COVID-19 programs to help families and businesses stay afloat inadvertently diverted hundreds of billions to scammers who spent thousands on wish-list items like luxury cars and plastic surgery.

The actual amount of pandemic-related fraud, however, is unknown not only to us but also to the federal government. What’s more, the amount that the federal government has recouped makes up a scant 0.47% of the government’s fraud guestimate.

The difficulty of recouping these ill-gotten gains makes it even more critical that government programs are designed with far better guardrails in place. Scrutiny on the front end, even at some added investment, is imperative; the Covid era demonstrated that once money has left public coffers, it’s incredibly challenging to recover all or even much of it.

Background

Previously, Open the Books identified an estimated $400 billion in fraud in a series of COVID-19 programs due to a rushed rollout and lax oversight. Although the full extent of pandemic relief fraud is not known, estimates from some of the largest pandemic relief programs put losses at around $300 billion.

If we take that $300 billion and divide it up among taxpayers, that leaves households on the hook for

$2,260 each. $400 billion, on the other hand, would cost households an eye-catching $3,013 each.

Congress authorized about $4.6 trillion in emergency COVID-19 relief between 2020 and 2021 for vulnerable businesses and struggling families, but fraud was identified in at least 19 different pandemic-relief programs, according to an April 2025 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. If the government’s $300 billion fraud calculation is correct, then 6.5% of all pandemic aid was incorrectly distributed. What we have compiled is just a fraction of the hundreds of charged cases and undetected schemes.

The last update from the Department of Justice regarding how much stolen COVID-19 relief funds were seized or forfeited — over $1.4 billion — was in April of 2024. While this is described more broadly as “stolen COVID-19 relief funds” by the DOJ, the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force classifies the figure as Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) funds seized or forfeited. This means that the federal government has only recovered $10.55 per household. That leaves the remaining fraud tab nearly untouched.

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Small Business Relief Programs

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) programs were cornerstone small business relief initiatives implemented under Congress’ CARES Act, offering over $1.2 trillion in total aid.

The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) internal watchdog reported that 17% of all PPP and EIDL funds were flagged for fraudulent activity — with a $200 billion price tag. Open the Books identified well over $100 billion in PPP losses alone; an estimated $136 billion was stolen by criminals, con artists, and crime rings from around the world.

The SBA’s previous ballpark of $36 billion in fraudulently obtained funds from the two programs found that 86% of it originated in 2020. It later estimated 40.5% of PPP loan forgiveness payments and 49.2% of PPP guarantee purchase payments were improper in fiscal year 2023, though the SBA noted roughly 95% of the forgiveness figure consisted of unverifiable payments rather than confirmed fraud.

While the agency tracks some PPP and EIDL improper payment data, the SBA does not have a “sufficient process” for tracking identified overpayments and subsequent recoveries, according to the GAO.

NOTE: We went into further detail about the lax protocols for these programs at a March hearing before the Senate Small Business Committee. Click here to watch the hearing.

The COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force recovered over $1.4 billion in fraudulently obtained CARES Act funds, according to its 2024 report.

Unemployment Insurance

Congress created four new and temporary emergency unemployment insurance programs in the wake of the pandemic, including Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which extended benefits to gig workers and the self-employed.

Open the Books found that unemployment aid was robbed of $200 billion. The Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General estimated that at least $191 billion could have been improper payments, with a “significant portion” attributable to fraud.

The DOL estimated that 35.9% of PUA payments were improper, translating to $47 billion of its $131 billion.

The DOL’s internal watchdog estimated total pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) fraud losses may exceed $45 billion, jumping from over $16 billion in potentially fraudulent UI pandemic benefits in 2021. But the GAO calculated that improper payments rose from approximately $8 billion in the 2020 fiscal year to about $78.1 billion the next fiscal year. The GAO report was released in June 2022, while the DOL OIG’s report came out in September of the same year — two watchdog agencies with dramatically different estimates.

The GAO later estimated fraud could be between $100 billion and $135 billion from April 2020 through May 2023 — an almost 73% maximum increase from its $78.1 billion improper payments calculation three years prior.

Even combining all recovery channels — state-level clawbacks and criminal restitution and forfeiture — the total amount recovered is between $5 billion and $6 billion. That’s a recoupment rate of somewhere between 3.7% and 6% of estimated fraud.

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State Recovery Funds

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) provided $350 billion in Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF), which still has millions left to divvy out.

However, there is no single published estimate for total ARPA fraud specifically, and that gap is itself a documented oversight failure.

