Open the Books obtained Medicaid billing data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services covering Massachusetts providers from 2018 to 2024. This analysis traces non-emergency transportation claims, a program worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, at the same time two fraud schemes were operating undetected inside it. It’s part of our Cost of Fraud series. Read part 1 and part 2 here.

Bakali Mukasa billed MassHealth for rides to methadone clinics that were never driven. His Waltham-based company, JBM Health and Educational Services Inc., collected more than $770,000 from Massachusetts Medicaid for 16,907 trips that did not happen, including nearly 100 trips billed for patients who were already dead.

Investigators discovered the scheme by cross-referencing billing records against the clinics own logs. On the dates the rides were supposedly provided, patients had been issued take-home medication, meaning there was no reason to travel. The ghost rides were hiding in plain sight.

In February 2026, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office indicted Mukasa and JBM, a company now dissolved, on charges of Medicaid false claims, larceny, and money laundering. The proceeds were allegedly funneled through real estate and investment accounts, with transfers to Uganda, where Mukasa currently lives.

Less than a year earlier, the same office indicted Ardit Islamaj, 36, and his Worcester-based Instant Transportation LLC on 17 counts: Medicaid fraud, larceny, patient abuse, identity fraud, money laundering, and witness intimidation. Between August 2018 and August 2023, Islamaj allegedly billed MassHealth more than $3 million for rides that never occurred, including trips for deceased patients, hospitalized patients, and patients who had cancelled. Employees were instructed to impersonate MassHealth members to inflate trip counts. A former employee was paid thousands of dollars to stay quiet before meeting with investigators.

Two companies. Two schemes. $3.77 million in alleged stolen funds. Five years without detection.

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The Claims Data Shows an Explosion in Volume

In the Medicaid system, every service has a billing code called a HCPCS code, that identifies what is being provided. Non-emergency transportation is primarily billed under code T2024, which covers the daily coordination of rides for Medicaid members: not a single trip, but the ongoing management of a patient’s transport over time.

Using CMS billing data for Massachusetts, Open the Books tracked claims under all non-emergency transport codes from 2018 to 2024.

Non-emergency transport claims grew 403%, from 4,417 in 2018 to 22,228 in 2023.

T2024 accounted for nearly 59% of all claims over the period. That growth is not proof of fraud on its own. Medicaid enrollment in Massachusetts expanded significantly during the pandemic, and demand for this service is real and legitimate.

But the numbers document a program that scaled dramatically while two separate fraudulent operations ran undetected inside it.

A New Billing Code Appeared in 2023

In 2023, a second transport code appeared in the Massachusetts data for the first time: T2038, which covers individual trips rather than daily coordination. By 2024, T2038 had reached 10,489 claims, nearly matching the volume of T2024 in the same year.

The reason for this shift is not visible in the public data. Open the Books is asking MassHealth why T2038 adoption accelerated so sharply and whether the transition was accompanied by additional oversight.

What the Data Cannot Show

The CMS dataset has important limitations that are worth stating clearly.

The payment column in the Massachusetts file contains no dollar figures, only claim counts. That means it is not possible to calculate directly from this data how much any provider was paid. In the Massachusetts State Checkbook, transport payments appear as lump sums, making it difficult for taxpayers or outside auditors to trace money at the provider level.

There is a second gap. CMS suppresses data for providers that submit fewer than 11 claims per period, to protect patient privacy. That threshold means small operators, precisely the type of company most likely to run a short-lived fraud scheme, may not appear in the public record at all.

Neither JBM Health nor Instant Transportation appears in the CMS data. The public record had no way to flag them.

The claims-to-patient ratio, a common fraud indicator, also requires caution here. T2024 is a per-diem coordination code, meaning a patient with chronic needs like dialysis or regular treatment can legitimately generate many claims over time. High ratios are not automatically suspicious in this context.

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Four Enforcement Actions in 18 Months

The two indictments are not isolated. In October 2024, the AGO reached a $380,000 settlement with a Swampscott-based provider for billing MassHealth for services it never delivered. In July 2025, a Millville-based company paid $1.045 million to resolve allegations that it billed for routes it never drove and transported disabled passengers without required safety monitors on board.

That is four enforcement actions against Massachusetts non-emergency transportation providers in roughly 18 months.

Whether this reflects an intensified enforcement effort, a systemic vulnerability in the program, or both, is a question MassHealth and the legislature have not publicly addressed.

The Questions MassHealth Has Not Answered

Non-emergency transportation is an essential service. People who cannot drive themselves still need to reach dialysis appointments, chemotherapy, and mental health treatment. The program exists for good reason.

The problem is the absence of basic controls and the opacity that makes those controls hard to verify from the outside.

How long did it take to detect these schemes, and what triggered the investigations? How many audits were conducted specifically on non-emergency transport codes between 2020 and 2025? Does MassHealth have automated checks that cross billing records against mortality data and patient eligibility? Why does the State Checkbook aggregate transport payments rather than publishing them at the provider level?

The Worcester scheme ran for five years. The Waltham scheme ran for over a year. In both cases, the fraud was uncovered by active investigation, not by a system that caught it automatically.

Every dollar paid for a ride that never happened is a dollar not available for someone who genuinely needs one.

Massachusetts has one of the most generous Medicaid programs in the country. That generosity deserves transparency to back it up.

Methodology

This analysis uses Medicaid billing data published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, covering Massachusetts providers from January 2018 through December 2024. The dataset includes provider name, billing code (HCPCS), month and year, total claims, and total unique beneficiaries. Payment amounts are not included in this release of the data. Non-emergency transport was defined as claims under codes T2024, T2038, A0425, A0428, S0302, and A0120. Growth figures compare 2018 annual totals to 2023 annual totals, the peak year in the dataset. Fraud case details are drawn from press releases issued by the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.

Source data: CMS Medicaid claims, Massachusetts subset (Open the Books analysis) · Massachusetts AGO press releases (Feb. 2026, Apr. 2025, Jul. 2025, Oct. 2024).

The Department of Justice announced last month that the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center, organization designed to confront “hate” in society, was being charged with wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The root of the crime?

A grand jury in Alabama returned an indictment on April 21 concluding there was enough evidence to go to trial on the following:

“Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist Party of America.”

In effect, the DOJ is alleging that the SPLC funneled money through dummy accounts to hate groups that spurred racial unrest, like the infamous Charlottesville Proud Boys event, only to turn around and decry the behavior.

By May 11, the Alabama Attorney General had followed up with a civil investigation into whether SPLC had used “deceptive fundraising practices under Alabama’s consumer protection statutes.” The nonprofit is based in Montgomery, Alabama.

The alleged behavior would put quite a stain on SPLC’s stated mission of “creating a world where Black and Brown communities are represented and respected by our democracy.” Its website highlights “dismantling white supremacy” as a priority.

We opened the books on the group, which had designated Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA a hate group prior to his murder, to find out whether any public dollars had flowed to SPLC.

Since 2016, at least $3.85 million has gone to the nonprofit, either as direct payments, or indirectly to help spread their teaching materials in America’s public-school classrooms.

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BY THE NUMBERS

Since FY 2016, at least $1,352,655.07 worth of taxpayer funds have been paid directly to SPLC from school districts, states, cities, counties, universities and other public entities. Most of the 63 reported payments lack an explanation, but the relatively small amounts suggest payment for materials, speakers or licensing fees.

While some units of government might seem more predictable than others (e.g. New York City), payments came from a range of places across the ideological spectrum from New Jersey to Florida and from Michigan to Kansas.

Incoming public revenue for SPLC peaked in FY 2021 thanks in part to Fulton County, Georgia. That county made the largest set of payments on August 6: three separate payments of $30,000; $6,262.00; and $3,019.37 for a total of $39,281.47. None of the payments include an explanation.

Several examples do include explanations, though. A $5,500 payment from Robbinsville Public Schools in New Jersey includes “Title Iv - Pur Prof Svcs,” a common abbreviation for “Title IV - Purchased Professional Services.”

Title IV of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act of 1965 (updated by the Every Student Succeeds Act) provides grants to K-12 schools for a range of academic enhancement purposes. Section A includes professional teacher trainings from outside experts (for “student support and academic enrichment”), while Part B includes hired instructors and after-school programs.

Another $4,000 payment from Chicago Public School District 299 includes the note, “For Credit Classes, Seminars, Workshops, Etc.” Again it indicates SPLC was spreading its materials and message in K-12 classrooms.

In two other cases, public entities reimbursed travel for a speaker from SPLC. Kansas State University paid $642.70 for “Honorariums Reimburse Travel” and the Judicial Conference of Ohio paid $550.14 for “Supplies & Maintenance : Comm Transport Reimbursement To/from Site (out-of-state).”

But perhaps most troubling are two payments marked for “Teaching Tolerance.” Cincinnati Public Schools paid $2,000 for “Teaching Tolerance Facilitatin” [sic] in February 2020. Penfield Central School District (a suburb of Rochester, NY) paid $4,000 for “Mou Teaching Tolerance” in July 2019. An MOU refers to a “Memorandum of Understanding” to deliver services.

Open the Books had previously uncovered a multimillion-dollar grant to a public university that involved injecting SPLC’s “Teaching Tolerance” curriculum into half a dozen K-12 schools in Michigan. We dove into the details of the research and the radical curriculum itself.

Download the data.

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TEACHING TOLERANCE

Our research team profiled a grant worth $2.5 million called “Youth Empowerment Solutions: Engaging Youth for Anti-Racism and Cultural Equity (YES-ERACE)” in our recent report, “Transparency Crisis,” which detailed the murky world of overhead spending that accompanies every research grant.

The grant in question came from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and describes creating an after-school curriculum based on radical SPLC “Learning for Justice” materials. Looking past the project’s incredibly on-the-nose acronym (YES-ERACE) describing its aim to erase racial injustice, we reported:

One of the only avenues researchers can pursue to ascertain the overhead rate for a given project is through filing a Freedom of Information Request (FOIA) for the proposal and progress reports of target research.

Open the Books requested such documents from HHS subagency National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities for a University of Michigan-Ann Arbor project called “Youth Empowerment Solutions: Engaging Youth for Anti-Racism and Cultural Equity (YES-ERACE).” The federal grant for this project was $2.5 million.

The project integrated “the Teaching Tolerance curriculum from the Southern Poverty Law Center” into an existing local middle school program called Youth Empowerment Solutions. UM-Ann Arbor researchers said they would use a “group-randomized trial design in the summer programs across 6 middle schools” and “examine the effects of the curriculum on individual youths’ sense of empowerment, racist behaviors, and violent behavior.”

The “efficacy of the YES-ERACE” program would be tested “in a randomized design on empowered outcomes which will mediate the effects of YES-ERACE on perpetration of racist attitudes and behavior” and on a “model that predicts empowered outcomes will mediate perpetration of racism, and that YES-ERACE effects on aggressive and violent behavior will also be mediated by reducing perpetration of racism over time.” The curriculum included lessons on “white supremacy,” “media stereotypes,” “LBGTQ appreciation,” and “solidarity.”

Documents produced through FOIA state the researchers obtained the standard on-campus overhead rate the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor commands: 56%, or $1,173,910.

The grant proposal went into tremendous detail on its direct costs, which include:

• $3,400 for computers “to develop curriculum documents, manage...data, and communicate with partners, research staff, and faculty.”

• $15,000 for supplies like copier and printer paper, clipboards, folders, and envelopes, along with swag for youth participants.

• $512,500 to pay participating schools to implement the project.

• $5,000 for “anti-racism and cultural equity ‘train the trainer’ for staff and faculty” with “experts in the Teaching Tolerance curriculum.”

• $48,000 for consulting from an expert in “racism [and] racial identity and adolescence.”

• $16,000 for an advisory board “with expertise in the Teaching Tolerance curriculum, health equity and anti-racism training.”

Given that direct costs cover computers and office supplies (which are not particularly expensive, as outlined above), it is unclear how this project can justify over $1 million in overhead costs, except for the fact that it is automatically mandated by law.

Open the Books received these documents roughly ten weeks after submitting the public records request. However, the federal agencies already have this data. Simply making it publicly accessible will go a long way toward improving transparency and trust in scientific spending.

Universities, which have suffered reputational blows from hard-left campus activism and programmatic activities in recent years, could additionally volunteer to release data on overhead flows and amounts to regain the trust that taxpayer dollars are being put to good use.

According to the grant profile on USASpending, the YES-ERACE project is still active and receiving federal funds.

Read the original documents from the FOIA request here:

• YES-ERACE Award Application

• YES-ERACE Award Notice

• YES-ERACE Progress Reports

DIFFERENT NAME, SAME RACIAL GAME

Shortly after being awarded, the “YES-ERACE” moniker got a significant touchup and became “YES-IDEAS.”

We gave our findings to Daily Signal editor and resident SPLC expert Tyler O’Neil to investigate further. He was told by NIH that the agency had cancelled this grant in March 2025 and moved the funding elsewhere.

Further investigation shows a different story.

The same Principal Investigator for the original grant, Marc Zimmerman of UM-Ann Arbor, had a new project funded in December 2025, called YES: Innovative Discussion for Engagement, Achievement and Service (YES-IDEAS).

While the words making up the acronym changed, the premise is the same: the researchers are developing a new curriculum to be used in Genesee County middle school after school programs. Any mention of SPLC has been removed, but observers have the right to be suspicious about the ideology driving Zimmerman’s “research” motivations.

Zimmerman receives millions of dollars in grants related to youth violence prevention and uses various DEI-related phrases and words in previous grants (like, for example this $1,000,000 one award in September 2025 Prevention Research Center of Michigan: Transforming the Built Environment to create Safe and Equitable Spaces for Physical Activity). He is published research oeuvre is replete with woke premises like, for example, this paper co-authored in 2025: “Understanding the Intersectionality of COVID-19 Racism, Mental Distress, Alcohol Use, and Firearm Purchase Behavior Among Asian Americans.”

Why is this person still getting millions of dollars in grants? Why has he been allowed to simply change out the words in one of his projects to erase reference to DEI, and still get funding for what is likely essentially the same project?

THE YES PROGRAM

You can read more about Zimmerman’s intent with the broader YES project here, including community development at UM-Ann Arbor’s own website:

Youth empowerment activities include workshops for program planning, budgeting, implementation, and evaluation; opportunities to engage peers in community change efforts; developing ethnic identity and pride; and working with adults to achieve these goals.

At UM-Ann Arbor’s Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, you can read more about the YES-IDEAS concept, including its goals of “Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Appreciation and Solidarity.”

CONCLUSION

Open the Books only came upon the details of “Teaching Tolerance” and the SPLC curriculum by submitting a FOIA request and waiting ten weeks. That suggests there could be plenty more indirect support for the nonprofit that’s not readily visible to taxpayers.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that’s true. A second FOIA related to our investigation of the Pentagon’s K-12 public schools turned up SPLC, too. In our report on the radical ideology that had taken hold in the school system, we reported that free resources used in teacher training or classrooms, like the radical SPLC content, can be even more problematic because they do not show up in spending data and don’t have reporting requirements.

For example, one free resource recommended multiple times during a professional development summit was SPLC’s “Let’s Talk!” handbook, which teachers are supposed to use to make children have “uncomfortable conversations” about race, power, and privilege.

We also dove into College and Career Readiness Standards, which were launched in 2015 to ensure students have the same curriculum no matter where in the world they are going to school. The standards were rolled out slowly over the years, with the last standard, elementary social studies, being introduced in the 2021-2022 school year.

Multiple teachers discussed how learning standards have been, or could be, highjacked to encourage children to become social justice. [Find details in Appendix A of the report].

