The federal government sent $186 billion in improper payments to welfare and social-services recipients in fiscal year 2025, a $24 billion jump from the prior year, and the watchdog agency that flagged the problem says Washington has largely ignored its own advice on how to stop the hemorrhage.
That figure, drawn from a Government Accountability Office analysis covering 64 programs across 15 federal agencies, amounts to roughly $510 million a day in taxpayer money that went where it should not have gone. Medicare alone accounted for $57 billion. Medicaid added another $37 billion. The Earned Income Tax Credit sent $21 billion to ineligible recipients. Food stamps overpaid by $10 billion. And a pandemic-era program for shuttered entertainment venues, the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, matched that with another $10 billion in erroneous disbursements, as the New York Post reported.
The remaining 59 programs combined for $51 billion more.
The GAO's cumulative estimate is even harder to absorb. Since 2003, the federal government has overpaid recipients by more than $3 trillion, and the agency says the real number is probably higher. The $186 billion headline figure itself omits certain programs that agencies have determined are susceptible to "significant improper payments," meaning the true scope of the problem in fiscal 2025 remains unknown.
One program left out of the tally: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, administered by the Department of Health and Human Services. TANF spent roughly $16.5 billion in fiscal 2025. Its omission suggests the actual overpayment total is worse than the already grim number on the page.
The GAO drew a distinction between fraud and overpayment. Roughly 82 percent of the improper-payment overage stemmed from overpayments, money sent to people who qualified for less, or sent in incorrect amounts, rather than outright criminal fraud. That distinction matters legally. It does not make the money any less gone.
Kristen Kociolek, managing director of the GAO's Financial Management and Assurance team, pointed to the pandemic years of 2020 through 2023 as the period that supercharged the problem. During those years, she said, "new programs were quickly developed and existing programs were rapidly expanded, leading to a significantly greater risk of fraud and improper payments."
That explanation tracks with what taxpayers saw in real time: trillions in emergency spending pushed out with minimal verification, eligibility checks deferred or waived, and oversight treated as an afterthought. The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, which alone accounted for $10 billion in overpayments, was a creature of that era.
But the pandemic ended years ago. The improper-payment total is still climbing, up $24 billion from fiscal 2024's $162 billion. Whatever emergency logic justified loosened controls in 2020 cannot explain why the federal bureaucracy has failed to tighten them since.
The GAO has not been silent. In March 2022, during the Biden administration, the agency submitted 10 specific recommendations to Congress and federal agencies designed to enhance accountability over federal spending. As of April 2026, action has been taken on exactly one of those ten.
One out of ten. Four years later.
That record speaks for itself. The GAO identified the problem, proposed fixes, and watched Congress and the executive branch do almost nothing. The result is a system that continues to bleed money at an accelerating rate, with no structural correction in sight from the agencies responsible.
The Trump administration has signaled it intends to change that trajectory. Vice President JD Vance is now leading a fraud task force that has begun pressuring states, including New York, to root out sources of fraud or face the loss of federal funding. The administration has already withheld $259.5 million in Minnesota Medicaid funds over fraud concerns, a move that signals the White House is willing to use financial leverage rather than polite memos.
Medicare's $57 billion in improper payments deserves particular scrutiny. The program operates on a budget of nearly $1.1 trillion, making it the second-largest federal program after Social Security. A $57 billion error rate in a program of that scale is not a rounding error, it is a systemic failure of payment controls that has persisted across administrations.
Medicaid's $37 billion overpayment figure is no less troubling. Together, the two health-care entitlements accounted for $94 billion, more than half the total improper-payment figure, in a single fiscal year.
The Earned Income Tax Credit's $21 billion in payments to ineligible recipients reflects a long-documented weakness. The IRS has struggled for decades to verify EITC claims before issuing refunds. The GAO has flagged the issue repeatedly. The payments keep going out.
SNAP overpayments of $10 billion land in a program already under scrutiny. Minnesota has faced allegations of billions in food-stamp fraud, and the broader SNAP system remains a target for the administration's enforcement efforts.
The vice president's fraud task force represents the most visible attempt to address the problem at a political level. By threatening to withhold federal funds from states that fail to address fraud, the task force is attempting to create incentives that decades of GAO recommendations have failed to produce.
Vance has been active on multiple fronts. He has pushed the Justice Department to investigate fraud allegations involving public officials, signaling that the administration views accountability as a priority that extends beyond faceless bureaucratic reform.
The enforcement push extends beyond the vice president's office. Fox News has reported on the broader scope of the administration's fraud-fighting agenda, which targets an estimated $250 billion in government fraud and is described as just getting started.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has moved to stand up new institutional capacity. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche launched a DOJ fraud division targeting more than $1 trillion in vulnerable taxpayer programs, a structural step that could outlast any single administration if it survives the usual Washington inertia.
The numbers tell a story of institutional failure that crosses party lines and spans decades. Three trillion dollars in overpayments since 2003. Ten recommendations from the government's own auditor, nine of them gathering dust four years after submission. A $24 billion year-over-year increase even after the pandemic emergency ended.
The people who bear the cost are not the officials who designed these systems or the bureaucrats who administer them. They are the taxpayers who fund them, and the genuinely needy recipients whose programs lose credibility with every billion-dollar error.
Vance's task force and the DOJ's new fraud division are steps in the right direction. But the scale of the problem, $186 billion in a single year, and climbing, demands more than task forces. It demands that Congress act on the recommendations it has been handed and that agencies treat payment accuracy as a basic obligation rather than an aspiration.
The GAO has done its job. It found the waste, measured it, and told Washington how to fix it. The administration has shown it is willing to act where the previous one would not.
When a government cannot keep track of $186 billion in a single year, the question is no longer whether the system is broken. It is whether anyone with the power to fix it actually will.