ARPA was an umbrella law that funded many different programs administered by different agencies. Unlike single-agency programs with dedicated OIG oversight, such as PPP under the SBA or unemployment insurance under the DOL, ARPA’s $1.9 trillion flowed through dozens of programs across multiple agencies, meaning no watchdog has a unified fraud calculation.

Take for example the Treasury Department. It established and modified its monitoring procedures, reviewing how SLFRF was spent, but it did not document those changes in key internal program guidance, creating a risk that the new procedures would not be implemented consistently, according to the GAO. Treasury also did not issue timely management decisions on SLFRF findings in recipients’ single audit reports, meaning it did not have “reasonable assurance” that unallowable uses of funds were identified or remediated, leaving the fraud door wide open.

From 2022 to 2024, thousands of SLFRF recipients did not meet the reporting deadline for project and expenditure reports, according to the GAO. The Treasury Department issued notices of noncompliance and conducted targeted outreach, but reporting remained inconsistent. As of January 2025, recipients that had never submitted a report accounted for about $139 million in combined awards.

In short, total ARPA/SLFRF fraud is unknown because the oversight infrastructure to measure it was never fully built.

Luxury Cars, Yachts, and Payments to Nancy Drew

Carl Delano Torjagbo defrauded the government out of $13 million, including a $9.6 million PPP loan and filing fraudulent tax returns that generated a $3.4 million IRS refund.

His tax returns falsely reported bogus losses for Kremkov Industries, Mr. Torjagbo’s alleged gold mining business in Ghana. His PPP loan application falsely certified that Kremkov Industries had 493 employees, including nearly a dozen celebrities and fictional characters: Keanu Reeves, Gene Hackman, Charlie Brown, Nancy Drew, John Snow, and Emilia Clarke. Mr. Torjagbo used those funds to pay personal debts, purchase a mansion in Marietta, Georgia, and spend over $15,000 for plastic surgery.

If such scammers do not have an appetite for honesty, many have a shared expensive taste in luxury cars.

Mr. Torjagbo was ordered to forfeit property and proceeds obtained through his scheme, including roughly

$333,000 for a 2014 Lamborghini Aventador, $120,800 for a 2022 BMW M850xi, $90,520 for a 2021 Land Rover Range Rover Velar, and $51,000 for the down payment on a 72-foot yacht.

One fraudster withdrew $60,000 of fraudulently obtained money to help purchase a 2019 Porsche Turbo Cabriolet. In another case, federal agents seized a Porsche and a Lamborghini in what one U.S. attorney described as “one of the largest PPP conspiracies in the country.” Two others utilized the majority of their stolen funds for cryptocurrency investments, purchasing stocks, leasing luxury apartments, and buying a Mercedes-Benz.

But none of these examples count estimates that imply that at least half of all stolen COVID-19 relief funds went overseas to Russian, Chinese, and Nigerian criminals.

There is still more COVID-19 fraud we have not mentioned: pandemic-related health care fraud (as Open the Books has documented in the Cost of Fraud series), stimulus checks paid out to dead people, and tax credits. One New Jerseyan sought more than $170 million in fraudulent COVID-19-related tax refunds, resulting in the largest COVID-19 tax relief fraud case to be tried in the country as of April this year.

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The federal response

The COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force, established in 2021, has criminally charged more than 3,500 defendants and filed more than 400 civil suits that have led to settlements or judgments. According to a GAO analysis of Justice Department public statements and court documentation from March 2020 to December 2024, 46% of the 1,875 defendants convicted of pandemic-fraud-related offenses with final charges recorded had conspiracy charges, which the GAO says suggests involvement of an organized group.

A 10-year statute of limitations for criminal charges and civil enforcement in PPP and EIDL-related fraud was extended in 2022. In January 2025, Congress introduced legislation to extend the statute of limitations for violations relating to pandemic UI programs and other pandemic-relief programs to 10 years. DOJ officials say this gives law enforcement, investigators, and prosecutors more time to uncover potential fraud and to develop cases.

The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, established by the CARES Act to support fraud prevention and detection efforts across federal programs using data analytics, was provided $88 million through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2026 fiscal year funding to keep it operational through 2034.

While PRAC has flagged billions in anomalies, it is to be determined whether the return on investment over the next decade — including the six remaining years on the PPP and EIDL statute of limitations

— will be worth the price tag.