A DoDEA middle school teacher noted in a presentation called “Integrating Global Citizenship Education and Social Justice Standards” that SPLC’s resources aligned with the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework DoDEA uses to teach history and social studies:

“The Learning for Justice website [a project of SPLC] provides numerous resources available to you. One of these resources is the Social Justice Standards. They provide a roadmap to develop anti-bias education for every grade level and focus on four domains: Identity, Diversity, Justice, and Action...The lessons offered on this website provide strategies that align with our C3 standards for different grade levels. I have personally completed many of these lessons offered.”

In short, taxpayers have spent millions on spreading SPLC’s rhetoric and pedagogical materials. While the numbers may not be enormous, the costs are both real and intangible and students are offered messaging about racial solidarity, white supremacy and DEI.

It’s cost a minimum of $3.85 million since 2017, but anecdotal evidence suggests the numbers are higher, and that the intangible costs will spread much further.

Open the Books recently hosted a timely and fascinating discussion on “AI and the Future of Freedom” at Old Parkland in Dallas. It was the next step in building our vision for a future that allows for citizens to utilize AI to hold politicians accountable for how they spend our tax dollars.

We’ve made it a priority as an organization because Americans are right to be concerned about AI being used as a tool of government surveillance. We're going to flip the script. We believe the best way to thwart a surveillance state is with a surveillance citizenry. For a free society to survive, We the People must be the center of gravity.

When Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings he intentionally made the modest, unassuming Hobbits the heroes. Wizards had their place and saved the day on a number of occasions. But, in the end, it was Hobbits who threw the ring into the fire.

In the digital age, data is like enriched uranium. It can be used for peaceful or destructive purposes. We intend to merge our data, which includes government spending at all levels, with other public datasets to build tools that will help citizens hold government accountable and advance the noble goal of freedom.

Open the Books is a First Principles organization, seeking to better apply the wisdom enshrined in our Constitution in the modern era. If our founders were alive today, we have no doubt they would be pushing Open the Books to use our data to ensure that technologies like AI strengthen the hand of We the People rather than that of centralized governments. Our founders understood that human history is a forever war between the forces of freedom and tyranny. Every new technology can tilt the scales in either direction.

The Free Press recently described our vision as the "Moneyball" of politics. We're going to discover metrics that were always there but never applied.

In Dallas, stakeholders from private industry came together with public servants and nonprofit stakeholders to dissect this challenge from all angles. We discussed the regulatory roadmap ahead, the proper role of government in this emerging technology, and opportunities to keep taxpayers at the helm of our democracy. If AI development is an arms race, we intend for a superintelligent citizenry to be among the winners.

Many thanks to our co-host Paul Allen, our generous sponsors State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), Club for Growth Foundation, and Triad Foundation Inc. and stellar speakers and panelists including:

• William Beach, fmr. Commissioner of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics

• Newt Gingrich, fmr. Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives

• Galen Hines-Pierce, Founder, Minerva Fund; Co-Founder, Recoding America Fund; Harris Council Member, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago

• Daniel Elliott, Indiana Treasurer of State

• Nick Mastronardi, CEO, Polco

• Travis Oliphant, CEO, OpenTeams; Chairman of the Board, Quansight

• Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM-SCP, President & CEO, SHRM

• Kelsey Murray, Director of Programs and Operations, Club for Growth Foundation

• Timothy Doescher, Executive Director, Committee to Unleash Prosperity

And check out some more photos from the event, with more exciting news to come:

READ MORE:

The modern-day Department of Education (ED) was created in 1979 through the Department of Education Organization Act, which consolidated the separate education functions of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) into its own agency. At the time, ED was intended to reduce bureaucracy in federal grantmaking, get parents more involved in their children’s education, conduct education-related research and expand educational opportunities, particularly to disadvantaged groups.

Nearly 50 years later, ED has instead empowered school districts to exclude parents from their children’s education; funded research ranging from unhelpful to harmful to student success; and overseen plummeting rates of student success across demographics. Nevertheless, agency funding has reached new heights, rising 749% from 2000 to 2024. ED has become the quintessential unnecessary, bloated bureaucracy; but the agency is a progressive darling with a large cottage industry of advocates it has itself funded over the decades.

Eliminating ED for good will take courage and resolve, but such a victory would strike at the very heart of the progressive ideology that relentlessly and uncritically seeks to expand the size and scope of the federal government. Indeed, accomplishments in this arena can help provide proof of concept for eliminating, consolidating, and downsizing other agencies. President Trump promised during his 2024 election campaign to dismantle ED and he appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to undertake the daunting task.

Activities so far include winding down and cancelling wasteful grants and transferring more critical activities to other agencies. Congress, however, must partner with the Administration for the progress to become durable.

The following report addresses two research topics.

Part 1 breaks down staff and spending trends, while Part 2 outlines major Trump administrative actions related to ED since assuming office in January 2025. Together, they offer a comprehensive progress report on the potentially historic task of returning education to the states in keeping with our Founders’ vision.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT

President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to reduce federal spending at private universities, especially those he considers “woke” or left-leaning. To some extent, he’s been successful. Private universities received $22.3 billion of federal grants and contracts in fiscal year 2025 — the lowest amount since 2018, adjusted for inflation.

However, Trump has yet to fully undo the spending spike that began during his first presidential term and continued during President Joe Biden’s administration. Private colleges receive 40% more federal research funding today than during an average year under President Barack Obama, even adjusted for inflation.

Some of the money helps fund weapons development, disease research, and more. It also forces taxpayers to spend tens of billions of dollars every year on overhead costs such as laptops and garbage collection.

Our review of 20 elite private schools also found a moderate correlation between per-student federal funding and per-student endowment growth. Universities that receive the most taxpayer money are the most likely to grow their own private reserve of cash, too. Lavish federal funding and preferential tax treatment allows them to avoid dipping into their endowments on research and other costs of doing business.

Today, Ivy League and other elite schools are sitting on endowments of up to $55 billion thanks to your generous support.

The Elite 20

We sampled 20 universities with the largest endowments and federal funding levels, including all eight schools of the Ivy League and prestigious research schools like Duke and Emory.

The numbers exclude student aid like Pell Grants. Money was appropriated during the Biden administration and continued to flow during the Trump administration.

Three schools — Johns Hopkins University, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology — have been the top recipients of federal money for years. They accounted for more than 30% of the total research money sent to all private colleges in fiscal year 2025. There are 34 countries whose entire gross domestic product (GDP) is lower than the amount of research funding sent to Johns Hopkins last year.

From 2018 to 2025, these schools’ endowments grew by 70% on average. Endowments at Vanderbilt and Emory more than doubled. Johns Hopkins’ endowment more than tripled.

Endowment growth is primarily driven by private donations and investment returns. But there is also a moderately strong relationship between the 20 elite schools’ per-student federal funding and their per-student endowment growth from 2018 to 2025.

Methodology: Spearman correlation analysis revealed a significant result, rs(18) = 0.57, p = .009, ρ = 0.57. Spearman analysis was used in place of Pearson analysis to offset the outlier effect of Caltech, which is a top recipient of federal money but has less than 2,500 students. Caltech is excluded from the above scatter plot for visualization purposes but was included in calculations.

Academic prestige likely accounts for some of the correlation. Schools with excellent reputations are more likely to be hired by the government, and they also have access to premier investment opportunities that help their endowments grow at an impressive rate.

But the strength of the correlation suggests the existence of a “crowding out” effect that bilks taxpayers. When the federal government funds research projects at Harvard or Yale, those schools do not have to spend as much of their own funds on research or even overhead. They can instead avoid withdrawing money from their endowments. Those appreciating assets keep them among the richest institutions in the country even as they splash out for big administrative salaries, building upgrades, athletics, art galleries, and much more.

A wealthy individual would need to pay a 20% capital gains tax on realized gains from their long-term investments, but university endowments evade taxation because the schools are registered nonprofits.

For years endowment growth was completely tax free, but Trump has successfully put some taxes in effect. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act required private colleges with more than $500,000 of endowment assets per student to pay a 1.4% tax on realized gains. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 increased the tax to 8% for schools whose endowments are worth more than $2 million per student (Currently, that applies to Princeton, Yale and Stanford.)

Overhead Costs

Every university has a negotiated Facilities & Administrative rate with the federal government, typically ranging from 50-60%. That means for every $1 the government pays a school for direct scientific research, the school also gets 50 to 60 cents for overhead costs. Those expenses can include building construction and maintenance, water bills, janitors, accounting expenses, ethics and legal compliance expenses, Human Resources services, and even grant-writing costs. In a few cases, we’ve documented related wacky podcasts launched to complement research.

The National Association of Scholars estimated that in 2023 alone, the federal government spent $22 billion on overhead for both private and public universities. But there are no official figures disclosing exactly how much was spent and what the money paid for, even at public schools. (Read more: The Black Box of Overhead Spending in Academia).

Caltech, the top recipient of federal money over the last decade, has one of the highest overhead rates in the country at 70%.

The National Institutes of Health tried to cap all overhead rates at 15% in February 2025, but a court injunction quickly stopped the change after a group of universities and state officials sued. The injunction became a permanent ruling in April 2026.

Congress also rejected Trump’s attempts to cap overhead rates. A budget resolution that passed 26-3 in the Senate Appropriations Committee barred the NIH from changing how it calculates overhead.

Curiosity Killed The Cat

Research grants are a mixed bag in terms of taxpayer value. For every project focused on vaccine development or energy efficiency, there is another that studies the artistic expression of technical rock climbing or cultural resistance to bug-eating.

Open the Books identified hundreds of grants to elite schools from fiscal year 2025 of dubious merit. The majority were first awarded under the Biden administration, but they continued to receive funding last year. Examples include:

• Columbia University: $745,323 to study “the nature of curiosity itself … and of its direct consequences.” The researchers will test their hypothesis that “curiosity promotes learning.” (most recent funding action: April 2025)

• Harvard University: $2.5 million for “equitable and accessible research-based testing … to reduce the impacts of the warming climate on marginalized communities.” The study’s description explains that “climate change disproportionately affects individuals and communities that experience social and environmental vulnerabilities and discrimination.” (most recent funding action: March 2025)

  • $57,730 for “an intersectional approach to transgender and/or nonbinary (TNB) college student mental health.” The project will “categorize campuses into distinct classes of TNB-supportive policy environments” because “no quantitative studies of TNB college students have examined mental health outcomes across intersecting social positions of gender identity, race/ethnicity, and sex, a notable gap in mental health equity research.” (most recent funding action: July 2025).

• Cornell University: $5,500 to fund an open-access edition of Among Women Across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War by Suzy Kim. The book uses a feminist perspective to evaluate how women “espousing communism” contributed to the spread of socialism and anti-colonialism as a method of liberation from patriarchy. (most recent funding action: February 2025)

• Johns Hopkins University: $3.9 million for “characterizing intersecting sexual, gender, and race-based stigmas affecting communities of U.S. transgender women and cisgender men who are sexually active with men.” (most recent funding action: September 2025).

• Duke University: $784,147 to build robots that mimic the movements of mantis shrimp, marketed with a software that helps “diverse undergraduates access research experiences in an equitable and transparent way” and helps “enhance access and equity for undergraduate research experience.” (most recent funding action: February 2026).

• Vanderbilt University: $115,696 for a project that “explores how developmental norms presumed to be generalizable are reproduced, challenged, and sometimes disrupted within scientific and activist communities.” The study “will generate new conceptual tools for understanding development in a non-Euro-American context” and “use critical theory in mainstream science, policy, and public debate.” (most recent funding action April: 2025)

Federal research money should fund scientific inquiry with a clear benefit to taxpayers. Congress and executive agencies should be more stringent with statutory award criteria and grantmaking decisions for universities that can more than afford their own operations. Funding physics and biology research is a government interest; buttressing huge endowments with ideologically-driven projects is not.

This story is the second in an ongoing series on the Cost of Fraud, as Open the Books tallies the hidden fees on American tax returns. Click here to read the first story on fraudulent autism billings.

In January 2026, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz alleged that roughly $3.5 billion worth of fraud, so far unconfirmed, was happening through false hospice billings in a scheme he attributed in large part to what he called the “Russian Armenian mafia.”

So, Open the Books took a look at Oz’s claims, what fraud could be confirmed, and its cost to taxpayers.

It turns out Russian and Armenian-linked fraud has cost taxpayers almost $1 billion in confirmed losses from Medicare and Medicaid, part of a Department of Justice operation dubbed “Operation Gold Rush.” These schemes become a hidden fee on America’s tax returns; this example carries a price tag of $7 per household, according to Federal Reserve data.

Open the Books’ cost-per-household estimates for fraud reflect only confirmed cases; the true cost is likely far higher.

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Operation Gold Rush

In June 2025, the Department of Justice announced charges against members of a transnational crime organization who had submitted an eye-popping $10.6 billion in fraudulent billings through medical supply companies they’d acquired. They successfully drew down $941 million from federal taxpayers, or $7 per household.

“Operation Gold Rush,” part of the National Health Care Fraud Takedown, is the largest health care fraud case ever charged by the Justice Department based on the amount of lost tax dollars. A coordinated law enforcement operation led to the indictment of 11 members of a transnational criminal organization involved in a multi-billion-dollar scheme. They purchased dozens of durable medical equipment (DME) companies and submitted the false Medicare claims by stealing the identities of more than one million Americans in all 50 states.

Federal officials prevented them from receiving the vast majority of the money, but the fraud nonetheless resulted in approximately $900 million from Medicare supplemental insurers and $41 million directly from Medicare. The government has seized roughly $27.7 million, under 3% of what was paid out, in fraud proceeds.

The $7 hidden fee on our tax returns does not include the cost of enforcement or the cost to prosecute.

NOTE: In the past, foreign-linked schemes to defraud Medicaid and Medicare programs have seen defendants use their loot on luxury shopping sprees rather than to funding care or easing costs for American families. Taxpayers have footed the bill unknowingly for bad actors’ cruise trips; Jimmy Choo, Prada and Burberry swag; and tech from the Apple store. The latter instance carried an $11,700 price tag adjusted for inflation. That’s two to three months of housing, food and transportation expenses for the average American household.

Ground Zero for Health Care Fraud?

In January 2026, CMS Administrator Oz claimed that roughly $3.5 billion worth of fraud is taking place in Los Angeles County, which he calls the “epicenter for health care fraud in America.” In a four-block area in the Van Nuys neighborhood, there are 42 hospices and, he said, “it’s run, quite a bit of it, by the Russian Armenian mafia.”

If Oz is correct, it would amount to $25.97 per household in wasted tax money.

His allegations, still unproven by the Department of Justice but included in their $14 billion running “attempted fraud” estimate, are largely against hospice centers and home health care businesses. But his viral post led to a sharp drop in business for one local bakery whose signage appeared in the background of the video. Sherman Way Marketplace owner Movses Bislamyan said customer traffic fell 30% in a single day but insists the family-owned business has nothing to do with the criminal claims.

The Details

Standing outside a Van Nuys business complex in a video posted to X.com, Oz described a $16 million fraud operation based out of an office on the second floor. “If you look at it, it’s pretty [non]ndescript, there wasn’t anyone really in there, they weren’t doing any services. They just got an address they could claim was a hospice and then they ran the business claiming people are at home getting services which they’re really weren’t.”

Of the wider fraud epidemic, Oz said:

When fraudsters siphon funds or even successfully submit large waves of false claims, the response can indirectly lead to legitimate patients facing tighter restrictions due to more bureaucracy, higher compliance costs, and larger premiums or taxes in the long run.

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California Medicaid: By the Numbers

Because hospice companies, both legitimate and illegitimate, would reasonably make claims under any number of billing codes for different forms of care, it’s difficult to tally the exact amount of taxpayer cash in play. However, a recent data dump from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) from 2018-2024 offers some perspective.

