What The Hell America!

One thing I’ve learned over more than three decades of work as an investigative editor and reporter: There’s plenty of waste, fraud and abuse in government agencies. The problem is finding it. Some things that look suspicious at first glance make sense when you understand how a system really works. And that understanding doesn’t come easily.

If you hope to identify serious shortcomings in an agency, ones that add up to many millions or even billions of dollars, you have to immerse yourself in the intricacies of, say, how Medicare pays for prescription drugs. Steeping yourself in such minutiae is inevitably a trial-and-error process in which insights emerge only after journeys down multiple initially promising avenues that lead to dead ends.

That really helps explain some of the well-publicized stumbles of Elon Musk and the team of cybercommandos at the Department of Government Efficiency who have taken a chainsaw approach to spending based on cursory examinations of federal government records. To give but one recent example: No, Social Security is not paying large sums of money to people who are over 150 years old. That finding, trumpeted by Musk, turned out to be a glitch in the Social Security Administration’s recordkeeping, not evidence of massive fraud by a zombie army of superseniors.

Despite the way it is sometimes depicted in movies and television, the work of investigative reporting moves slowly, with hours of boredom punctuated by moments of exhilaration that, sometimes, are undone by further research. It may look like the Internal Revenue Service is spending an outsize amount of money on hiring sophisticated auditors to handle complex returns. But as we pointed out recently, cutting those salaries will likely end up costing the government money in lost tax revenue.

I’ve never seen things work out as smoothly as they did in the pilot episode of the HBO series “The Newsroom,” in which a producer figures out in just a few hours the key corporate and government missteps that contributed to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The producer cracks the case because he has a friend who happens to both be sitting in BP’s control room and willing to relay newsworthy information in real time. I had my own front-row seat to how that very story was actually covered, and it took ProPublica reporters many months to puzzle out what was revealed in just minutes in the episode.

Because perfectly placed acquaintances and random invites to classified Signal chats are rare in real life, ProPublica relies on a more straightforward playbook for finding WFA (waste, fraud and abuse). It bears little resemblance to the approach deployed by Team DOGE against agencies like the Social Security Administration or U.S. Agency for International Development. Pro tip for chainsaw-wielders: You can almost never understand what’s happening inside a complex organization from your initial pass through records and documents.

Rather, that pass raises more questions than it answers about how and why an agency spends staggering sums of taxpayer money. To find the real answers, we look for the people who are most likely to know where the bodies are buried. Sometimes, that search turns up whistleblowers eager to tell us something scandalous. More often, we find sources who help us understand the real day-to-day work of an agency.

Another standard step in the search for WFA is a dive into reports by an agency’s inspector general or the General Accountability Office, an arm of Congress with deep expertise in examining federal agencies. The inspectors are independent, and their reports can be a rich source of reporting avenues to pursue. President Donald Trump complicated any prospects DOGE had of using this knowledge by firing 17 inspectors general who were responsible for some of the biggest budgets in the federal government, including the Pentagon and Social Security Administration.

As for the GAO, the head of the organization told Congress that his analysts have had little contact with DOGE. Gene Dodaro, the comptroller general, said the GAO has a list of reforms that could save the federal government $200 billion without laying off massive numbers of federal workers. Dodaro said staff cuts were an inefficient way to cut the budget since payroll costs are less than 10% of total spending.

One thing we often try to do when investigating possible government waste or malfeasance is obtain massive databases. DOGE seems to have chosen that route as its main means of finding savings, and it can work.

We are of course hampered by not having the president’s imprimatur. Our requests are shuffled off to Freedom of Information Act officers and come back months later, if we’re lucky.

Still, we have found some fascinating things buried in government records.

Years ago, we persuaded the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to release the names of the doctors prescribing drugs through the massive Medicare program that provides medications to seniors. It took us a while to understand what we were looking at, a process that was helped along by interviews with experts inside and outside of government.

Sorting through the tables and tables of data, we noticed that some doctors seemed to be writing impossibly large numbers of prescriptions. One Florida doctor had seemingly signed off on more than $4 million in medications, up from $282,000 the previous year. No one from Medicare had called to ask her about that; she only stumbled upon the fraud years later because of a mishap with the mail. (Two workers in her clinic later pleaded guilty to federal health care fraud and identity theft.) As we looked through the list of the most prolific prescribers, we confirmed that this type of prescription fraud was widespread. Medicare was not checking its own records for signs of abuse, missing chances to catch doctors or others who were robbing the government.

It was the quintessential case of WFA, combining at once waste, fraud, abuse and, yes, massive government inefficiency.

Things don’t always go as smoothly. Reporters often receive startling tips or notice surprising numbers in records and then learn there are perfectly clear explanations for what appeared shocking at first glance

The former head of U.S. Agency for Global Media, Amanda Bennett, described a recent instance of this phenomenon. The USAGM is responsible for overseas broadcasts like the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Bennett resigned from her post soon after Trump was inaugurated.

Kari Lake, a reporter-turned-politician who Trump named as a special adviser to the agency, posted a video soon after arriving in which she pronounced herself “horrified” by the USAGM’s “shiny, brand-new beautiful skyscraper building that is costing you, the taxpayer, a fortune.”

Lake tweeted that the new building was absurdly luxurious, with Italian marble, leather furnishings and even a few waterfalls.

But as Bennett pointed out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Lake’s account of WFA was far from complete.

Bennett said her agency was told in December 2020 that it would have to leave its FDR-era building by 2028. Bennett and her team began looking for a new office at precisely the right moment — commercial landlords in D.C. and elsewhere were essentially giving away downtown offices. The deal the agency negotiated included three years of free rent and $27 million in cash incentives from the building’s owner that could be used to upgrade the agency’s aging equipment. The furniture and Italian marble were donated by the previous tenant, a law firm, saving the government an additional $10 million. The annual rent for USAGM dropped from nearly $24 million to less than $16 million a year. Bennett said she left Lake a memo detailing the savings, which she estimated as $150 million over the life of the lease.

Lake nonetheless put out a press release that excoriated the agency for “obscene over-spending including a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-dollar lease for a Pennsylvania Avenue high-rise.”

“Waste, fraud, and abuse run rampant in this agency,” Lake wrote, asserting that USAGM had been penetrated by “spies, terrorist sympathizers and/or supporters” and that it had engaged in “eye popping self-dealing.”

She declared the agency “not salvageable” and announced a plan to end its operations immediately. Days later, a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., temporarily blocked that action. The case is pending.

If we were reporting out a story about possible excessive spending at the USAGM, I’m sure we would have found Lake’s allegations about its purportedly lavish quarters intriguing. But if we came across Bennett’s memo and it stood up to scrutiny, I would have spiked the story. Or maybe turned it into a piece about using misinformation to justify massive cuts at an agency that Trump has openly disparaged.