Like a dog chasing its tail, our federal government has been chasing “waste, fraud and abuse” for decades.

Thirty-nine years ago, President Ronald Reagan established the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency (PCIE), including the inspectors general of all cabinet departments. Reagan made the elimination of fraud, waste and abuse a national priority. He believed “the American taxpayer should not spend a penny for programs or purposes that are unnecessary or improper.”

In its first two months, the PCIE put “in excess of $70 billion to better use,” and was responsible for “16,000 successful prosecutions of persons attempting to defraud the federal government.” Reagan even went after waste in the Armed Forces, finding a defense contractor who charged the Air Force $9,000 for a 32-cent Allen wrench.

Four decades later, President Donald Trump lifted pages from Reagan’s playbook, creating on his first day in office a temporary Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), evolved from what used to be called the U.S. Digital Service, “to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Every federal agency set up a “DOGE team” of special government employees with access to all unclassified agency records and software.

Unlike Reagan, Trump chose an unelected large donor to “head up” his new office. At the end of February, DOGE released a list of 2,300 canceled government contracts — one-third of which were expected to produce no savings because funds were already obligated.

On Feb. 19, the White House released an executive order “continuing the reduction of federal bureaucracy and waste.” The White House claimed that DOGE “has already identified billions in waste, fraud and abuse.” “By reducing the federal footprint, President Trump is returning power to local communities and state government,” the White House boasted.

At the “local community” level, we have seen our share of waste, fraud and abuse. On Feb. 18, under federal and state False Claims Act statutes, 13 counts were filed against Regal Care Management nursing facilities in Massachusetts and Connecticut, charging defendants with “systematic billing fraud to cheat Medicare and Medicaid and increase their profits.”

Regal Care bought the Buckley nursing facility in Greenfield in 2022, and owns 17 other facilities in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Between April 2018 and September 2023, MassHealth paid Regal Care $63 million, including $4.37 million to Regal Care in Greenfield. The government says these companies were “improperly inflating the patients’ health conditions to receive higher payments.”

Your Daily Puzzles

Cross|Word

Flipart

Typeshift

SpellTower

Really Bad Chess

The CEO of Regal Care Management has never been licensed as a nursing home administrator in Massachusetts. This lawsuit was triggered by the actions of one ”whistleblower,” a physical therapist inside the Regal Care network.

Such fraudulent claims are disturbing, but the White House has weakened the government’s capacity to investigate waste, fraud and abuse. In the first days of the Trump administration, more than 17 inspector generals — the independent watchdogs overseeing government waste, fraud and abuse — were fired. Eight of those IGs are suing the administration, including Christi Grimm, a former IG for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees nursing facilities.

Grimm says she had saved the government $14.5 billion in fraudulent claims. “We do work looking at abuse and neglect in nursing homes,” Grimm told PBS. She investigated a large nursing home chain: “We found … nursing home residents were incurring harm, medication errors … Some of these residents were found in beds soaked with urine. So it touches every American.”

Trump told Congress that DOGE found $22 billion of “appalling waste,” and “fraud of over $500 billion.” The Intercept news reports: “nearly all of DOGE’s operations have been taking place behind closed doors with zero meaningful oversight from Congress.” In the first week of February, nearly $7 million was “apportioned” to cover DOGE expenses.

Trump complained to Congress that Social Security was paying claims of dead people, but then eliminated the inspector general at Social Security, closed offices and fired 7,000 workers. The former head of Social Security warned that DOGE cutbacks “could result in the collapse of the Social Security system within the next 30 to 90 days.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s budget resolution sought to “carve out fraud, waste and abuse,” then added $4.5 trillion in spending by extending tax cuts to benefit largely the wealthiest 1% of Americans, while slashing $2 trillion from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for 70 million poor people.

The government’s fake war against waste, fraud and abuse is itself an object lesson in waste, fraud and abuse. Workers who were saving taxpayers billions were fired.

Al Norman’s Pushback column appears in The Recorder every first and third Wednesday of the month.