ATLANTA — Good-government advocates, anti-tax conservatives, politicians of various stripes and everyday Americans grouse about “waste, fraud and abuse” across the U.S. government.
President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, led by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, opened the latest chapter for a phrase hailed as common sense and derided as propaganda.
“It’s a very broad idea,” said Matt Weidinger of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “But this phrase ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ obviously means different things to different people.”
Here is a look at this rhetorical cudgel and how it relates to the outset of Trump’s second administration.
Pinpointing the genesis of “waste, fraud and abuse” as political rhetoric is difficult. But the concept and resulting battles are older than the nation: Think “taxation without representation” and the break from Great Britain.
After winning independence, the early American republic reprised the arguments.
Two generations fought over Alexander Hamilton’s national bank — a philosophical forerunner to everything from the Federal Reserve system to Small Business Administration loans, federally backed mortgage securities and bank deposit insurance.
Trump’s populist hero, Andrew Jackson, cast the Second National Bank as a sop to its wealthy stockholders. “There are no necessary evils in government,” the seventh president wrote in one veto message. “Its evils exist only in its abuses.”
Many of Jackson’s fellow Southerners opposed the related “internal improvements” of Henry Clay’s American System. The enslaving planter class viewed the spending for roads, bridges and navigable waterways — long before Washington had “infrastructure weeks” — as an unconstitutional federal overreach that transferred their wealth indirectly to factory owners, bankers and shipping magnates in more industrialized northern states.
Ronald Reagan cemented modern conservatives’ approach in his first inaugural address. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he said in 1981. “Government is the problem.”
He railed against “the welfare queen” as the public face of an inefficient social safety net and unaccountable federal government. Reagan based the attack, which critics lambasted as a racist trope, on one woman’s criminal fraud case for getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in assistance.
In a forerunner to DOGE, Reagan impaneled a group of private sector CEOs to identify waste. The “Grace Commission,” colloquially named for its chairman, businessman J. Peter Grace, moved more deliberately than DOGE, and its recommendations were not implemented on a broad scale. Reagan and Congress did raise the retirement age for Social Security eligibility.
The federal government spent about $6.7 trillion in fiscal year 2023.
The libertarian Cato Institute counts the biggest-ticket items this way: $3.19 trillion in transfer payments; $1.15 trillion in aid to states; $950 billion in interest payments on national debt; $840 billion in purchases of goods and services; and $560 billion to pay federal workers.
Social Security and Medicare comprise most of Cato’s transfer category, along with programs like food assistance and the earned income tax credit for low-income households. Medicaid accounts for most state aid, which also includes education, transportation and other infrastructure.
The issue for Musk, or perhaps for Trump and Republican majorities in Congress, is that Americans hold conflicting views about the details.
March 2023 polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 6 in 10 U.S. adults said the U.S. government was spending “too much” overall. Yet an AP-NORC poll taken in January 2025 found that about two-thirds of American adults say the U.S. government is spending “too little” on Social Security and education. About 6 and 10 said the same about Medicare, the government health insurance program for older Americans, and assistance to poor Americans.
Most adults also say Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poorest working-age Americans and low-income children, is underfunded. Medicare and Medicaid payments do not go directly to patients but to health care providers — physicians, hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies and medical supply firms in communities across the country.
The Government Accountability Office and other agencies produce regular reports identifying inefficiencies and other problems. The GAO said in 2024 that its enacted recommendations have saved about $667 billion since 2011.
Vivek Ramaswamy, another Trump ally initially involved with DOGE, seized on hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts and programs that Congress may not have reauthorized explicitly. Yet contrary to Ramaswamy’s characterization, most are ongoing programs from veterans medical care to NASA functions.
Trump has not addressed another pool of potential money: the so-called “tax gap.” That’s not about the Republican vs. Democratic debate over rates and loopholes. It’s the estimated gap between what the federal government should collect under existing law and what actually gets paid on time. Like “improper payments,” it’s a mix of clerical error and intentional fraud.
The IRS estimate for the 2022 tax year: $696 billion.
Other government reports identify “improper payments” — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance — that total several hundred billion in typical years.
Weidinger, the AEI budget expert, said that includes some fraudulent spending but is mostly overpayments or payments that require more documentation. Mistakes could include a Social Security payment a month after a recipient has died, a government miscalculation of someone’s benefit, someone getting one unemployment check after getting a new job or an insufficiently documented claim from a health care provider.
But Weidinger also noted that special government programs, such as unemployment during the COVID pandemic, carried a much higher rate of outright fraud — identity thieves, including from foreign nations, gaming the system to get money.
“We won’t ever recover all of that,” he said.
And, he added, the government’s estimates of fraud and improper payments are probably too low even if they almost certainly do not reach the levels of savings Musk and Trump have promised.
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