Fraud and Funny Numbers

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Like previous efforts to reduce the deficit by cutting "waste, fraud, and abuse," DOGE was a failure.

Linda Qiu at NYT:

Since the White House formed a task force in March intended to combat fraud, top administration officials have repeatedly heralded its work, pointing to huge amounts of recovered payments and graft stopped in its tracks.

“We found $250 billion of fraud just since the president made me the fraud czar,” Vice President JD Vance, who leads the task force, said in a speech this month at the Republican midterm convention.

Yet some of the numbers Mr. Vance and his task force have promoted are overstated or lack specificity, and rely on temporary pauses in funding as well as cases and actions that long predated President Trump’s second term, according to a New York Times analysis of documents released by the administration. The task force also appears to be relying on claims of fraud that could not be verified or leaning on allegations of fraud that are being prematurely included.

In August, the White House published a so-called fraud ledger chronicling its work. It singled out three categories of fraud identified and eliminated since January 2025 — not, as Mr. Vance said, since this March, when the task force was established. As of Wednesday afternoon, the task force asserted it had found, or “uncovered,” $245.7 billion in fraud through data analysis, “stopped” $62.9 billion annually through actions like suspending providers and enacting rule changes, and “enforced” $59.1 billion through indictments, settlements and financial fines.

It is difficult to verify those figures because there is no publicly available breakdown of the total. A senior White House official said the task force chose not to itemize fraud schemes and actions to avoid compromising current law enforcement investigations.

The task force ledger’s chronology and a White House news release from August offer some details about $47 billion of the more than $300 billion the task force asserts it has identified or eliminated. But even that information falls short, leaving unclear how that amount is spread across the three categories.

Undoubtedly, the federal government loses vast amounts of money to fraud: $233 billion to $521 billion annually, equal to about 3 to 7 percent of federal spending, according to one estimate from the Government Accountability Office, an independent, nonpartisan agency that has scrutinized how the government spends taxpayer funds for more than a century.

Mr. Vance and his task force have ferreted out real cases of fraud, and their efforts to draw attention to the problem and recover taxpayer funds are laudable, experts said. But the task force’s unverifiable claims may undermine efforts at transparency and obscure the actual scale of the work it is performing.

 

Two Cheers for Socialism

 A number of posts have discussed socialism.

 Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Forty-three percent of Americans now have a positive view of socialism, marking the first time this figure has exceeded 39% in Gallup’s trend since 2010. Socialism still trails capitalism and free enterprise in public favorability but now ranks ahead of big business. Small business remains the clear leader among the five economic concepts tested, with 95% viewing it positively.

Gallup has measured Americans’ overall views of these five economic concepts periodically since 2010, with the latest update conducted Aug. 3-24.

Over the longer term, Americans have become less positive about most of the market-oriented concepts Gallup tracks. Since 2010, positive views of big business have fallen by 14 percentage points, free enterprise by nine points and capitalism by six points. Small business is the exception, with views of it unchanged. Meanwhile, positive impressions of socialism have risen by seven points.

 

Funny Numbers from the Census

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.

Americans are increasingly skeptical of government data -- with good reason.

 Michael Strain at AEI:

Unfortunately, Trump’s attacks on the integrity of official statistics have continued. Last month, the US Census Bureau published an official brief that claims to have “readily determined with high confidence” that, of the 160 million voters in the 2020 presidential election, more than 128 million were citizens and more than 24,000 were noncitizens. “Over 32 million voter records remain to be analyzed.”

This report clearly falls short of the Census Bureau’s own standards of quality, integrity, and accountability. For example, it does not name its authors or provide relevant contact information for members of the public interested in asking questions about the report. Examining these unusual omissions, NPR reports that “the analysis was not conducted by career civil servants at the Census Bureau,” but by individuals affiliated with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute.

Then there is the fact that the brief’s subject matter is nakedly political. Illegal voting is a topic that the bureau previously would have bent over backward to avoid, lest it be accused of engaging in partisan politics. Not any longer. On the day the report appeared, Trump himself posted about it on social media, highlighting the 24,000 illegal vote figure and claiming that “The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!”

The report’s analysis links a variety of databases together in an effort to determine if all the people who voted in the 2020 election were citizens. One is a private-sector database of voter registration and turnout records, which was used here to figure out who voted in the election. The authors then linked this database to internal government databases with the goal of determining the citizenship status of the individuals in the private-sector data on voter records.

This type of analysis is challenging for several reasons. Large private-sector databases of the type used by the brief’s authors often contain missing values for key variables (including home address, birth date, and name) that one would use to ensure that the same individual is being observed across multiple data sources. Normally, a study relying on this sort of data linking would provide extensive, detailed, and assessable information about the challenges the researchers faced and how they overcame them. That is how one convinces professional statisticians, economists, and demographers that one’s conclusions are credible. (Indeed, the bureau has reporting requirements to this effect, which the authors of this brief seem to have violated.)

Congress Struggling

 Many posts have discussed the state of Congress.

At AEI, Kevin R. Kosar and Scott Warren have a report titled "Congress Is Struggling to Govern. Are Electoral Incentives to Blame?"

Executive Summary

Congress performs poorly by most measures, and a mere 15 percent of the public approves of our national legislature’s performance. The public’s discontent is understandable. Legislators have failed to debate and craft policies to address important issues such as immigration, healthcare, and housing affordability.

This report examines whether electoral incentives are to blame for Congress’s performance.