Key billing codes for hospice care are G0299 (care from a Registered Nurse in a home or hospice setting) and G0300 (care from a Licensed Nurse Practitioner in a home or hospice setting). Over that time, $822,484,769.10 was billed to those two codes in MediCal (California’s Medicaid program) alone.

Durable medical equipment, the focus of the Medicare fraud found in Operation Gold Rush, is a broad category that covers billing codes for everything from walkers and canes to respiratory equipment, infusion pumps and even hospital beds. While itemized Medicare spending is unavailable, the corresponding Medicaid data released by CMS demonstrates the scope of such spending (billing codes E0100-E8002). From 2018-2024, $807,418,922 was billed to those codes in California. Monthly billing peaked in March 2024 at $13,196,503.26.

More broadly, California billed over $127 billion ($127,651,196,790) to Medicaid in the years 2018-24. Los Angeles County billed more than $20 billion worth ($20,322,094,908). In Van Nuys alone, businesses billed Medicaid nearly a billion dollars ($916,370,840.60). Again, these figures don’t even include Medicare and its potential fraudulent claims.

Medicaid spending in California has soared 147% in just a few years.

Billing in Van Nuys similarly soared from $90,341,066.35 in 2018 to $167,147,404.10 in 2024. That’s 185% higher.

Click here to download more data on Medicaid billings by city in California.

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FLASHBACK: Luxury Goods on the Taxpayer Dime

Back in 2013, 49 defendants, all of whom were current or former Russian diplomats or the spouses of diplomats, were criminally charged for a 9-year scam to illegally obtain nearly half a million dollars in Medicaid benefits.

In general, the defendants underreported their income below or at the Medicaid eligibility level to qualify for benefits, even submitting letters signed by employees of the Russian Mission to the United Nations, the Russian Federation Consulate General in New York, or the Trade Representation of the Russian Federation in the USA to corroborate the falsified income. One set of defendants even failed to disclose their marriage, instead claiming that they were brother and sister.

To celebrate their seemingly successful scheme, they spent tens of thousands of dollars on cruise vacations and luxury shopping sprees at Tiffany & Co., Jimmy Choo, Prada, Bloomingdale’s, Burberry, and Swarovski.

One of their $8,400 purchases from Apple in 2012 would be roughly $11,700 today, translating to roughly two to three months of housing, food, and transportation costs for the average U.S. household — let alone covering the bill for legitimate Medicare and Medicaid patients.

There is no clear record of prosecutions of the 49 defendants, as only 11 were still in the United States. Diplomatic immunity shielded them from U.S. courts, where authorities could rely on expulsion rather than incarceration.

Conclusion

The federal government has been cautious about foreign schemes that defraud taxpayer-funded health care for years, but not cautious enough to nip them in the bud. These transnational crimes are the tip of the iceberg.

Through a multiagency effort dubbed a National Health Care Fraud Takedown, which includes Operation Gold Rush, the Department of Justice has charged 324 individuals with all manner of fraud totaling a staggering $14.6 billion in “intended loss.”

Of those individuals, “29 defendants were charged for their roles in transnational criminal organizations alleged to have submitted over $12 billion in fraudulent claims to America’s health insurance programs.”

The cases of alleged fraud range from telemedicine to genetic testing to opioid trafficking and more, with defendants of varied backgrounds.

The total cost of all that fraud and would-be fraud? Taxpayers were exposed to $108.95 in wasted taxes per household.

FURTHER READING

Hidden Fees: Federal Taxpayers on the Hook for Autism Fraud Through Medicaid

Medicaid Data Dump: Billing Codes Explode Up to 10,000%, LA Mental Health Dept. Highest Biller in the Nation

Ernst Unveils Legislative Package to Stop Fraud

This story is the first in an ongoing series on the Cost of Fraud, as Open the Books tallies the hidden fees on American tax returns.

Taxpayers are unknowingly sponsoring bad actors’ multi-million-dollar Medicaid reimbursement scams for autism programs.

Fraud schemes targeting autism services cost government programs at least $21 million over six years (Nov. 2019-Dec. 2024), and investigators have recovered roughly $15.3 million so far. That still leaves taxpayers on the hook for about $5.6 million in confirmed fraud in just one program alone.

While taxpayer money is being burned on the misuse of federal dollars, Americans are waiting for paychecks to hit to buy groceries and pay rent or hoping for a tax return to help cover the rising costs of daily life.

Furthermore, federal audits in a series of key states demonstrate a repeated pattern of improper payments that reveal autism therapy is a growing field that’s ripe for plenty more fraudulent schemes.

The Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services found the scale of improper payments is much greater: almost $200 million through Medicaid in Colorado, Indiana, Maine and Wisconsin alone.

That amounts to $1.54 for every household in the United States, according to Federal Reserve data. Divided among taxpayers in these audited states, that translates to $34.77 per Colorado household, $20.70 in Indiana, $78.62 in Maine, and $7.77 in Wisconsin.

Open the Books is digging into the details of the confirmed fraud, the findings of improper payments through audits by the Department of Health and Human Services; and the overall spending on autism therapy through Medicaid, an expenditure that has soared in recent years.

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Minnesota: Confirmed Cases of Fraud

Two Medicaid-covered autism services have found themselves the victims of fraud schemes: Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention (EIDBI). They offer tailored treatment to those with autism spectrum disorder, such as children, to improve communication and social skills. Instead of benefiting only those who rely on these services, schemers are making hay with the lack of proactive oversight, ultimately resulting in defrauding the federal government of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Minnesota took the limelight when it rocked the nation with its widespread Medicaid fraud schemes, particularly in the state’s Somali community.

Asha Farhan Hassan and her co-conspirators at Smart Therapy LLC defrauded Minnesota’s EIDBI reimbursement funds of $14 million. To implement a successful campaign, the fraudsters needed children diagnosed with autism who had an individual treatment plan. They recruited children in the Somali community, incentivizing parents with a cash kickback. And if a child did not have an autism diagnosis, they worked to get the child qualified for autism services.

Kickback payments ranged from $300 to $1,500 per month, per child, technically contingent on the services DHS authorized a child to receive — i.e., the higher the authorization amount, the higher the kickback. Parents even made true on threats to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks.

Many Medicaid reimbursement claims were fraudulently inflated, billed without providers’ knowledge, and for services that were not actually provided.

Another group of scammers at Star Autism Center LLC defrauded the same reimbursement funds of $6 million using the methods of its counterpart at Smart Therapy LLC — including employing unqualified teenage relatives as behavioral technicians.

Star Autism Center President & CEO Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf used his payout on a $100,000 Freightliner semi-truck and sent over $200,000 to Kenya. Hassan used her cut to purchase real estate in Kenya.

All told, these schemes captures roughly $21 million in tax dollars, while Hassan has agreed to pay back over $15 million.

Improper Payments in Autism Services

But these were just two schemers who were caught in one state.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ internal watchdog is performing an ongoing audit of Medicaid ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) services and has thus far identified almost $200 million in improper payments.

The initiative, which began in January 2022, has audited four out of a planned seven states in the series, looking into questionable billing patterns and noncompliance with federal and state requirements. The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) only announces which states are involved after the audit is complete.

The OIG found that in some cases therapy wasn’t actually provided. Providers billed for children napping, eating, playing on tablets, and watching movies.

In Colorado, one provider billed 151 hours of therapy in a single month.

Staff without credentials delivered therapy across multiple states.

Facilities submitted session notes that staff had photocopied, cloned between patients, or signed before sessions concluded.

Many children had never even received a valid diagnostic evaluation.

In one Indiana case, a child accumulated $677,448 in Medicaid payments from age 2 to 11 based on a single 2014 referral with no subsequent reassessment.

None of the four states had ever conducted a post-payment review of the claims before the federal audits. The programs operated, in effect, on an honor system without verification.

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Findings & Recommendations

The first audit found that Indiana’s fee-for-service Medicaid payments for ABA were $14.4 million in 2017, but increased to $101.8 million by 2020 — the second highest in the nation. By sampling 100 enrollee-months, Indiana’s state agency made improper payments with an estimated $56.5 million price tag, or about 37% of all claims.

The $350,000 fraud by the aforementioned Applied Behavior Center for Autism was excluded from the Inspector General report because it did not specifically target ABA services.

Investigators’ audits of Wisconsin, Maine, and most recently, Colorado, turned up an estimated $18.5 million, $45.6 million, and $77.8 million in improper payments, respectively.

Colorado’s fee-for-service Medicaid payments for ABA were $60.1 million in 2019, but they skyrocketed to $163.5 million four years later. The HHS Inspector General recommended that the state refund $42.6 million to the federal government; exercise “reasonable diligence” to determine whether any of the estimated $112.5 million in potentially improper ABA payments complied with requirements; and refund the federal share of any improper payment amount to the federal government.

The state agency disagreed with the first recommendation, citing several reasons: auditors did not provide detailed billing records; nor did they review all documentation; and they applied requirements that are not state rules (e.g., the OIG reported flagged payments because behavior technicians weren’t certified, but state rules don’t actually require certification).

The OIG recommended that the four state health departments refund a combined $123 million to the federal government for FFS Medicaid ABA payments. So far, no state has done so in four years.

The four audits include the same compliance failures — e.g., auditors repeatedly found that providers could not produce records proving therapy occurred — suggesting the problem is structural to the Medicaid ABA program, not isolated misconduct.

Autism Therapy by the Numbers

As Open the Books previously reported, in February the Department of Health and Human Services dropped an unprecedented amount of new data to improve public transparency and reduce fraud: over 270 million payments made by Medicaid from 2018-2024. They amount to over a trillion dollars of taxpayer funds.

A series of particular billing codes are used to draw down Medicaid funds for applied behavior analysis, from assessing patients who might need autism therapy to their treatment and ongoing support for patient and family (codes 97151-97158):

• 97151: Adaptive behavior assessment.

• 97152: Behavior identification supporting assessment.

• 97153: Adaptive behavior treatment by protocol, one patient.

• 97154: Group adaptive behavior treatment.

• 97155: Treatment with protocol modification.

• 97156: Family adaptive behavior treatment guidance.

• 97157: Multiple-family group guidance.

• 97158: Group treatment with protocol modification.

Based on the data provided by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), nationwide billing to these codes soared over the course of 5 years. In January 2019, $24.2 million was billed to this set of codes across 231,884 claims. By 2024, the monthly billing was routinely flirting with the $200 million-dollar mark. May 2024 saw a high of $191.6 million billed to the codes across 975,328 claims. That’s a 792% jump in monthly Medicaid billing.

In other words, autism treatment in 2024 was costing taxpayers nearly 8 times as much monthly as it did in 2019. The 2024 yearly total, with only a partial December on the record, reached almost $2 billion ($1,992,561,609.55).

Along with that surge in billing comes a presumed increase in fraud and other improper payments.

According to the Wall Street Journal, autism was Medicaid’s fastest-growing area of spending. Autism therapy is lucrative because Medicaid pays relatively high rates ($61/hr) for routine therapy for someone with a high school degree and certification vs. $75/hr for psychotherapy by someone with advanced degrees. The ease of certification and relatively high returns would make ABA billings a ripe target for fraud.

The report noted that providers found ways to charge up to $800/hr for work that could be done “by high-school graduates,” and that providers shifted faster than regulators could keep up, with some billing for up to 10 workers evaluating a single patient in a single day.

Explore the billings by individual provider here.

Conclusion

Across the line, autism-therapy programs were found vulnerable to fraud or improper payments due to a slew of issues — even simply including naptime or recess as therapy time can substantially inflate billable hours. But state Medicaid agencies are not adequately monitoring ABA providers amid a rapid growth in Medicaid spending, and taxpayers are getting the short end of the stick.

Following Tax Day, Open the Books is releasing a set of deep dives into data released by the Internal Revenue Service, synthesized with additional public datasets. These findings come straight from Uncle Sam’s own ledger. Read the previous story here.

Last week the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) released its seminal, annual Rich States, Poor States report, which ranks all 50 states on their economic competitiveness using metrics like total tax burden, labor laws and the cost of debt service. Open the Books did a complimentary analysis, digging into county-level statistics.

We usually measure migration by counting how many people leave. But that’s only part of the picture. When people move, they don’t just relocate, they take their income, spending power, and economic impact with them.

A survey of 2,315 counties using data published by the IRS demonstrates billions of dollars of dollars in adjusted gross income (AGI) have been leaving counties that house major urban centers.

Counties experiencing the largest net income outflows due to migration (IRS SOI Data, 2022–2023)

The data reveals a striking pattern.

Cook County, Illinois lost more than $4.3 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI) through migration. Los Angeles County follows closely, with losses exceeding $4.2 billion.

Other major economic centers are not far behind:

Santa Clara County lost nearly $2.8 billion. New York County, Manhattan, has lost roughly $2.8 billion. King County, WA (home to Seattle) saw nearly $2 billion leave.

These are not marginal shifts. They represent massive economic outflows from some of the country’s most productive regions.

As people pack up and move, their taxable income is headed elsewhere. More spending power is disappearing. More long-term economic capacity is being relocated.

Many of the counties experiencing the largest losses share common traits. They are large urban centers, high-cost regions, and major economic hubs.

In many cases, they’re also dense with government employees. In our previous report, we detailed how high-government counties suffered higher poverty rates and lower median household incomes. Conversely, low-government counties were more prosperous.

San Francisco County has a massive 133 government workers per 1,000 residents, 73 more than the average county. New York County has even more at 136 per thousand. King County has 76 per thousand, still 17 more than average.

Just a bit further down the list of losers is another usual suspect: Washington, DC with a predictably high 335 government employees per thousand residents and net negative $702,074 in AGI.

Not only do places like these tend to fare worse by key economic indicators of wellbeing, but they’re bleeding revenue.

Income loss at this scale has real implications. Counties losing billions in AGI face shrinking tax bases, increased pressure on public services where they may be most needed and reduced long-term economic resilience.

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From Urban Centers to Smaller Government Counties

Take a look at where the revenue was headed. These are the counties that enjoyed the biggest net gain in AGI, year over year.

Many of these counties also share something in common: the density of government employees is below average there.

Palm Beach County has just 39 government workers per 1,000 residents. Pasco County has an even lower count at 25. Per our previous report, Pasco was also among the top five counties for net taxpayers gained. It was joined by Williamson and Montgomery counties in Texas; they respectively have 39 and 46 government workers per thousand residents, both well below average.

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Fewer People, More Money: Where Income Is Gathering Despite Population Loss

When we compare total income across places like Los Angeles County, New York County, and Cook County we assume that tells us where economic prosperity is abundant. But that assumption hides more than it reveals. Large counties almost always dominate these rankings simply because they have more people. It does not follow that the average household in those places is wealthy. In fact, some of the most populated counties in America look far less affluent once you shift the lens.

This is where AGI per return becomes essential. Adjusted Gross Income, or AGI, measures total income reported on tax returns. But total AGI alone tells us very little about how people actually live. AGI per return, which captures income per household, changes the question entirely. Instead of measuring economic size, it measures economic reality.

In fact, a deeper and more surprising pattern emerges when we look at how income moves alongside people.

In several counties, fewer households arrived than left, yet total income still rose. In places like Miami-Dade and Palm Beach County, population decline coincided with income growth.

As discussed, Palm Beach County benefits from a low density of government workers in addition to the state’s sunny skies and lack of an income tax. Nearby Miami-Dade County, despite being a major urban hub, still manages to have a relatively low number of government workers per thousand residents (49, or about 10 below the average county).

