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.

 

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.)

Little Evidence that Undocumented People Get Medicaid

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt. Americans vastly overestimate the amount of waste in the budget

Phil Galewitz at KFF:

Last August, as part of the federal government’s crackdown on people in the country illegally, the Trump administration sent states the names of hundreds of thousands of Medicaid enrollees with orders to determine whether they were ineligible based on immigration status.

But seven months later, findings from five states shared with KFF Health News show that the reviews have uncovered little evidence of a widespread problem.

Only U.S. citizens and some lawfully present immigrants are eligible for Medicaid, which covers health care costs for people with low incomes and disabilities, and the closely related Children’s Health Insurance Program. Both programs are administered by states.

Spokespeople from Pennsylvania’s and Colorado’s Medicaid agencies said, as of March, the states had found no one who needed to be terminated from Medicaid. That was after checking a combined 79,000 names.

Texas has reviewed records of more than 28,000 Medicaid enrollees at the Trump administration’s request and terminated coverage for 77 of them, according to Jennifer Ruffcorn, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Human Services.

Ohio has checked 65,000 Medicaid enrollees, of which 260 people were disenrolled from the program, said Stephanie O’Grady, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Medicaid.

In Utah, 42 of the 8,000 enrollees identified by the Trump administration had their Medicaid coverage terminated, said Becky Wickstrom, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Workforce Services.

Myths, Misinformation, and US Elections

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. 

Daniel Dale at CNN:

President Donald Trump made a series of false claims about elections in a Monday social media post in which he pledged to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and voting machines – including an inaccurate assertion that states have to run elections in the manner the president tells them to.

Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s comments.

“We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”

False. Dozens of other countries use mail-in voting, as CNN and others have pointed out when Trump has made such claims before. These countries include Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland.

The specifics of different countries’ policies vary, but it’s simply not true that every other country has abandoned mail-in voting.

“WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections.”

Trump’s claim about Democrats is nonsense. There is simply no basis for the assertion of massive cheating. US federal elections are free and fair; there has generally been a tiny quantity of ballot fraud representing a minuscule percentage of votes cast.

“Our elections are more secure, transparent, and verified than ever before in American history, thanks to the thousands of professional election officials of both parties, at the state and local level, that oversee them,” David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said in a Monday message to CNN.

“…Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS.”

More fiction. Mail-in voting is a legitimate method used by legitimate voters to cast legitimate ballots. Elections experts say the incidence of fraud tends to be marginally higher with mail-in ballots than with in-person ballots – but also that fraud rates in federal elections are tiny even with mail-in ballots.

Republican-dominated Utah is among the states where voters are automatically sent mail-in ballots (though it is now phasing out that policy); its elections, like other states’, have been free of widespread fraud. And it’s worth noting that Trump himself encouraged supporters to vote by mail in 2024.

“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

That’s not what the Constitution says. Here’s what it does say: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”

In other words, states set their own election policies unless Congress passes a law preempting them. The Constitution does not grant the president himself the power to simply tell states what to do, using an executive order or anything else.

Voter Fraud Misinformation

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

The Parker County GOP has spent the last 24 hours investigating the claims made by Maria Bartiromo on X and subsequently in a segment on her show that, a friend witnessed at the Weatherford DPS office a “massive line of immigrants getting licenses and a tent and table setup… https://t.co/2rcCXmtO6n

— Brady Gray (@Brady_Gray) August 20, 2024

Quack Cure Killed

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.

Ramon Antonio Vargas at The Guardian:

People who took an anti-malaria treatment that Donald Trump touted as a cure for Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic and waning days of his presidency were 11% more likely to die from the virus, according to a new scientific study.

The study’s authors – who published their findings in the peer-reviewed Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy journal – also estimated that nearly 17,000 people in six different countries, including the US, died after contracting Covid-19 and taking the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine.

Doctors who prescribed hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 at the height of activity restrictions meant to slow the spread of the virus did so off-label and without evidence that there was any clinical benefit, as the authors of the new study noted. The study’s conclusions “illustrate the hazard of drug repurposing with low-level evidence for the management of future pandemics”, its authors added.

 A meta-analysis of randomized trials produced the findings in the study released by Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, a 67-year-old journal edited by DM Townsend of the Medical University of South Carolina.

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Shady Fundraising

Many posts have discussed campaign finance.

David A. Fahrenthold and Tiff Fehr at NYT:

A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves, highlighting a flaw in the regulation of political nonprofits.