It first traces the constitutional design of congressional elections—two-year House terms, staggered six-year Senate terms—and the framers’ theory that regular elections would produce accountable, virtuous representation. The growth of the federal government’s role and other developments have left the hopes of James Madison and other creators of the US Constitution feeling remote from today’s campaigns and elections.

The report then reviews decades of research on how modern elections actually shape legislative behavior: the near-constant campaign cycle, soaring campaign costs, the rise of primaries dominated by unrepresentative and ideological voters, shrinking numbers of competitive districts and states, and intensifying partisan competition for narrow chamber majorities.

Together, these forces push legislators toward fundraising, symbolic position taking, and party loyalty rather than substantive lawmaking and oversight. Electoral incentives do discourage good governance, and structural electoral reforms—particularly changes to primaries—have merit. Nonetheless, no single reform will fix Congress. Electoral pressures are only one of several factors shaping Congress’s performance, and there are profound normative disputes over what constitutes a well-functioning Congress.

Class Ceiling

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

Stansbury, Anna, and Kyra Rodriguez. “The Class Gap in Career Progression: Evidence From U.S. Academia.” Econometrica, 94, .no 4, (Econometric Society: 2026), 1345-1373. https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA23358

Unlike gender or race, class background is rarely a focus of research on career progression, or of DEI efforts in elite occupations. Should it be? In this paper, we document a large class gap in career progression in one occupation—U.S. tenure-track academia—using parental education to proxy for class background. First-generation college graduates are 10% less likely to be tenured at an R1, are tenured at institutions ranked 11% lower, earn 3% less, and report 5% lower job satisfaction, than their former PhD classmates (from the same institution and field) with a parent with a non-PhD graduate degree. Neither selection out of academia nor different preferences explain this gap; differential research productivity also plays little role. Instead, likely drivers are differences in cultural and social capital. We also find a class gap in career progression for PhDs who work in industry, suggesting this phenomenon generalizes outside academia.

McClatchy: Cutting Jobs, Agentifying the Enterprise

Many posts have dealt with media problems such as ghost newspapers and news deserts.

Mark Keierleber at Straight Arrow News:

Just last week, dozens of reporters with at least 17 McClatchy newspapers from coast to coast — including the Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star and the Sacramento Bee — were laid off as the company pivots toward lifestyle content written by artificial intelligence chatbots.

At the Herald, which has won 24 Pulitzer Prizes, including one this year for reporting that led to sex-trafficking charges against Jeffrey Epstein, more than one-third of the editorial staff was let go as the struggling newspaper chain deals with a dwindling readership and a 41% decline in consumer revenue.

The email also recognized McClatchy employees with work anniversaries, including a reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky, who has been with the company for more than 40 years. That reporter was among the lucky ones. At the Herald-Leader, which has won three Pulitzer Prizes over the past four decades, McClatchy slashed the newsroom staff by more than half.

While McClatchy journalists blasted the layoffs as a devastating loss for local news, company executives framed them as necessary to compete against social media influencers — and survive industrywide woes. Newspapers nationwide have struggled for decades, and some 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have closed shop in the past decade, including more than 130 outlets in the last year alone.

But more than other news companies, McClatchy is leaning into AI as the answer to the existential threats facing the industry.

Even before the layoffs announced last week, McClatchy executives made clear they believe the future of the news industry is AI.

During a contentious, off-the-record virtual town hall in May, company executives said their business was in freefall — and positioned AI as its savior. Executives pleaded with skeptical journalists to get on board, and issued what appeared to be a threat: Embrace AI or get out of the way.

“We have a company-wide effort to agentify the entire enterprise,” McClatchy CEO Tony Hunter said during the town hall, a recording of which was obtained by Straight Arrow.

Erick Erickson on the Right Rot

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.  In the past decade, it has taken a bad turn.

Conservative Erick Erickson bravely takes on the rot on his own side of the spectrum:

A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even surround the Vice President of the United States. Some of them believe the United States is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image. You might think it does not affect you, but, in time, you will see their efforts in your church pews, in your kids’ brains, and in your politicians’ mouths. It begins with shampoo.

Charles Haywood made his fortune selling shampoo. He sold his Indianapolis hair care company in 2020, and he has spent the years since writing out, at length and under his own name, what he would like to do with your country. Rod Dreher, who is no man of the left, read Haywood’s online ramblings and described Haywood as pouring out vile from “deep in his Midwestern Führerbunker”.

In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government “will not be democratic.” The state “will have unlimited means,” because “properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.” Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.” Men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” The state will seize the assets of “any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.”

That is not my characterization of his politics. Those are his words, from the manifesto that earned him a friendly sit-down with Tucker Carlson in September 2022.

Elsewhere he has speculated about serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network,” a model he says he drew from the groups of white settler farmers formed in southern African countries and colonies while black Africans were fighting for majority rule. Reviewing a biography of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, he wrote that his already favorable impression of the Spanish dictator had become positively glowing. He is not alone in that fixation. MAGA gadfly Jack Posobiec wrote a book called Unhumans, which Vice President JD Vance blurbed and which claims Franco and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet are models for handling the American left. Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, has written that America is going to need a Protestant Franco. It is not a coincidence, but an attempt to shift the Overton window toward dictatorship.

A crank with a blog is a crank with a blog. The problem is that Charles Haywood is not on the outside of the conservative movement. He has used his wealth to get inside it and reshape longtime institutions that build the future of the right, pushing those institutions toward his vision of pushing our constitutional republic to its breaking point so they can rebuild it the way they want.