The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently announced that the 2024 fiscal-year federal budget deficit — the amount the government spent over and above what it received in total revenue — was $1.8 trillion. That makes the Biden-Harris administration by far the biggest deficit spenders in modern history. Worse yet, Biden-Harris also wasted more money than any other administration, roughly $1 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The Biden-Harris four-year deficit total was $7.65 trillion — roughly 50 percent more than Donald Trump’s four-year deficit total of $5.56 trillion, and that figure included $3.13 trillion spent in FY2020, the first year of the pandemic. Had Trump’s fourth year deficit been in the general range of his first three years, his total deficit spending would have been about $3.25 trillion, less than half of Biden-Harris’s actual four-year deficit.
But with great spending should come increased efforts to minimize fraud and waste. And that’s where Biden-Harris really failed. Last April the GAO released its “improper payments” assessment, and Team Biden has the dubious distinction of wasting more taxpayer money than any previous administration. To be sure, some of the Biden-Harris deficit spending was also because of the pandemic, but then Biden used the pandemic as a catch-all excuse to ladle out money he was eager to spend anyway.
“Improper payments” aren’t all fraud, though fraud makes up a significant portion. The GAO defines improper payments as “those [payments] that should not have been made or were made in the incorrect amount.” So, for example, if Medicare overpaid a hospital for its services, that would be an improper overpayment. But there is also a lot of outright fraud in health care and several other federal programs, areas where payments “should not have been made.”
The GAO says that in FY2023, Medicare and Medicaid together accounted for more than $100 billion in improper payments. Another $43.6 billion in improper payments went to Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, $21.9 billion was for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and $18.7 billion was for the Paycheck Protection loan forgiveness program.