...

In theory, it is a political nonprofit called a 527, after a section of the tax code, that can raise unlimited donations to help or oppose candidates, promote issues or encourage voting.

In reality, it is part of a group of five linked nonprofits that have exploited thousands of donors in ways that have been hidden until now by a blizzard of filings, lax oversight and a blind spot in the campaign finance system.

Since 2014, the five groups have pulled in $89 million from small-dollar donors who were pitched on building political support for police officers, veterans and firefighters.

But just 1 percent of the money they raised was used to help candidates via donations, ads or targeted get-out-the-vote messages, according to an analysis by The Times of the groups’ public filings.

...

The campaign-finance system is built to police who puts money into politics, legal experts say. These groups embodied a flaw: The system is poorly prepared to stop those who raise money and channel it somewhere other than candidates and causes.

By minimizing their aid to candidates, the consultants who helped set up the five nonprofits avoided scrutiny from the Federal Election Commission and most state watchdogs, and put their groups under the jurisdiction of a distracted and underfunded regulator, the Internal Revenue Service. As a result, their spending records were posted not on the F.E.C.’s easily searchable site, but on a byzantine I.R.S. page written in bureaucratic jargon. 

...

“Constructing an elaborate self-licking ice cream cone, or fund-raising cycle that feeds itself, that’s not an exempt purpose,” said Matthew Sanderson, a lawyer at the firm Caplin & Drysdale who has advised Republican campaigns, using the I.R.S.’s term for an allowable use of the groups’ money. “The fund-raising has to be for something.”

...

The organizations’ calls were recorded by Nomorobo, a company that collects robocalls so it can help customers block them. The company’s founder, Aaron Foss, said it had recorded tens of thousands of calls from just these four groups — putting them among the most prolific and longest-running robocallers his network has ever tracked.

The calls captured by Nomorobo were made using a powerful new technology, a “soundboard,” according to a spokesman for the groups’ largest vendor for fund-raising calls, New Jersey-based Residential Programs, Inc.

A soundboard is a computer program, preloaded with snippets of recorded dialogue, down to uh-huhs, thank-yous and mother-in-law jokes. By clicking buttons, an operator anywhere in the world can “speak” to donors in colloquial English without saying a word.

“One, it keeps everybody on script. Two, you don’t hear the foreign accent. And three, you don’t hear the call center noise,” Mr. Foss said.

“If you say, ‘Are you a robot?’,” Mr. Foss said, “there’s a button that says, ‘No.’”

Foreign Governments Did Not Tamper with Election Results

Joint Statement from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security Assessing the Impact of Foreign Interference During the 2020 U.S. Elections

Note: The joint report can be viewed here.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), released today key findings and recommendations from a joint report to the President issued last month on the impact of foreign governments and their agents on the security and integrity of the 2020 U.S. federal elections.

The Departments investigated multiple public claims that one or more foreign governments owned, directed or controlled election infrastructure used in the 2020 federal elections; implemented a scheme to manipulate election infrastructure; or tallied, changed or otherwise manipulated vote counts. The Departments found that those claims were not credible.

These conclusions are part of a classified report to the President prepared by DOJ and DHS pursuant to section 1(b) of Executive Order 13848, Imposing Certain Sanctions in the Event of Foreign Influence in a United States Election (the EO), issued on Sept. 12, 2018. Although the 1(b) report notes that Russian, Chinese, and Iranian government-affiliated actors materially impacted the security of certain networks during the 2020 federal elections, the Departments found no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor manipulated election results or otherwise compromised the integrity of the 2020 federal elections.

The 1(b) report relied on a classified assessment — prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), pursuant to section 1(a) of the EO, about any information indicating that a foreign government acted with the intent or purpose of interfering in the 2020 U.S. federal elections. Whereas the 1(a) report discusses efforts to influence public perceptions and opinion, the scope of the 1(b) report only includes efforts to compromise the security or integrity of election infrastructure or infrastructure pertaining to political organizations, candidates or campaigns used in the 2020 U.S. federal elections. The 1(b) report does not discuss efforts to sway voters or influence opinion.

During the 2020 election cycle, federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, non-governmental and private sector partners nationwide worked together in unprecedented ways to combat foreign interference efforts and support election officials, political organizations, campaigns and candidates in safeguarding their infrastructure. The Departments remain committed to continuously strengthening the nation’s cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, supply chain risk management, public-private partnerships and public messaging to enhance the resiliency of our democratic institutions.