These results are not a contradiction. They demonstrate a shift in who lives there. Lower- or middle-income households are being replaced by higher-income ones, changing the economic structure of these regions even as the number of residents falls.

Indeed, the Los Angeles Times reported the area has attracted an “unusually large number of the disaffected California tech moguls” fleeing a potential 5% wealth tax on billionaires.

“This extraordinary wealth migration is reshaping south Florida: spurring development…and amplifying demand for nannies, private chefs, exclusive golf club memberships and private schools,” wrote reporter Stacy Perman.

The logic should follow that some of the net migration out of these counties can be reversed, and household incomes can rise, as a fresh support economy springs up around the new neighbors.

Conclusion

Some counties are becoming more economically selective, with rising barriers to entry and a growing concentration of wealth among fewer households. At the same time, other counties may appear prosperous in aggregate terms while many of their residents do not experience that prosperity. Frequently, they appear in pairs. While New York County generates massive total income, tax revenue is hemorrhaging and some of it is pooling in Western Connecticut just outside the city. The same story is true even in the environs of progressive bastion San Francisco: nestled in the cliffside, neighboring Marin County managed to hover just 1 above the national average of government workers per thousand residents (60) while minimizing outflow of taxpayers and getting slightly wealthier.

In the end, the way we measure inequality shapes the story we tell about it. The real question is not how big a local economy is, but how much of its benefits are captured by dense government rather than truly reaching the people who live there.

Methodology

This analysis uses the most recent publicly available data from each federal source. Employment and population data run through 2024. Poverty and income estimates run through 2023. Migration data runs through 2021-2022, reflecting the additional processing time required for IRS tax return address matching at the county level. These timelines are consistent with how federal statistical agencies publish county-level data.

Click here to interact with more county-level data.

Source Data: BLS QCEW 2024 · USDA SAIPE 2023 · IRS SOI 2021-2022 · U.S. Census Bureau 2024

Beginning with Tax Day, Open the Books is releasing a set of deep dives into data released by the Internal Revenue Service, synthesized with additional public datasets. These findings come straight from Uncle Sam’s own ledger.

Across America, a persistent assumption shapes public policy: more government workers mean better public services, and better public services mean better outcomes for residents. More staff in schools, workers in social services, and employees managing infrastructure should translate to a higher quality of life for the people it serves. An analysis of 2,315 counties using data from IRS tax return migration records, Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll records, U.S. Census Bureau population estimates, and USDA poverty and income figures say otherwise. As Americans prepare file their taxes this week, it begs the question: Are those payments producing results?

Counties with the highest concentrations of government workers — defined as more than 1.5 times the national median of 58.9 civilian government employees per 1,000 residents — have significantly higher poverty rates, lower median incomes, and are losing residents at a significant rate. Counties with the lowest concentrations of government workers show the opposite pattern. This finding is consistent across two separate years of federal poverty and income data.

The National Pattern

We divided counties into two groups. High-government counties are those with more than 88 civilian government employees per 1,000 residents. Low-government counties are those with fewer than 44. The differences between the two groups in the following economic factors are significant. The IRS only published data from 2,315 counties, or roughly two thirds of American counties; both groups lag public national average income because those statistics are weighted for population, but high-government counties fair significantly worse.

In high-government counties, the average poverty rate is 15.6% -- 40% above the official national rate of 11.1%

High-government counties have an average poverty rate of 15.6 percent. Low-government counties, by contrast, average 12.2 percent. The official national poverty rate, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau, was 11.1 percent in 2023. High-government counties had a 40 percent higher poverty rate on average.

Median income in each high-government county averages $66,231 -- nearly $14,400 below the national figure of $80,610

High-government counties average $66,231 in median household income figures. Low-government counties have an average of $72,553 for median household income.

This is significant because the median household income figures include the salaries of government workers themselves who on average earn more than private sector workers in many counties. Even with those above-average government salaries, high-government counties still have lower median incomes than their low-government counterparts. Without the government workforce inflating the numbers, the gap would likely be wider.

High-government counties lost 530 residents per year on average. Low-government counties gained 1,128.

The migration data also shows a notable pattern. High-government counties are losing an average of 530 taxpyers per year. Low-government counties are gaining an average of 1,128 per year. There is a swing of 1,658 per year between the two groups. This suggests that people choose to move away from places with large government workforces and toward places with smaller ones.

Among the biggest losers was Los Angeles County with a year-over-year net loss of 81,742 taxpayers. Among the biggest population gainers was Polk County, FL, with a net gain of 19,407 taxpayers.

The Finding Holds Across Two Years

A single-year analysis possibly distorts the results due to changing economic conditions. Open the Books compared federal poverty and income data across 2022 and 2023 and found the results were nearly identical.

Big City Case Studies

Even in big cities with high earners, some of the negative correlations can be detected.

Washington D.C. has 335.2 civilian government employees per 1,000 residents -- nearly six times the national median of 58.9.

The outcomes do not match the investment. D.C.’s poverty rate is 15.2%, approximately 37% higher than the national rate, in the city that houses every major federal agency responsible for addressing poverty nationwide. That’s despite boasting a median household income of $104,643, one of the highest in the country thanks to the presence of so many federal workers and pricey government contractors.

Year over year, DC was a net loser in taxpayers with a loss of 2,337 tax filers.

Manhattan has more government workers per resident than any other county in New York with 136.2 per 1,000 residents. This high government presence has not translated into better outcomes for residents. Manhattan’s poverty rate is 16.5%. Roughly 1 in 6 residents live below the poverty line, despite Manhattan being known as a global hub for financial and intellectual capital and having the highest GDP of any U.S. county.

The IRS data for New York County, which contains Manhattan, shows a similar story. The county lost 9,755 filers year over year.

Click here to interact with more county-level data.

Methodology

This analysis uses the most recent publicly available data from each federal source. Employment and population data run through 2024. Poverty and income estimates run through 2023. Migration data runs through 2021-2022, reflecting the additional processing time required for IRS tax return address matching at the county level. These timelines are consistent with how federal statistical agencies publish county-level data.

Source Data: BLS QCEW 2024 · USDA SAIPE 2023 · IRS SOI 2021-2022 · U.S. Census Bureau 2024

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The Congressional Budget Office was created in 1974 “to provide objective, nonpartisan information to support the Congressional budget process and to help Congress make effective budget and economic policy.” Yet, a survey of major legislation over the years has shown bias favoring Democrat-led tax-and-spend policies. Although its routine forecasting has been reasonably accurate, its self-reported error rate has grown in recent years and when it comes to major benchmark legislation, the CBO’s scores have been dramatically off the mark.

The agency costs taxpayers close to $100 million a year, while shielding its staffers from transparency laws.

In a new oversight report, Open the Books highlights several case studies that demonstrate huge gaps between CBO’s scores and the reality of policy outcomes. Our auditors further reveal subtle cheerleading for policy prescriptions, like green energy spending. Democrat-favored initiatives.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL REPORT

Some examples include:

• Despite extensively working with legislators on the Affordable Care Act, the CBO scored the ACA’s cost at $788 billion net cost of coverage provisions between 2010 and 2019 for Obamacare. By 2012, the new estimate for the period of 2012-2022 was $1.76 trillion.

• Within the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, the CBO predicted the highly expanded Child Tax Credit would decrease revenues by $21 billion and increase outlays by $88 billion, at a cost of about $109 billion. However, when calculating the possibility of extending the credit, its new cost, according to CBO, suddenly spiked to $185 billion over the budget window — a 70% increase.

• The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was, despite its name, packed with green energy investments worth over $400 billion that seemingly had little to do with inflation. CBO calculated the whole bill would create savings and revenue worth $738 billion, and reduce the deficit by $238 billion over 10 years. In 2024 those predictions were revised to instead increase the deficit by $300 billion.

• CBO’s influence over green energy handouts in the IRA could be traced back to CBO climate policy reports produced in the years immediately before and after the bill was passed, outlining the fiscal case for climate change spending.

The CBO has had over 50 years to make its case as a reliable, neutral source of legislative analyses. After these multi-billion to trillion-dollar blunders, it’s clear taxpayers deserve an alternative way to understand the potential future impacts of federal legislation. Legislative scoring and economic forecasting should be openly transparent, easy to understand, and outside the ideological fray.

Your support makes our work at Open the Books possible! Please consider a donation of any amount to help us keep investigating government waste, fraud and abuse.

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Since 2013, millions of dollars in attorneys’ fees have been awarded to entities, usually nonprofits, to resolve environmental law litigation against the federal government. New data collected via Freedom of Information Act shows that in the first year of the Trump administration, environmental attorney fee pay outs have seen record lows.

As Open the Books has reported in the past, these fees are often part of “sue-and-settle” schemes where environmental nonprofits friendly to a presidential administration (typically Democratic) will sue the federal government to initiate a back-door rule making process that can exclude Congress and the public.

Attorney fees are paid when the federal government settles or loses a case; a rule created to assure successful litigation against the government would not be prohibitively expensive to the public. While the amounts can be revealed via Freedom of Information Act request, the itemized bills are secret; taxpayers don’t know if the federal government is being overly generous or if the nonprofits are artificially inflating their attorney fees.

While Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin hasn’t made many public statements about sue-and-settle practices since taking office at the head of the agency, a spokesperson told Open the Books last year:

“Outside activist groups should not dictate EPA’s agenda or federal environmental policy. The Trump Administration is keenly aware of concerns with sue-and-settle practices and commits to not engage in them. The Trump EPA will respect the rule of law and the will of the American people in setting policy based on its statutory mandates and Gold Standard Science, not based on side deals with outside activist groups dead-set on driving up costs to Americans or advancing the interests of our foreign adversaries.”

New data indicates Zeldin has kept his word, as attorney fee payouts in 2025 for litigation under the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Endangered Species Act (three of the most important laws under which most environmental litigation is filed) have been at their lowest level since 2013, when our records begin, at a little more than $510,000.

The next lowest payout year for attorney fees was the first year of first Trump administration, in 2017. While payments crept closer to $1 million in the next three years of the first Trump admin, Biden administration payouts were between $1.7 and $3.3 million.

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The top five litigants receiving attorney fee payouts under CAA, CWA, or ESA during the Biden administration include, Northwest Environmental Advocates, Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Law and Policy Center, and the state of California.

During the first year of the second Trump administration, the only two litigants receiving near $100,000 were the Center for Biological Diversity and the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense Fund.

FURTHER READING

Taxpayers Send Millions to Nonprofits Filing Costly Climate-Related Lawsuits (Dec. 2025)

Secretive “Sue And Settle” Back In Play At Biden’s EPA (Jan 2024)

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Like a twisted game of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?,” the federal government is running out of lifelines to fund the entitlement programs it has created. Social Security and Medicare will be $88.2 trillion short of the money needed to pay full benefits for the next 75 years under current policy.

The Fiscal Year 2025 Financial Report of the United States Government, released on March 19 and signed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, reached the same conclusion it did in past years: “The current fiscal path is unsustainable.”

Social Security is expected to collect $92.4 trillion of taxes over the next 75 years, but benefits will cost $120.3 trillion, according to the financial report. Medicare will collect $55.2 trillion from taxes and premiums, but benefits will cost $115.6 trillion. Medicare’s insolvency is driven mostly by Medicare Part B, which covers doctors’ visits, equipment like wheelchairs, and more.

Because those numbers do not account for inflation, the actual dollar cost will be far higher. The missing money can only be raised through an unappetizing combination of “increased borrowing, higher taxes, or reduced program spending,” the report states.

In a column for Fortune, former Comptroller General David Walker and Johns Hopkins economic professor Steve Hanke put it more bluntly: “The U.S. government is insolvent.” They compared the federal balance sheet (and the off-book unfunded entitlements) to “a household budget in freefall.”

Staring Down the Infinite Horizon

Of course, 75 years is underestimating the true debt. Today’s children, and future Americans yet to be born, would presumably use social safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare more than 100 years into the future. When they’re included, Social Security and Medicare are underfunded by $193.6 trillion over the “infinite horizon.” Again, that’s after accounting for funds that will be raised through taxes.

It’s an unfathomable amount of money that represents arguably the greatest fiscal challenge the nation has ever faced. Every federal expense in history has cost a combined $132 trillion, dating back to 1787. The net worth of every billionaire on the planet combined is currently $20.1 trillion.

The unfunded liability is only increasing. The report notes that the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 helped reduce Medicare spending by lowering the price of prescription drugs, but overall healthcare costs continue to rise faster than projected.

Senators such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have suggested that increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans could help keep the programs solvent, but that would raise only a small fraction of the money needed. Research from the Cato Institute demonstrates that even if the government taxed 100% of income above $500,000 for both businesses and individuals, there would not be enough money to fund this year’s budget deficit — let alone cover the Social Security and Medicare shortfalls.

Even Sanders admits that the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act he introduced on March 2, which would tax savings instead of income, would raise only $440 billion per year.

Beyond the Safety Net

As if paying for Medicare and Social Security were not difficult enough, America also has $47.8 trillion of other liabilities on its books. The government only has only $6.1 trillion of assets to pay for it.

Some of the liabilities include benefits for federal workers and veterans, but most of it is the U.S. debt held by the public — all the money borrowed from outside entities like banks and foreign countries.

Debt held by the public reached 99% of America’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2025. Under current policy, it will reach a record 108% by 2030. By 2100, the Treasury projects it will reach an absurd 576%, meaning the government would have to almost entirely eliminate all its functions except for paying interest.

There would be a crisis long before then. The Penn Wharton Budget Model predicts that if debt held by the public hits 200% of GDP, “no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could avoid the government defaulting on its debt.”

To make the budget “sustainable” within 75 years, the government would have to immediately cut non-interest spending by 21%, raise taxes on all Americans by 25%, or some combination of both, according to the Treasury report.

There is no indication that will happen. Under current policy, the government is projected to spend $24.2 trillion more than it collects in taxes and other revenue from 2027 to 2036. President Donald Trump has not yet released his budget request for 2027 (it was due on Feb. 2), but it is expected to include one of the largest deficits in history.

Addressing the Crisis

That has not stopped some leaders from trying to avoid the fiscal cliff. Sen. Rand Paul’s Six Penny Plan would cut federal spending by 6% every year for five years. Sen. Kevin Cramer recently introduced a nonbinding resolution that would show the Senate’s support for cutting budget deficits by more than 50%.

There are also immediate fixes that could nudge the budget in the right direction.

• Open the Books has reported that the federal government has made more than $3.5 trillion worth of improper payments since 2004 — money mistakenly sent to the wrong person or for the wrong amount. Medicare and Medicaid are typically the biggest culprits. Common sense solutions, like giving all federal agencies access to the Treasury’s “Do Not Pay” list, would help end the problem.

• Open the Books continues to advocate for greater transparency in government purchasing, allowing the public to hold lawmakers accountable for their deficit spending. We built support for the Expedited Transparency Act, a bipartisan bill that would require all agencies to upload their spending online three days after a payment is made. It currently takes 30 to 90 days. Sen. Joni Ernst’s Billion Dollar Boondoggle Act would also require public reports on any government project that is $1 billion over budget or five years behind schedule.

• In his own op-ed with Walker, Open the Books CEO John Hart argued that President Trump needs a “fiscal reset” to refocus on the lofty savings promises of DOGE. The five-point plan include a Constitutional amendment for “fiscal responsibility” and a fiscal commission that can propose solutions outside the regular order budget process. Read more at The Hill.

• We’ve also addressed the systemic problem with “use-it-or-lose-it” spending rules, which cause panic spending each September as agencies try to avoid forfeiting unused funds at the end of the fiscal year. The Department of War alone spent $93.4 billion in September 2025.

