are buried. Sometimes that search shows up whistleblowers who want to tell us something scandalous. More often, we find sources that will help us understand the agency’s actual day-to-day work.
Another standard step in searching for WFA is to jump into reports by the agency’s inspector or the general accountability department, a department of Congress with deep expertise in investigating federal agencies. Inspectors are independent and their reports can be as rich sources as they pursue. President Donald Trump complicated the prospects of Doge’s use of this knowledge by firing 17 inspectors who will be responsible for some of the federal government’s biggest budgets, including the Pentagon and the Social Security Agency.
Regarding GAO, the organisation head told Congress that his analysts had little contact with Doge. Director General Jean Dodaro said GAO has a list of reforms that could save the federal government $200 billion without laying off a huge number of federal workers. Dodaro said staff cuts are an inefficient way to cut budgets as payroll costs are less than 10% of total spending.
One of the things we often try to do when investigating possible government waste and fraud is getting a large database. Doge appears to have chosen that route as the main way to find savings, and it could work.
Of course, we are hampered by our lack of presidential accusations. Our requests will be shuffled by officers of the Freedom of Information Act and will return in a few months.
Still, I found something fascinating that is buried in government records.
A few years ago, we persuaded the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to reveal the names of doctors who prescribe drugs through large Medicare programs that provide medication to older adults. The process helped by interviews with experts both inside and outside the government took time to understand what we were seeing.
I sorted the tables and tables of data and noticed that some doctors seemed to write an incredible number of prescriptions. It appeared that one Florida doctor had approved more than $4 million in medication from $282,000 the previous year. No one from Medicare called on her to ask about it. She only stumbled on a scam a few years later due to an accident in the mail. (Two workers at her clinic later pleaded guilty to federal medical fraud and identity theft.) When they looked up the list of the most prolific prescribers, they confirmed that this type of prescription fraud was becoming widespread. Medicare has not checked its own records of missing out on signs of abuse, the possibility of catching doctors and others robbing the government.
It was a typical case of the WFA, and it quickly combined waste, fraud, abuse, and yes, large-scale government inefficiency.
Things don’t always go smoothly. Reporters often receive amazing tips, notice amazing numbers in records, and learn that there is a completely clear explanation of what was seemingly shocking.
Amanda Bennett, a former US agency of Global Media, has explained a recent example of this phenomenon. USAGM is responsible for international broadcasting such as The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Bennett resigned from her post shortly after Trump was launched.
Kari Lake, a reporter-turned-politician whose Trump was appointed as a special advisor to the agency, posted the video shortly after pronounced “terrifying” by USAGM’s “glossy brand new beautiful skyscraper buildings sacrificing taxpayers, taxpayers and property.”
The lake tweeted that the new building is ridiculously gorgeous, with Italian marble, leather furniture and even several waterfalls.
However, as Bennett pointed out in the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, the WFA’s description of the lake was not complete.
Bennett said her agency was told by 2028 that she had to leave the FDR-era building. Bennett and her team began searching for a new office at exactly the right moment. The negotiated agreements by the agency include three years of free rent and a $27 million cash incentive from the building owner, which can be used to upgrade the agency’s aging equipment. Furniture and Italian marble were donated by a former tenant, a law firm, saving the government an additional $10 million. USAGM’s annual rents fell from nearly $24 million a year to less than $16 million. Bennett said she left a memo detailing her savings.
Nevertheless, it issued a press release expediting the agency for “indecent overexpenditures, including a lease of about $400 million for skyscrapers on Pennsylvania avenue.”
October’s story that outlines exactly what the Trump administration will do to the federal bureaucracy
“The institution’s waste, fraud and abuse are rampaging,” Lake wrote, claiming that USAGM has permeated “spy, terrorist sympathizers and/or supporters” and engaged in “eye-catching self-dealing.”
She declared the agency “cannot be rescued” and announced plans to close operations soon. A few days later, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington, D.C. temporarily blocked the action. The case is pending.
If you were reporting on the possible overexpenditures at USAGM, you would have found Lake’s allegations about intriguing about the gorgeous quarter. But if I came across Bennett’s notes and it confronted scrutiny, I would have spiked the story. Or they could have used misinformation to turn it into a work about justifying the massive cuts of the agency Trump has publicly condemned.