• Also at the Pentagon, we’ve outlined 20 areas of fiscal concern that need addressing. The Government Accountability Office continues to put disclaimers on the Treasury report, saying they cannot determine if the statements are fair, in part because of the Pentagon’s consistent poor recordkeeping and failure to pass audits.

• We’ve also estimated the earmark ban in place from 2011-2021 saved taxpayers $141 billion -- the ban should be reinstated immediately.

All of these fixes are merely bandages on a gaping wound, though. Until Congress gets serious about reforming entitlement programs, America will be stuck on an unsustainable path.

Open the Books will continue to shine a spotlight on waste, fraud and abuse in all its forms as we work to build a critical mass of support for real savings and accountability for taxpayers.

Our work is made possible by your support. Please consider contributing to advance spending transparency and accountability. Any amount makes a difference!

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Today our CEO, John Hart, joined the Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship for a hearing tackling transparency issues during Sunshine Week. It’s a time to spread awareness about the need for open government, and John’s message was carried to a national audience on Special Report with Bret Baier last night.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH FULL THE HEARING

Read John’s testimony below:

Madam Chair Ernst, Ranking Member Markey and distinguished Senators,

Thank you for the invitation. It’s an honor to testify during the Sunshine Week of our 250^th anniversary.

Our founders were on to something when they wrote transparency into the Constitution.

We may remember from chemistry class that biological life is carbon-based. Carbon is the building block of life.

Our civic life is transparency-based. Transparency is the building block of our other freedoms. That’s why it appears in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 before the Bill of Rights because without transparency, our freedoms come apart.

But sunshine can be subverted by secrecy.

Secrecy happens due to human nature. Accountability is uncomfortable and ignoring problems is easy. Fixing systemic inefficiency requires hours of unglamorous and tedious work – it can be easier to mow the flower bed instead of pulling the weeds.

But, as flawed humans, the problem runs deeper. Author C.S. Lewis wrote a famous study of corruption called The Screwtape Letters, which is a dialogue between a devil, Screwtape, and his apprentice.

In one exchange, Screwtape says, “It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”

Government secrecy is insidious.

And Lewis and philosophers and theologians have long observed that for evil to succeed it must disguise itself as good.

Now, in some in some blatantly authoritarian regimes like Iran, Russia and China, evil doesn’t need a disguise. Rulers can thwart truth and transparency by turning off the Internet.

In our system, the slope to corruption is more gradual and subtle. The enemy of truth and transparency is not a pack of lies or brazen secrecy. The enemy is tribalism. Political tribalism provides the warmth of association, community and camaraderie – all good things – but it comes with a permission structure that allows for selective illumination – transparency for thee but not for me. It keeps inconvenient facts out of sight and out of mind. When both tribes permit partial secrecy, we’re on our way to total blindness.

Tribalism is incompatible with the founders’ vision of transparency. There are no Republican facts or Democrat facts or conservative facts or liberal facts. There are only facts, data and evidence.

The recent debate about “Lobstergate” that one of our reports provoked is a case study. We looked at $93 billion in year-end use-it-or-lose-it spending at the Pentagon. The left condemned Secretary Hegseth for ordering lobster while omitting the fact that previous Democrat administrations did the same thing. The right defended Hegseth for boosting troop morale with surf and turf while largely ignoring the fact that we just spent 10 times that amount on furniture and 2,000 times that amount – $50 billion – in the last five days of the fiscal year. To put that in context, Israel spent $35 billion in an entire year on its defense.

Both sides committed sins of omission. It was hecklers vs. cheerleaders.

In Washington, there is widespread collusion to not acknowledge enormous problems like use-it-or-lose it and our unsustainable debt.

Senator Ernst, as a combat veteran, you understand troop morale and all facets of this debate. Thank you having the courage to fix the real problem with use-it-or-lose it with your End-of-Year Fiscal Responsibility Act. Anyone who complained about “Lobstergate” needs to support your bill.

You have been a leader on so many areas. Your Stop Secret Spending Act would close a loophole called Other Transaction Agreements or OTAs that are concealing billions in spending. I’d call these Orwellian Transaction Agreements.

We also worked together to stop more than $1.3 billion in U.S. taxpayer money from going to Russia and China through grants and contracts.

You’ve also signaled your commitment to working with us and your colleagues on legislation to bring us closer to real-time transparency, which the founders would have written into the Constitution if they had access to today’s technology.

I’m pleased to report that today, Representatives Josh Brecheen, a Republican from Oklahoma and Jimmy Panetta, a Democrat from California, have introduced bipartisan legislation to do just that. The Expedited Transparency Act builds on the success of the Coburn-Obama transparency bill from 2006 that created USASpending and put all government spending online for the first time.

In the scope of history, transparency is radical and revolutionary. State secrecy is the norm. Technologies like AI tilt the scale in either direction. At the Open the Books, we’re working to create superintelligent citizens because the best way to thwart a surveillance state is with a surveillance citizenry.

I look forward to your questions.

Defense officials typically enter the end of each fiscal year with at least one goal in mind: spend the rest of the military’s budget by any means necessary. Otherwise, “use-it-or-lose-it” funding rules force the Pentagon to forfeit its unused money and potentially see reduced funding next year.

Open the Books has tracked the annual September spending bonanza for nearly a decade. Military spending has spiked every year, regardless of which party controlled the White House.

However, there has never been anything quite like September 2025, when $93.4 billion was spent on grants and contracts. Since at least 2008 — and presumably in history — no federal agency has ever spent so much on grants and contracts in a single month.

In the last five working days of September alone, the DoD spent $50.1 billion on grants and contracts. That’s more than the annual defense budget of countries like Israel and Italy. In fact, there are only nine foreign countries that spend that much on their military in an entire year!

These amounts only include money sent to entities outside the government, not salaries for service members and scores of other expenses.

Instead, the shopping spree encompasses luxury food items like lobster, high-end furniture and rushed IT purchases.

Open the Books has covered use-it-or-lose-it spending for years. In 2025 we called on Secretary Hegseth to rein it in because, of the dozens of areas of fiscal concern at the Pentagon, this may be the easiest problem to correct:

“Mr. Secretary, you have the power to end this practice today. We urge you to do so as you pursue your goal of reorientating DOD around its central warfighting and lethality mission.”

This year, as more kinetic action has kicked off in Iran and across the Gulf states, it’s time for the Pentagon to focus on replenishing critical items like defensive missile and drone interceptors, not fancy appetizers.

Protecting the Nation in Comfort

Furniture is near the top of the military’s wish list at the end of every fiscal year. Since 2008, the DoD has spent an average of $257.6 million on furniture every September — a 564% increase above the norm. In months besides September, furniture costs the military only $38.8 million on average.

This year was no different. The DoD spent $225.6 million on furniture, the most since 2014. Nearly half was labeled as “office furniture.”

The purchases included $60,719 worth of chairs from the premium furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, including at least one order of their luxurious Aeron Chair for $1,844. Another $12,540 paid for three-tiered fruit basket stands.

Furniture spending today is far lower than in President Obama’s administration, when the military routinely spent $300 to $400 million every September. However, it has increased compared to Joe Biden’s administration. Since 2008, there have only been four Septembers when the DoD spent less than $178 million on furniture: the four Septembers that Biden was president.

To be fair, federal office buildings were closed during part of Biden’s administration due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The whole federal government still somehow managed to drop $3.3 billion on furniture from 2020 to 2022, including solar-powered picnic tables and Ethan Allen leather recliners.

Military Munchies

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told the military in a speech on Sept. 30 that it is “completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Hegseth took notice of his employees’ weight at the end of September. Military personnel spent the month dining in luxury.

The Pentagon spent $2 million on Alaskan king crab in September. It’s the fifth time the Pentagon under Donald Trump has spent $2 million or more on king crab in a single month: twice during his first term and three times in 2025. It’s only happened one other month in history (February 2021).

Fortune magazine recently declared that king crab has taken caviar’s place as the “hottest luxury ingredient.” One seafood merchant explains that “king crab isn’t a budget buy” due to its “remote harvesting” and “labor-intensive handling.”

The military also bought $6.9 million of lobster tail this September. Again, it was not an isolated incident; it’s been a theme of Hegseth’s spending so far.

In 2025, the DoD spent more than $7.4 million on lobster tail in four separate months: March, May, June and October. That had previously only happened once in history (October 2024).

September 2025 also saw the Pentagon purchase:

• $15.1 million of ribeye steak

• $1 million of salmon

• 272 orders of doughnuts for $139,224

• $124,000 for ice cream machines

• $26,000 for sushi preparation tables

IT and Telecom

The Pentagon spent $5.9 billion on Information Technology and telecommunications in September. That included $3.5 billion for services like technical support and cable television, the fourth-most ever in a single month.

It also includes $2.4 billion worth of IT-related goods, including laptops and software licenses. The broken “product and service code” search feature on USAspending.gov makes it impossible to compare that figure to other months.

Use-it-or-lose-it spending on IT has been studied for years. Research in the American Economic Review found that from 2004 to 2009, the federal government spent 23% of its IT budget just in the last week of September.

The frenzy of spending had drastic consequences. Those same IT purchases were 5.7 times more likely to receive a “low quality” score from government chief information officers, based on their cost and usefulness to the government.

Salesmen have taken note. The Hewlett-Packard computer company gave its employees the following instructions in September 2024:

“Did you know that 8.7% of federal government spending will occur in this last week? That’s five times the normal weekly rate! Contact your government customers and take advantage of the federal spending rush. Stock up now to get your share of the ‘use it or lose it’ funds.”

Prime Day

Mike Weiland — the CEO of Govly, an AI company that aids government contractors — says Sept. 30 is like “Amazon Prime Day” for the federal government.

“Any company that spends less than it makes or is allocated will be seen as efficient, effective, and valuable in the market. However, this is different with the government,” Weiland wrote.

“If a government agency doesn’t spend its allocated budget funds over the course of the fiscal year, they no longer have access to those funds in the next year … The loss of their surplus funds, combined with the threat of a decline in future funding, is a recipe for serious fear amongst government agencies. Hence why they hit the panic button in August and September to spend.”

Business consultants at OST Global Solutions advise clients to “take advantage” of Washington’s rushed September spending, which they attribute to bureaucrats’ “procrastination.” OST recommends planning “an aggressive sales campaign during the fourth quarter” because “this time of year, the government contracting specialists are swamped. Many are working late and on weekends. There are some things that you should do to help them along.”

The Pentagon’s spending records support those claims. In September 2025, defense officials bought $5.3 million of Apple devices, including 400 of the new iPad Air M3 for $315,200. The same iPad with 128 gigabytes of storage is available online for just $499, but the DoD opted for the more expensive 512 gigabyte edition at a rate of $788 each.

Another $4 million was spent on Samsung products, including a 98-inch monitor with “crystal UHD display” for $4,000.

Musical instruments cost $1.8 million. That included a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 custom handmade flute from the luxury Japanese brand Muramatsu.

Just for good measure, the Pentagon dropped another $111,497 on footrests and $3,160 on stickers featuring Dora the Explorer, Frozen, Paw Patrol and more.

All that purchasing work must have left a big mess, because the garbage collection cost $19.3 million.

Make Foreign Manufacturing Great Again

Trump has made increasing American manufacturing a central part of his economic agenda, including placing tariffs on foreign goods. The Pentagon has not been doing its part.

The DoD made a record $6.6 billion of purchases from foreign governments and foreign-owned businesses in September, breaking the previous high of $5.2 billion from September 2023. Top recipients included the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Canada.

That included $3 billion for services including training classes, janitorial work and border surveillance — some of which were needed for overseas military bases and could only be purchased from international companies.

But there was also $3.6 billion of goods produced by foreign-owned companies or governments, including firetrucks, motors and computer chips. Of those goods, $1.4 billion were manufactured abroad and $2.2 billion were manufactured in the U.S.

Additionally, the DoD bought $252.3 million of products from American-owned businesses that manufactured the supplies overseas, such as forklifts, microscopes, and radios.

There was no money sent to adversarial countries like China or Russia, but that has not always been the case. From 2017 to 2023, the military made $51.6 million of purchases from China, including $6 million for tech support of “deployment and distribution command” software. It was part of $1.3 billion the federal government sent to China and Russia in that timeframe.

Conclusion

Use-it-or-lose-it spending is not unique to the Pentagon. The General Services Administration routinely doubles its purchases every September, and State Department spending often increases by five times. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $1.4 billion this September, nearly double any other month in history.

But the effect is magnified at the DoD because of its massive budget, which accounts for more than half of all discretionary spending. Since 2008, the DoD has spent $62.4 billion on grants and contracts in an average September, but an average of $28.9 billion in other months.

The federal government had a $1.8 trillion deficit in 2025. Even completely eliminating non-defense discretionary spending would have only reduced the deficit by 40%. It will be impossible to balance the budget without cuts to defense, Medicare, Social Security, or some combination.

Trump has called for the DoD budget to increase from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion by 2027, which would make a balanced budget even more infeasible.

Before committing to such a drastic funding boost, Congress should consider allowing the DoD to roll over portions of its budget to the following year instead of wasting money on seafood and pianos every September. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution states that funding “to raise and support armies” can be used up to two years after it is appropriated. The current one-year deadline is arbitrary and must be re-examined.

Your support makes our work at Open the Books possible! Please consider a donation of any amount to help us keep investigating government waste, fraud and abuse.

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Open the Books CEO John Hart joined FOX Business’ Stuart Varney to discuss the joint strikes on Iran by US and Israeli forces with the cooperation of a growing list of Gulf States and allies.

He also walked through the recent history of US policy that has accrued to the benefit of the regime in Iran.

It is outrageous but sadly true that American taxpayers were forced to subsidize the Iranian regime’s support for terror proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah.

The Biden administration’s appeasement strategy facilitated $160 billion in financial benefits via hostage payouts ($6 billion) and sanctions relief ($154 billion in value).

“They made it easier for the Iranian regime to sell oil. They loosened restrictions and then the proceeds the Iranian regime used were funneled to Hamas which committed the October 7 atrocities. We also had to finance -- American taxpayers -- the policy of containing additional threats that were enabled by this flow of oil. So we were double, triple paying for this outrageous policy,” Hart told Varney.

“We’re ending this practice of taxpayer-funded appeasement.”

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A Saner Foreign Aid Plan

Sending billions to hostile regimes has been just one piece of a disjointed foreign aid policy. In the past, taxpayers were forced to finance wasteful, ideologically driven spending, like a transgender opera in Colombia.

We should not close the door on foreign aid or investment, but should do it more strategically. It is also important to look honestly at not only foreign policy failures but successes.

While President Reagan failed to deter Iran, he effectively supported freedom fighters behind the Iron Curtain and supported magnificent successes in countries like Poland, where GDP per capita has nearly quadrupled since 1990.

Going forward, any nation that receives American security or economic assistance should establish a real-time, searchable database of government spending. That way, American taxpayers can be assured their money is well spent – or that if it’s misspent, we’ll know about it and can demand accountability and reform.

Watch the full video above or click here.

FURTHER READING

Aid for Ayatollahs: Financial Benefits to Iran Facilitated by Uncle Sam (April 2025)

Mapping the Growth of Government (February 2025)

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services dropped an unprecedented amount of new data to improve public transparency and reduce fraud: over 270 million payments made by Medicaid from 2018-2024. They amount to over a trillion dollars worth of taxpayer funds.

Open the Books broke down the data.

Payment amounts generally increased over time, with a notable bump starting in 2020 in response to COVID-related spending and increased enrollment due to economic hardship caused by government-imposed economic shutdowns.

Monthly Medicaid spending 2018-2024 as reported in HHS Open Data.

The states with the highest amounts of spending include New York, California, and Texas. But spending does not always correlate with population. Massachusetts and New Jersey, with 7 million and 9.5 million people respectively, have higher spending than more populous states like Florida and Pennsylvania. These top ten states represent $605 billion in spending, or over half of all spending during the time period covered.

Top ten states for Medicaid spending, including estimated population in 2024 from census.gov.

All spending has an corresponding billing code, which indicates what service is being billed for. Twenty-five billing codes represent half of all claims ($505 billion).

Top 25 billing codes by amount spent from 2018-2024. Billing code service descriptions taken directly from CMS.gov or AAPC.com [Link to Data]:

A huge proportion of spending is under code T1019, which covers personal care services. This billing code is for home and community-based care services as an alternative to residential nursing homes. Elderly or disabled people can stay in their homes and in some states hire friends and relatives to care for them using taxpayer dollars. The scheme is especially popular in New York State, which has seen $72.7 billion in such spending from 2018-2024. That’s the most of any state, and accounts for roughly half of all New York Medicaid spending.

Billing under T1019 exploded from 2018 to 2024, going from $9.6 billion in 2018 to almost $23.5 billion in 2024. That’s an increase of about 144%.

Spending under billing code T1019 from 2018 to 2024. [Link to data here].

Within that timeframe, eleven organizations were paid out over $1 billion under T1019. Nine of them are headquartered New York. The other two are located in Massachusetts.

Organizations receiving over $1 billion in T1019 funds from 2018 to 2024 [Link to data here]:

Across all billing codes, 46 entities have received over $1 billion in Medicaid spending and 16 received over $2 billion.

Organizations receiving over $2 billion in Medicaid spending across billing codes, 2018-2024 [Link to data]:

More Billing Codes See Skyrocketing Billing

T1019 is not the only billing code with explosive growth from 2018 to 2024, although it is the code with the highest amount paid out in that time. Twenty-two other codes saw anywhere from 200% to over 10,000% increases. Eight codes had over 500% more payments.

Billing codes with an over 500% increase in payments from 2018-2024 [Link to data here]:

The item with the highest increase, W1793, encompasses Pennsylvania’s Personal Assistance Service. This code is like the T1019 billing code but only for Pennsylvania. Payments soared from $5.6 million to $583 million in that time, largely beginning in 2021. That’s an increase of 10,283%.

Increase in W1793 spending, 2018-2024 [Link to data here].

Similarly, spending under G9005 for “coordinated care” dramatically increased almost 3,500% due to an overall increase in home-based care nationwide. The G9005 billing code covers case management and coordination between multiple healthcare providers for a given patient. Spending went from $9.9 million in 2018 to $351 million in 2024, with the biggest increase occurring in 2019 to over $120 million.

Increase in G9005 spending, 2018-2024 [Link to data here].

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Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services: The Bureaucrats Behind the Numbers

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are a division of Health and Human Services charged with administering Medicare & Medicaid spending and programs for around 100 million program participants.

Staff and salary data for the agency is not yet available for 2025, but Open the Books has the most recently available data, for 2024.

Access the Open the Books sets of CMS Staff and Salary Data here.

In 2024, 6,535 CMS staffers drew a paycheck, with total salaries worth about $918 million. This doesn’t include other benefits like healthcare and retirement funds, which add another estimated 30% to each salary.

Most employees, 4,304, are based in either D.C. or Maryland, where they enjoy location-based bonus adjustments to their salaries for living in a high-cost area.

A little less than half of employees, or 2,845, have the title “Health Insurance Administration” and have a combined income of $405 million. The next most frequent titles are “Information Technology Management” (754 staffers, $112 million in salaries), and “Management and Program Analysis” (565 staffers, $71 million in salaries).

Some other notable titles include “Social Science” (259 staffers, $51 million in salaries), “General Arts and Information” (63 staffers, $9 million in salaries), and “Public Affairs” (27 staffers, $4 million in salaries).

Across the agency, salaries average over $140,000. Eighty-three staffers had an over $200,000 salary, and 5,785 made between $100,000 and $199,999.

Biden-era CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, according to a press release, “charged CMS to advance health equity across the CMS programs,” and had a salary of $168,400.

Brooks-LaSure’s pay was still quite a bit lower than long-term bureaucrats like Chief Medical Officer Dr. Shari Ling, who directs the Center for Clinical Standards and Quality (CCSQ). Ling took home a $252,900 salary in 2024.

According to the CMS website, CCSQ is responsible for “executing all national clinical, quality, and safety standards for healthcare facilities and providers, as well as establishing coverage determinations for items and services that improve health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries.”

The next highest paid CMS professional, Dr. Michelle Schreiber, had a similar $250,950 salary in 2024. She is currently the Deputy Director of the Center for CCSQ and the Director of the Quality Measurement and Value-Based Incentives Group. These positions attempt to measure and improve healthcare quality. According to a press release, she also led the group’s work on “health equity.”

Under Trump, CMS is led by Dr. Mehmet Oz. According to news articles, the agency planned on cutting 300 roles as part of a “reductions in force” measure undertaken across federal agencies in 2024. The administration has not yet released its full 2025 staff and salary numbers, however, so it is unclear which and how many staffers were let go or replaced.

Open the Books commends the release of the Medicaid dataset, which provides crucial information on some of our biggest public expenditures. Taxpayers can understand, with real dollar figures, how policies have increased the cost of the Medicaid program and which businesses are benefiting the most, perhaps even through fraud.

Spending transparency is a key tenet of a functional democracy, and we hope the Trump administration continues releasing data for more years and more programs.

In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration was responsible for spending $24 billion more on improper payments than President Joe Biden’s administration spent his last year in office.

An improper payment is “made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason,” according to federal guidelines. These administrative errors include both overpayments and underpayments made because of missing or incorrect information.

The federal government made $186 billion worth of improper payments FY25, Trump’s first year back, versus $161 billion in FY24, Biden’s final year.

However, historical context is key.

That final year in office for Biden saw surprisingly low improper payments, in part because massive Covid-related improper payments began to taper off.

The first three years of the Biden Administration saw between $236 billion and $281 billion in improper payments annually.

Even Trump’s final year of his first term, FY 2020, had over $206 billion in improper payments.

Last year’s $186 billion is lower than each of the four years prior to FY 2024.

Trump’s first term saw between $141B and $206B — for a $168B average (not adjusted for inflation) or between $175B and $246B — for a $203.5B average when adjusted for inflation.

While improper payments have receded from historic highs of the Covid era, major transparency problems remain. Amid a series of fraud-related scandals in the news, the FY25 report fails to include the usual section tabulating “confirmed fraud.”

Improper Payments Year over Year

The Office of Management and Budget develops guidance for agencies to estimate, report, and correct improper payments. The Government Accountability Office audits agency compliance, and the Treasury Department maintains a “Do Not Pay” list to prevent improper payments before they occur.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has historically been the big loser of federal funds when it comes to improper payments.

Improper payments at CMS make up more than half of all improper payments each year. That’s $96.1 billion of the $186 billion in FY25. Similarly, in FY24, $87 billion of the $161 in improper payments were attributed to CMS.

The misappropriation of CMS funds should come as little surprise. CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz has said there is “another big crisis” concerning alleged social services fraud in Maine, which may be on par with the welfare fraud scandal in Minnesota.

Republican lawmakers in Maine brought the issue to light following December allegations from a whistleblower that the state’s Medicaid program had been defrauded of millions of dollars.

Lack of Compliance, Transparency

Some of these payments do get recovered: almost $24 billion (13%) of federal overpayments from last fiscal year have been recouped by the feds.

But there are likely more financial errors that have not been accounted for, in part because not all agencies report improper payments.

The Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019 (PIIA) (P.L. 116-117) and Appendix C to Circular No. A-123, Requirements for Payment Integrity Improvement require all federal agencies to report improper payments.

An agency can be considered noncompliant for a number of reasons. They could fail to report their improper payments, only issue partial reports, have error rates that are unacceptably high (above 10%), or have insufficient risk management programs in place. Some agencies are chronically noncompliant while others seesaw back and forth over the years.

The most recent report lists 63 agencies that have been reviewed for compliance since 2011.

FY24 is the last year available in the FY25 report, as it states the FY25 compliance status “will be updated in [the] 2026 dataset.”

Forty-eight agencies were compliant and 15 were not, making for a 76% compliance rate. Agencies can report some improper payments while failing to report others and thus be labeled noncompliant.

Most agencies that were noncompliant in FY24 have long histories of it.

The 15 noncompliant agencies in FY24 include several major Cabinet agencies and one of the biggest budget items, the Pentagon. The Department of Treasury itself is noncompliant due to having multiple programs with high error rates. Other agencies on the most recent list include Departments of Labor, Health & Human Services, Housand and Urban Development, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs.

HHS, Treasury, USDA and VA have been noncompliant each of the last 14 years; SBA, DOL and DOD/DOW have been noncompliant 13 of the last 14 years; DHS, SSA and HUD have been noncompliant 12 of the last 14 years.

Although the State Department hasn’t reported its improper payments since FY 2008, it has been deemed compliant since FY 2012.

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Sophisticated Fraud Schemes

Beyond the payments “made by the government to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason,” the GAO stated in 2024 that it also believes there are undetected, “sophisticated fraud schemes” not included in the annual improper payment estimates.

“Confirmed fraud” is a dataset that is usually included in the improper payments report but is excluded in the FY25 report.

While the FY24 report contained 11 sets of data, the FY25 report only has six.

Missing data tabs are:

• Improper payment totals from previous years

• Monetary loss root causes: this section explains whether overpayments were inside or outside the agency’s control, whether the information needed exists, or if the agency failed or was unable to access the information needed.

• Eligibility amount: these are payments that don’t match a recipient’s eligibility, i.e. address/location used by DOD for civilian pay or travel pay or age for Social Security

• Confirmed fraud: this explains which programs in each year had fraud confirmed by a court and how much (FY24 was over $7 billion)

• Recovery details: while the tab for “rate and amount of recovery” is present, missing are more details about the recoveries, like whether an audit was involved or the inspector general investigated (FY24 was $22.6 billion or 14%)

Arguably the most important of these is “confirmed fraud.” There was over $7 billion confirmed in FY24 but we don’t know how much was confirmed in FY25. We also don’t know which agencies and programs have fared worse or better.

Amid the fraud-related scandals in Minnesota, Maine and beyond (all of which involve federal tax dollars), this piece of reporting is more newsworthy and relevant to taxpayers than ever. But now it’s become another blind spot for taxpayers.

The worst agencies and programs for confirmed fraud in FY24 include HHS ($2.8 billion) and DOD/DOW ($2.4 billion)

Agencies with a history of noncompliance also, unfortunately, have a history of confirmed fraud.

For instance, HHS has been noncompliant each of the last 14 years, while the agency lost $28.5 billion to confirmed fraud in the time period between 2017 and 2024.

Both DOD/DOW and DOL have been noncompliant 13 of the last 14 years. The Pentagon lost $10.8 billion to confirmed fraud in that time period between 2017 and 2024 and DOL lost $5.6 billion.

USDA and VA have been noncompliant each the last 14 years. VA lost $1.3 billion to confirmed fraud between 2017 and 2024, while USDA lost over $1 billion to confirmed fraud.

DHS has been noncompliant 12 of the last 14 years, and lost $181.6 million to confirmed fraud in that same time period.

We asked the agencies responsible for setting guidelines, measuring compliance and issuing reports (OMB, GAO and Treasury) why the data is missing and have not received a response.

Incremental Improvements

While there are still glaring holes in the improper payment data and huge losses for taxpayers, one recurring problem was recently addressed by Congress. After bipartisan support in both chambers, President Trump signed the Ending Improper Payments for Deceased People Act into law in early February.

A significant source of improper payments have been checks being cut to dead people. Open the Books found $3.6 billion worth of stimulus checks sent to the dead as part of its investigation into Covid-related waste and fraud. The Internal Revenue Service had not used data from the Social Security Administration’s list of deceased persons. Simple knowledge sharing would have fix the problem.

The new law finalizes a temporary arrangement allowing Social Security to share its data with the Department of Treasury, which keeps a master “Do Not Pay” list. Now agencies using the master list can avoid payments to the deceased.

Click here to download the full dataset for FY25.

FURTHER READING

Final Tally for Biden-Era Improper Payments? $925 BILLION (Open the Books, Substack, 12 Feb 2025)

Open the Books has obtained teacher training materials used by the Pentagon’s k-12 school system from the most recent school year. The documents reveal contractors that continue pushing divisive far-left ideology that President Trump has attempted to root out through executive orders, and a bureaucracy loathe to take directions from the White House.

Internal documents replace SEL with “resiliency” to avoid open records requests, contractors continue to push “equity” over equality and make it a goal to turn students into “advocates.”

The leader of one private contractor called such efforts “defiance over compliance.”

BACKGROUND

The federal bureaucracy is notoriously slow to respond to the Executive Branch it is meant to serve and the Congress whose laws it should execute. As the Trump administration attempts to rein in the size and scope of the federal government, the bureaucracy the president oversees has shown resistance to change. The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) has proven to be a prime example.

DoDEA educates more than 70,000 children of servicemembers around the world and has been the subject of yearslong investigation by Open the Books for its use of divisive “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) frameworks as well as the controversial “Social Emotional Learning” (SEL).

The Trump administration has set upon the difficult task of rooting out harmful DEI practices from the federal government, its contractors and federally funded schools. DoDEA has come under fire in recent years for promoting far-left content, encouraging children to fixate on their racial, economic, and gender “identities” to understand their place in a “privilege” hierarchy. Teachers have also been caught boasting about hiding “gender transitions” from parents and creating secret student-only online chatrooms to talk about sexuality.

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING PLANS

Given the ideological commitment shown by DoDEA staff, it’s not surprising they would be resistant to President Trump’s anti-DEI measures. But because DoDEA has long been plagued with extreme delays and over-redactions in their public records request process, it is not always possible to find evidence of bureaucratic intransigence.

This year, however, Open the Books was able to receive the annual professional learning plan for DoDEA teachers for the 2025-2026 school year. The plan guides teachers in professional development and the books, technologies, and other materials the school staff can use in their daily work.

According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, the plans are drafted in February or March and then shared with regional and district officials and teachers for feedback. A final revised version is sent out in July, before the school year starts.

Given Trump and Secretary Pete Hegseth’s hardline stance against DEI in the American military and American schools, DoDEA officials should have the time and motivation to excise the corrosive ideology from the agency.

However, while the terms “equity” and “social emotional learning” have been eliminated from this school year’s professional learning plan (once ubiquitous in earlier years), far-left ideas in conflict with the President’s anti-DEI directive are still being promoted through professional societies and contractors discussed in the plans.

This example raises questions about how bureaucrats are continuing to launder their own favored policies through outside contractors and professional societies.

Examples include:

thinkLaw

ThinkLaw claims to teach children “critical thinking skills” because “rote memorization and spoon-fed learning will not prepare young people for the rapidly changing workforce that awaits them.” At DoDEA, teachers in Advanced Academics, also known as the gifted program, are given thinkLaw resources for their professional development plan. The curriculum and classroom activities can only be obtained through a contract with the organization, but a look through the thinkLaw website show’s a strong commitment to “equity.”

In the wake of President Trump’s anti-DEI orders, thinkLaw CEO Colin Searle authored a blog titled “The Collective Power of Moving in Silence: A Practical Response to the Codification of Anti-DEIA Efforts in Public Education” where he advocates for “defiance disguised as compliance.” He continues, in one example encouraging teachers to affirm secret “gender” transitions in schools, behind the backs of parents.

“In education, this could look like feigned compliance to the federal standard of only acknowledging two genders: male and female. ... maybe it doesn’t make sense to make big, bold statements about pronoun usage or to openly defy federal pronouncements. It’s about the collective work of intentionally affirming the young people in our schools for who they are and understanding that we all have the power to be that one adult.”

The CEO has also written a book called “Tangible Equity” which urges educators to “not just prioritize equity, but go beyond the buzzwords” and leverage “power to really start doing something about equity.”

The DoDEA thinkLaw contract is held by CS Educational Services, LLC, and is worth $539,750 in potential awards. ThinkLaw was recently given a $141,000 obligation in July, 2025, according to data in USASpending.

Other notable language in the Advanced Academics Teacher Training:

Advanced Academic teachers training also states that “there will be an increase in the number of underserved students receiving LoS Ill or IV.” LoS III and IV refers to more intensive “levels of service” for advanced students. The teacher training sounds as though students will be selected for these services based on identity rather than merit.

SHAPE America

DoDEA professional learning plans sign Physical Education teachers up for SHAPE America professional society membership and asks them to follow SHAPE America National Health Education Standards.

Open the Books previously wrote about SHAPE America’s National Sex Education Standards, which includes goals like:

• By 2nd grade, define gender identity

• By 5th grade children should be able to describe the role of puberty blockers on those who identify as transgender. Fifth graders should differentiate between sexual orientation and gender identity and explain that gender expression and gender identity exist along a spectrum

• By 8th grade, define anal sex and describe “pregnancy options” including abortion.

While the Health Education Standards don’t touch on “gender identity” or abortion, they do embed new concepts like “equity” and “misinformation and disinformation:”

The standards aim to turn children into “advocates.” In fact, one standard is exclusively devoted to advocacy.

Parents and policymakers should be troubled by an organization that is explicitly espousing far-left ideology is also making a point of turning students into community activists.

During the rollout of these new standards in 2024, then-board president (and current board member) Cara Grant reiterated that the National Health and the National Sex Education standards were grounded in DEI principles, continuing:

“Equity lies at the heart of our mission. We recognize that systemic disparities exist within our educational systems, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Our approach is not simply to level the playing field but to dismantle the structures that perpetuate inequality.”

Many references to DEI have been removed from the website, including a disturbing webpage stating puberty blockers could “neutraliz[e]” the competitive advantage boys have over girls in sports, but, as in the case of Cara Grant, DEI staffers remain at the organization. Kaitlyn Gaddis-Thompson was touted as the Project Director for the National Initiative to Advance Health Equity in Schools in a 2023 podcast.

On her LinkedIn she lists her job as “project director” at SHAPE America, along with a rousing quote stating teachers can either be revolutionaries or oppressors.

The DoDEA SHAPE America contract is worth $82,245 in potential awards, running until 2027, according to data in USASpending.

American School Counselor Association

DoDEA school counselors are advised to:

“Analyze common ethical dilemmas in school counseling though the lens of the American School Counseling Associations Ethical Standards and DoDEA’s policy specifically for appropriate responses for student well-being. Participants will apply ethical decision-making models to real-world scenarios, demonstrating alignment to DoDEA policies and appropriate responses to all students.”

ASCA Ethical Standards emphasize the need for counselors to “affirm” a child’s “gender identity” and urge counselors to “advocate” for various policy items, including “systemic and other changes needed for equitable participation and outcomes in educational programs when disproportionality exists.”

While DoDEA professional development also asks counselors to align responses to DoDEA policy, it is unclear why they would use resources that have foundational ideological conflicts with President Trump’s executive orders on DEI and gender identity ideology.

American Library Association

DoDEA librarians are asked to “plan collaboratively with teachers to support classroom instruction and embed the National Library Standards within their lessons.”

The National Library Standards are developed by the American Association of School Librarians, which is in turn a division of the American Library Association. ALA has strongly resisted attempts for parents to remove pornographic books from children’s libraries, calling them attacks on First Amendment rights and “Intellectual Freedom.”

ALA also promotes the concept of “equity” and Affirmative Action as a matter of “justice,” rejecting the notion of “equality.”

Equality vs. Equity, from the ALA website.

The National Library Standards DoDEA staff are asked to consult are imbued with the same spirit. In the 2025 standards, published this year, librarians are told:

“Continuing to curate reflective collections and advocate for inclusive perspectives also ensures that the school librarian upholds the belief that intellectual freedom is every learner’s right. School librarians do not censor their school library collections to fit the majority and exclude the minority.” [Page 163. Emphasis in the original]

While it’s a nice sentiment on its face, they are written in the context of ALA’s accusations of “book bans” against pornographic books promoting gender confusion.

The Standards also state “ensuring equity in the school library begins with an ongoing reflective analysis of the school library’s existing digital and print collection, outreach programs, and user services.” [Page 46]. These actions were already implemented by DoDEA staff through “equity audits,” described in the 2021 Equity and Access Summit, during which time-honored authors like Dr. Suess were purged in favor of authors like controversial rapper Lil Nas X, who wrote a children’s book called C is for Country, featured in DoDEA programming.

A slide from the 2021 DoDEA Equity and Access Summit showing an activity students participated in for National Education Association’s Read Across America program at Smith Elementary School. Note C is for Country by Lil Nas X.

SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING

In January of last year high-level DoDEA staffers were recorded in a meeting stating they would no longer be using the term “social emotional learning” because of the negative attention SEL practices had received from Open the Books.

SEL is a quasi-therapeutic practice that elicits and records emotional responses from children throughout the school day to recommend potential mental health “interventions.” Instead of SEL, they would use the word “resilience.”

[Read more about SEL at DoDEA in our 2024 report, Schools for Radicals.]

True to form, there is no instance of “social emotional” in the SY 2025-2026 professional development plan but there are 241 instances of “resilience.”

Example: In School Year 2024-2025 the Physical Education learning plan outcome focused on social emotional learning:

The SY 2025-2026 Physical Education learning plan outcome instead focuses on “resiliency:”

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Next Steps

DoDEA has had years to institutionalize far-left ideology down to the core of its administrative functions. Teachers have been caught on video discussing instigating and affirming “gender transitions” behind the backs of parents, and they are on record stating that no child is too young to discuss racial “privilege,” “gender,” and sexuality. High-level administrators said they would no longer use “social emotional learning” in their materials because the practices were unpopular, while changing nothing about how SEL is implemented in the classroom. Administrators and teachers have demonstrated a commitment to lie, hide, spin, and obfuscate the nature of their extremist activities.

There are many DoDEA administrators and teachers who do not support far-left DEI and SEL pedagogies and do not wish to undermine the President and Secretary’s objectives. But there is reason to believe outside contractors and professional societies are used as a lesser known, more difficult to check, back door to these same policies the Trump administration wishes to reform.

Radical transparency is the answer. Secretary Hegseth’s War Department must end these known affiliations and review each contractor and professional society partner for alignment with agency objectives. The agency could then publicize these cancelled contracts so that aligned state and local governments can follow suit.

In 2024 the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed into law by then-president Joe Biden, featured a new “parents bill of rights” for military families, which included the right for parents to review instructional materials, curricula, and books available to students. Teacher training like that obtained by Open the Books for this report, along with books and curriculum materials, should also be disclosed so the public can understand how administrators are directing the classroom climate.

None of this would be necessary if DoDEA administrators had not conspired to deceive parents of their DEI and SEL activities, but trust can only be regained when parents understand what is going on in their children’s classrooms. Radical transparency is key for winning back the trust of DoDEA parents and taxpayers, and an important tool that can be used to keep rogue administrators in check.

This week The Free Press highlighted our major new initiative that puts our work – and the future of government transparency – squarely on the front lines of public impact.

In their piece titled “The Watchdogs Who Are Building a ‘Moneyball’ for Politics,” The Free Press spotlights how Open the Books is joining forces with Citizen Portal to create a first-of-its-kind tool that will allow citizens, journalists, and policymakers to compare what politicians say with what they actually do.

READ THE STORY AT THE FREE PRESS

What this means:

• We’re combining the largest private database of government spending with AI that has indexed over a million hours of public official remarks and meetings – creating unprecedented transparency.

• For the first time, taxpayers can compare what politicians say with what they do — and spend — in one place.

• This has the potential to reshape the public square and accountability ecosystem.

This partnership marks a significant evolution in how transparency is delivered in the age of AI.

It’s only the first step in a generational upgrade to government transparency. We believe pattern recognition and pattern prediction will help identify areas of spending that are ripe for waste, fraud and abuse. Harnessing that tech could have the power to head off scandals like the Minnesota daycare crisis in real time. But for sophisticated AI tools to work, they need enormous amounts of data. At 10 billion data points and counting, Open the Books is the organization that can supply it!

READ THE PRESS RELEASE

Photo Credit: Fibonacci Blue, 30 January 2026

Trump administration border czar Tom Homan recently arrived in Minneapolis with a pledge that he is “staying until the problem is solved” while acknowledging that the federal government’s conduct has not “been perfect.”

Homan added, “I didn’t come here looking for photo ops or headlines. I came here looking for solutions.”

Homan’s appearance comes as Trump administration officials, including Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have come under withering criticism from across the political spectrum for their management of immigration enforcement – which includes a massive $75 billion spending surge. Critics charge that instead of following the president’s directive to prioritize “violent criminals,” some officials have prioritized detentions of non-violent immigrants and raids conducted by armed, masked and poorly trained new recruits.

ICE operations have been associated with not only the shooting deaths of two American citizens but also the illegal detention of American citizens, arrests of immigrants who were in the process of following established procedures, separations of caregivers, and high-profile raids at locations like Home Depot parking lots that tend to be associated with more benign and less violent facets of illegal immigration.

High-profile Republicans have raised concerns about the administration’s immigration enforcement efforts. Republican Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma questioned proposals of sending national guard troops to Illinois, stating that, “We believe in the federalist system – that’s states’ rights … Oklahomans would lose their minds if Pritzker [Democrat Governor of Illinois] sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”

Meanwhile, Patrick Schiltz, the George W. Bush appointed-chief judge for the U.S. District Court of Minnesota, who served as a clerk to the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, accused ICE of lawless conduct. He wrote that, “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”

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Open the Books is committed to transparency in all areas of government. We believe all agencies benefit from forensic audits. As our compendium at the end shows, we have a long history of bringing transparency and evidence-based analysis to the trend of militarizing federal agencies, which has been an ongoing and growing trend under both Republican and Democrat administrations. We have also examined the use of taxpayer money to subvert federal immigration law in sanctuary cities and states, and we have provided evidence countering the claims of some politicians who insist they are not providing such funding.

Because immigration and law enforcement are charged topics it is important to note how our perceptions of norms and standards can change. Not long ago, in 2014, the trend of militarizing local police was an area of bipartisan concern with Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) questioning the wisdom of the Pentagon passing off surplus equipment like armored vehicles to local police to do crowd control.

“The militarization of police is something that has gotten way out of control,” Paul said.

McCaskill added, “I think most Americans were uncomfortable watching a suburban street in St. Louis with vivid images of a war zone.”

In 2026, people on all sides can agree that more, rather than less, transparency will help the country navigate this difficult issue. Taxpayers have the right to ask basic questions about law enforcement tactics, and demand visibility and accountability about activities they are paying for.

Tracking the ROI on immigration enforcement spending is especially important because the savings produced by last year’s DOGE-facilitated rescissions bill ($9 billion) have already been spent by the administration’s massive $75 billion immigration enforcement surge.

Homan seems eager to accept the highest standards of transparency and accountability that our organization is committed to providing, and he has been consistent about highlighting the human costs of a chaotic open borders policy. He estimates that 145,000 unaccompanied children out of 300,000 have been located. Homan understands that caring about these children means locating them.

Understanding the ROI for taxpayers requires a critical look at the cost per deportation, the ethics of masking officials with firearm authority, the field training of those officials, conflicting messages about Second Amendment rights, and DHS’ public relations campaign, including Noem’s deals with preferred vendors.

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ROI: The Cost Per Deportation

In 2025, ICE received approximately $28.75 billion in funding which came from $10 billion Congress had already appropriated in addition to the $18.75 billion Congress directed to ICE through the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The $75 billion authorized for ICE will be allocated over four years.

In 2024, ICE received $9.2 billion, which means ICE’s budget tripled from 2024 to 2025.

Taxpayers can understand the ROI on their money any way they choose, but two methods can help them sort through the numbers.

First, if ICE’s budget tripled, taxpayers can fairly ask if its performance tripled. If deportation removals are the Key Performance Indicator (KPI), the number of removals should reach 814,452 in 2025, which is triple the number of removals (271,484) in 2024, the last year of President Biden’s term.

DHS claims it removed 675,000 illegal immigrants last year, but that number is in dispute. Other estimates suggest the number is closer to 540,000. We’ve issued a FOIA request to determine the basis of DHS’ claim and will update our estimate accordingly.

Regardless, if DHS’s estimate is correct, it has fallen short of reaching a three-fold improvement in performance for three times the funding.

Another fair comparison is to look at past administrations that conducted removals efficiently. President Obama was criticized for being the “Deporter in Chief” by immigration rights groups for conducting, on average, nearly 400,000 removals each year during his two terms. During Obama’s tenure, ICE’s budget was approximately $6 billion annually, one-fifth of Trump’s ICE budget in 2025. If Noem was meeting Obama’s efficiency standard, ICE should be removing 2 million people a year. By that measure, Noem has fallen far short of the Obama administration standard.

Another method is to look at the delta or difference between what previous administrations accomplished vs. this administration. In other words, if Obama removed 400,000 illegals a year while Trump removed 600,000, the delta or difference would be 200,000. If the cost difference is $75 billion, the cost per deportation under Trump will be astronomically high (around $375,000 per deportation, which close to the median price of a new home in many states). If Trump’s removal process stalls due to agency incompetence or other factors and he only matches Obama’s performance number, the cost delta will remain at that high amount. If Homan helps ICE’s performance improve, the delta cost will go down.

Additionally, taxpayers have the right to ask critical questions about the macro-economic costs and benefits of illegal immigration. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), illegal immigration costs taxpayers $150.7 billion per year at the federal state and local level. FAIR estimates the annual K-12 education cost of illegal immigration is $78 billion while health care costs consume $42.7 billion. By this measure, the $75 billion surge may look like a bargain, even if this administration is conducting operations less efficiently and professionally than past administrations.

However, the mass deportation of laborers in sectors like construction, food service, retail and agriculture could reduce GDP by 1% and cost taxpayers at least $270 billion over four years and $862 billion over ten years, according to modeling by Penn Wharton.

Ultimately, taxpayers are free to choose whatever metric seems sensible because it’s their money. Taxpayers deserve transparent date and evidence so they can decide if they are getting their money’s worth. Our responsibility isn’t to tell you what to think but to provide data, metrics and comparisons for you to think about.

Additional background on the cost per deportation:

DHS says the current cost of a single enforced deportation is $18,245, but the simple math of dividing ICE’s budget ($28.75 billion) by DHS’ claimed number of removals (675,000) suggests the cost per deportation is $42,593.

We have sent a FOIA request to DHS to better understand how they calculated their cost per deportation.

As the chart below details, there are different types of “deportations.”

The New York Times notes that the Trump administration has deported more people from the interior in one year than President Joe Biden’s did in four.

In FY 2023, for the first time since FY 2010, the Biden administration returned more migrants directly across the border than were removed from the U.S. interior. The Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, has argued that should earn Biden a “returner-in-chief” label.

That’s compared to President Barack Obama, who, again, was known as the “deporter-in-chief” during his two terms.

In 2012-2014, deportations exceeded 400,000 annually under the Democratic Obama’s watch, according to DHS data compiled by Migration Policy Institute. The three years prior hovered just under 400,000.

ICE reported the average FY 2016 deportation cost as $10,854 during Obama’s term, according to then-ICE spokesperson Yasmeen Pitts O’Keefe.

“This includes all costs necessary to identify, apprehend, detain, process through immigration court, and remove an alien,” she said in an interview.

While both the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were known for U.S.-Mexico border apprehensions – 11 of the combined 16 years saw over 1 million – removals from the interior were far below Trump’s.

Bush oversaw between 165,000 and 359,000 during each year of his two terms, according to the DHS data compiled by Migration Policy Institute, while Clinton saw between 42,000 and 188,000 during his eight years.

Credit: Migration Policy Institiute

Changing Costs, Double Standards

Most of the controversy surrounding immigration is focused on ICE but much of the $170 billion directed to immigration in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” went to border security. On that front, the ROI for taxpayers seems higher than for ICE. The surge in funding for border security has led to a significant decrease in illegal border crossings. According to the Trump administration:

· Since January 21 through end of November, there have been 117,105 total enforcement encounters along the southwest border which is 37% less than the monthly average of 185,625 during the Biden Administration.

Regarding daily average apprehensions on the Southwest Border, the administration estimates:

• 245 per day – less than 11 per hour

• 95% lower than the daily average under the last administration (5,110/day, Feb. 2021-Dec.2024)

• In December 2023, 336 aliens were apprehended every hour – today, that’s more than one day’s worth of apprehensions.

When comparing cost per deportation reported by DHS now ($18,245) versus a decade ago ($10,854 in FY 2016) it’s important to understand there were also different strategies, partisan environments and circumstances.

President Trump has followed years of record-breaking illegal border crossings, attempting a large-scale reversal while at the same time working to remove those with additional criminal records and standing removal orders who may have been in the United States for years or decades. The efforts have faced aggressive judicial scrutiny, legal opposition, protests and local political opposition in cities far afield from the border.

The Obama administration did its share of interior ICE raids as well and faced many of the same criticisms. Those include denials for asylum seekers, removals without a judicial hearing, removals of unaccompanied minors, and more.

The American Civil Liberties Union described Obama’s policy as “speed over fairness.” Here’s just a sample of their contemporaneous concerns in 2014:

“The numbers are staggering: in 1995, 1,400 immigrants were subject to nonjudicial removals, representing 3 percent of total deportations. By FY 2012 that number had sharply increased to 313,000 nonjudicial removals – an all-time high.

“Under today’s removal system, only one quarter of all people facing expulsion get to present their case before an immigration judge. These judges, employed by the Justice Department, are experts in immigration law. They conduct formal court hearings where they hear live witnesses, review documentary evidence, and evaluate applications for immigration relief.

“By contrast, nonjudicial removals are fast-track proceedings wholly controlled by the Department of Homeland Security (”DHS”), sometimes involving only a single border agent who acts as both judge and jury. Those facing nonjudicial removal have no lawyer and no chance to appeal.”

The ACLU even warned these changes risked becoming “un-American:”

“…A deportation system that herds 75 percent of people through fast-track, streamlined removal is a system devoid of fairness and individualized due process. Nonjudicial removals violate our constitutional tradition and cannot be reconciled with an administration that has repeatedly stated its commitment to immigration reform.

“Fairness and individualized due process must be restored to the system…Anything less is un-American.”

Another key difference: Obama mostly stuck to fast-tracking at the border, rather than removals from the American interior. His “speed over fairness” approach was thanks to enthusiastic interpretation of a 1996 law (The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act).

Specific tactics included:

• Stipulated Orders: The administration removed some 160,000 non-citizens by requiring them to sign papers that waived their right to a hearing.

• Reinstatement of Removal: If a person was previously deported and re-entered illegally, immigration authorities had the legal authority to reinstate the original order without a new hearing.

This approach helped the majority of removals stay out of sight, out of mind and likely at lower cost.

But this administration is responsible for creating its own costs and public relations problems. The resources directed to deporting non-violent immigrants congregating at Home Depot parking lots are not available to track, arrest and deport violent immigrants. Every dollar spent tracking a non-violent immigrant is a dollar not available to track down an illegal immigrant gang member who may murder the next Laken Riley.

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DHS Sweetheart Deals?

Noem is also in the hot seat over questions about how a contractor with ties to her team was selected to create advertising.

DHS spent at least $180 million in 2025 on its Stronger Borders, Stronger America media campaign, described as “advertising and media support” about the “national emergency at the southern border.”

Advertising contracts must go through a competitive bidding process, but DHS ignored the rules by claiming there was an “unusual and compelling urgency” to find an advertising firm quickly, according to Axios.

People Who Think LLC collected $52.2 million. It’s a media firm owned by Jay Connaughton, a political consultant and media advisor from Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Safe America Media received $127.8 million, though the company was formed just days before it collected the money. Its address matches a property in Delaware owned by Republican consultant Mike McElwain, according to the Associated Press.

Safe America used some of its federal funds to hire the communications firm Strategy Group to film a television ad for DHS, according to an investigation by ProPublica. Noem’s chief spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, is married to Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho. According to the report, Corey Lewandowski (Noem’s top advisor) has “worked extensively” with the company and was Yoho’s boss during a campaign to promote Noem’s 2024 memoir.

ProPublica’s reporting was cited in a December letter from nine Congress members that asked the DHS inspector general to probe potential ethics violations in DHS’ contract spending.

Strategy Group’s name does not appear on any publicly available documents. Charles Tiefer, a former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, told ProPublica that “Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer.”

DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin described the advertisements as “a public service announcement urging illegal aliens to leave,” but critics viewed them as thinly veiled campaign ads for the GOP.

Three of the ads used the phrase “Thank you, President Donald J. Trump.” In another, DHS called out the “weak leadership” of the Biden administration that “left our borders wide open.” The ads were narrated by Noem and featured images of Trump signing executive orders and flying on Air Force One.

People Who Think and Safe America Media collected almost half of DHS’ $380.1 million advertising spending in fiscal year 2025. That’s nearly as much as DHS spent in the previous eight years combined.

From fiscal years 2021 to 2024, which includes almost all of Biden’s time in office, DHS spent $289.5 million on advertising. From fiscal years 2017 to 2020, which includes almost all of Trump’s first term, DHS spent only $116.4 million.

DHS’ 2025 contracts also included $85.7 million for seven of the 10 consulting firms identified for spending cuts in a February letter from the General Servies Administration, including Deloitte Consulting and Accenture Federal Services. The firms were set to receive $65 billion from Washington in 2025, an amount the GSA said “must change” because some of it was for “vague, never-ending contracts tagged as consulting.”

All 10 firms were asked to send the government a list of potential cost-cutting measures, but the GSA said all 10 lists were “wholly insufficient to the point of being insulting.”

DHS successfully cut $19.2 million of the contracts but then turned around and awarded $104.9 million of new money from October to December 2025.

In total, DHS gave out $28.4 billion of contracts in fiscal year 2025, $2.5 billion of which did not go through a competitive bidding process.

Open the Books will keep pressing for more clarity here as well. We have submitted a FOIA request for internal mentions of these vendors.

Shortened Training for Deportation Officers

Law enforcement experts have suggested that some Enforcement and Removal Operation (ERO) officers, the deportation officers within ICE, may be in over their heads. Some have pointed to poor training and lack of experience, while others argue a “cowboy mentality” is to blame for aggressive tactics.

The Atlantic claimed Secretary Noem and others in DHS “have been pushing the agency to do more showy operations in Democratic-run cities that can advance the president’s agenda — and supply clips for social media and the MAGA faithful.”

In that context, they quoted a “frustrated ICE official” who said of DHS leadership, “They love this cowboy s---.”

The current training time for new ERO officers is six weeks, NBC News reported, citing current and former DHS officials.

Training time used to be 13 weeks, but the Trump administration cut it to 8 weeks, before trimming off two more weeks.

DHS officials also claimed some new recruits entered the training program before being vetted, later discovering some failed drug tests, had disqualifying criminal backgrounds or didn’t meet other physical or academic requirements.

Police forces in large cities get far more training.

NYPD and LAPD and Chicago and Houston police academies are each six months. Boston PD’s is even longer, at over 7 months.

FBI training for new agent trainees lasts 18 weeks at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA.

U.S. military basic training is 8-12 weeks, depending on branch: Coast Guard and Air Force at the low end and Army, Navy and Marine Corps at the high end.

Open the Books has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for internal emails that would shed light on the decision making and internal deliberation over the rush to grow the ranks of ICE and shorten the training process. We will provide updates as they become available.

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Masked Law Enforcement Officers

Another lightning rod of the Trump deportation effort are the ethics of allowing ICE officers to wear masks that obscure their identity in public and on camera.

The norm for local police, and military personnel operating under Geneva Convention standards, is to not wear masks so they can transparently and clearly define their identity and association.

Some local police departments have higher standards of decorum and professionalism. New York City, for instance, requires its officers to wear neck ties.

Some psychologists argue that we act how we dress. If Noem doesn’t want ICE agents to be accused of acting like a paramilitary force that is immune from accountability, taxpayers might prefer a modified dress code.

DHS defends the practice by arguing that it protects officers and their families from “doxing,” when people post their personal information online to target them for harassment.

Doxing should be condemned but ICE officers are hardly the only public servants who face risk. Masking is typically reserved for the most highly trained personnel who have earned elite status and are conducting sensitive, clandestine missions.

Taxpayers can decide if ICE officers are more worthy of protection and anonymity than their local law enforcement officers, prosecutors and judges or rank and file military personnel.

DHS does not report a specific spending line item for masks but does report broader contract spending for personal protective equipment (PPE). In FY 2025 and 2026, DHS and subagencies paid:

• $129.6 million to ADS Tactical, in part for PPE and riot gear

• $11.6 million in ICE funds to Quantico Tactical Incorporated, mostly for “law enforcement equipment” and “gear”

• $3.1 million to LC Industries Inc for “DHS PPE safety stock”

• $284,000 to Olgoonik Corporation for PPE for a training class

The list does not include money for oxygen masks for FEMA and the Coast Guard, which are separate spending items.

Open the Books is taking multiple steps to gain more clarity about both the costs and the ethical implications of masking federal law enforcement officers.

• We asked the White House whether it plans to mask other federal agents with firearm authority. If not, why does their logic for ICE not apply to other agencies?

• We asked the White House whether there is a limiting principle for future administrations. For example, what would keep the IRS from obscuring its agents’ identities? To use another example, what would keep food or environmental regulators from hiding their identities while they investigate farmers or food purveyors?

• We asked whether DHS has a preferred vendor for masks and will investigate whether there are any ties to federal officials.

• We submitted a FOIA request for contracts related to facial coverings and internal discussions about masking.

A Taxpayer-Funded PR Campaign against the Second Amendment

One of the strangest developments following the death of Alex Pretti is what appears to be a coordinated effort by the Trump administration to deny Americans their Second Amendment rights.

Critics suggested that if the Trump administration’s deportation policy is based on reversing Biden’s immigration policies, their response to Alex Pretti’s shooting seems to be based on advancing Biden’s gun control policies.

In multiple interviews and public statements, Trump officials echoed Biden’s rhetoric condemning “high-capacity magazines.”

Pretti was licensed to carry a concealed weapon and was not breaking the law by simply having his gun on him in the Minneapolis street where he was shot and killed.

Noem has made numerous comments that created a false narrative contradicted by videos footage captured at the scene. She falsely claimed Pretti was “brandishing” a gun and “attacked” officers, calling him a “domestic terrorist,” even though he never showed or touched his weapon.

“I don’t know of any peaceful protesters that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” she said at a news conference. “This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons.”

As Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem has a 2026 salary of $253,100, based on the basic pay for Level 1 executives, which is the level of pay for heads of cabinet agencies. That is up from $250,600 in 2025.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel similarly took aim at the fact Pretti had a gun, even though he didn’t attempt to use it.

“No one who wants to be peaceful shows up at a protest with a firearm that is loaded with two full magazines,” Patel said on Fox News “Sunday Morning Futures”, adding, “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple. You don’t have that right to break the law.”

That comment is incorrect, the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus said in a statement: “There is no prohibition on a permit holder carrying a firearm, loaded with multiple magazines at a protest or rally in Minnesota.”

As head of the FBI, Patel is likely level 2 on the executive schedule of pay, making his salary $228,000.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also sought to blame Pretti for the shooting, saying, “he brought a gun.” When ABC News “This Week” host Jonathan Karl pushed back, bringing up the Second Amendment, Bessent said, “I’ve been to a protest. Guess what, I didn’t bring a gun, I brought a billboard.”

Bessent has a 2026 salary of $253,100, based on the basic pay for Level 1 executives, which is the level of pay for heads of cabinet agencies. That is up from $250,600 in 2025.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli posted similar sentiments on X: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it!”

After criticism from Second Amendment supporters, he later posted: “I never said it’s legally justified to shoot law-abiding concealed carriers … My comment addressed agitators approaching law enforcement with a gun and refusing to disarm.”

According to the Department of Justice’s pay plan charts, an assistant U.S. attorney with 0-2 years of experience makes up to $107,376. (Essayli was appointed to the job in 2025; he previously was a state assemblyman).

NOTE: Essayli was serving as interim U.S. attorney for the Central District of CA from April to July 2025 until a federal judge ruled that he was disqualified from holding the position because he stayed on beyond the initial interim period without having received official congressional approval. He was then reassigned to the First Assistant United States Attorney role. As an interim U.S. attorney, he would likely be paid more than his current salary.

Other Trump officials who misstated what videos of the incident obviously contradict include White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who referred to Pretti as “an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” He earns $195,000.

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino said, it “looks like” Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

Taxpayers can decide if they want the public officials they are paying to prudently enforce immigration laws or moonlight as spokesman for Biden’s gun control policies.

Conclusion

Taxpayers have the right to transparent facts and evidence about the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement surge, which is mostly financed by borrowed money they will have to pay back.

Open the Books will continue working to add sunlight and evidence-based analysis to the conversation. In a free society, you can’t have accountability without visibility. In the meantime, these facts and figures can be used by taxpayers as they consider the costs of illegal immigration, the costs of deportation, and what kinds of policy solutions might start to rebuild consensus on one of the most vexing issues of our time.

For example, little attention has been given to the self-deportation provisions the Trump administration has offered. Those who use the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol “CBP Home Mobile App” to voluntarily leave the United States can receive a free flight, a $2,600 stipend, and the ability to restart the immigration process with a clean slate. This app might not entirely solve the problem but could provide a more cost-effective use of taxpayer dollars.

Do you have other questions about the costs of deportation? Let us know in the comments.

FURTHER READING

The Militarization of the U.S. Executive Agencies | OpenTheBooks Oversight Report (December 2020)

The Militarization of Federal Bureaucracy - Updated Statistics Through March 31, 2023

The Militarization Of The IRS – The Facts On The Purchase Of Guns, Ammunition, And Military-Style Equipment Since 2006 (Substack, May 2023)

“Why Does the IRS Need Guns?” By Adam Andrzejewski & Sen. Tom Coburn (Wall Street Journal, June 2016)

California Pumped Tens of Millions into Immigration NGOs that Fight Deportation, Track ICE and more… (Substack, June 2025)

Grants to Combat School Violence Redirected to Defray Costs of Illegal Immigration (Substack, January 2026)

Nearly $200M in Direct Federal Grants Has Been Aimed at Expanding Programs to Serve Illegal Immigrants (Substack, October 2025)

Cash for Migrants: FEMA Not the Only Agency Spending Big (Substack, February 2025)

U.S. Spent $13 Billion Sponsoring Unaccompanied Minor Children At The Border Since 2012 (Substack, May 2023)