Conclusion

As we wrote in Newsweek during the immediate aftermath of the pandemic emergency, we wrote:

As Congress appropriates funds, and as Executive Branch officials design their spending programs, they must learn from past lessons and begin prioritizing far better safeguards against waste, fraud and abuse. Once the money is spent, it’s often simply too late.

FURTHER READING

The COVID Aid Waste Compendium

Ghost Rides: Massachusetts Billed Medicaid for 16,907 Trips That Never Happened

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

Hidden Fees: Taxpayers on the Hook for Foreign-Linked Health Care Fraud Schemes

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

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Open the Books has spent the summer quantifying recent spending spikes across Medicare and Medicaid, along with the cost of fraudulent schemes that sap the programs of resources for those who need care. Those stories have rightly dominated headlines for months.

But fraud doesn’t start or end with our safety net programs.

We collaborated with the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) to take a look at fraud in K-12 education. The Department of Education Office of Inspector General (OIG) documented more than $225 million in alleged fraud since 2019, across more than 90 cases, in state after state. From California to West Virginia and even Puerto Rico, schemers were rigging bids, billing for supplies they never purchased, embezzling and more.

» READ THE FULL REPORT «

These are just a few examples from the report:

• DISNEY ADULTING: At Community Preparatory Academy in Los Angeles County, school executive director Janis Bucknor admitted to stealing more than $3 million over five years, or more than one-third of the schools federal and state funding. She used the cash for personal travel, restaurants, internet shopping, and private school tuition for her children, prosecutors said. She also pleaded guilty to spending more than $220,600 on Disney cruise line vacations, theme park admissions, and other Disney-related expenses. The cost per student? A whopping $9,090; that’s plenty to put toward an education somewhere else.

• MR. CLEAN: The maintenance director of Boone County, West Virginia schools, Michael David Barker, pleaded guilty in 2025 to defrauding the school district out of $3.4 million. He falsified documents to make it look like the district was receiving large amounts of janitorial and custodial products including hand soap, trash can liners, and face masks from Rush Enterprises, when in fact it only received a small amount of those products or paid for products that were never delivered. Barker and his parents all made cash deposits that went toward purchasing vehicles and making home improvements. The cost per student was $1,096.

• PHONY VIRTUAL CLASSROOMS: Five former school employees fraudulently enrolled students in virtual public schools. They used student identities from various private schools around the state, offering those schools computers, direct payments, and access to online curriculum — “to persuade the private schools to share their students’ academic records and personally identifiable information with the public-school districts,” the OIG found. They created fake report cards, used false addresses and submitted falsified course completion reports to the Alabama State Department of Education. The state then paid the school districts millions of dollars to educate these private school students, “who at no time attended the virtual public schools.” The scheme cost state and federal taxpayers $10 million.

IMMEDIATE NATIONAL ATTENTION

In response to our report, Education Secretary Linda McMahon told FOX Business, “Fraudsters are seemingly trying to pick the pocket of American taxpayers everywhere we turn.”

Secretary McMahon noted that her department had previously focused on rooting out waste and fraud in higher education, including the FAFSA student financial aid process. As we documented in our Progress Report of efforts to unwind the agency, the Trump-McMahon effort resulted in rooting $1 billion of fraud out of FAFSA.

But she told viewers they would also place more focus on K-12 schools.

”I can assure you that we will be following through with our departments to see where this money has been going...As we’re looking at schools, looking at the programs that are going out, we will be focusing on this fraud as well.”

This is the kind of accountability — and results — that our transparency model can produce!

Our CEO John Hart gave an interview to local network news stations and told viewers, “Every dollar that we waste on fraud is a dollar that never makes it into the classroom where it’s urgently needed.”

Hart told FOX News Digital, which broke the report, “These schemes within public schools arguably hit us where it hurts most: America’s future leaders…Student outcomes will continue to suffer until we clean up both fraud and administrative overhead."

State Financial Officers Foundation CEO OJ Oleka, whose organization is working to expose fraud at the state level, told FOX, “All fraud is harmful, but defrauding education dollars meant to help kids learn and succeed is especially hideous. The findings in this report should alarm every family, teacher, and civic leader, especially since they only scratch the surface of the problem. The state financial officers courageously tracking every school dollar abused historically have had a bloated federal education bureaucracy only make their job harder."

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CONCLUSION

These multimillion-dollar figures may not seem enormous in an era when federal agencies are requesting hundreds of billions or even over a trillion dollars for a fiscal year budget. But this survey of reports from publicly funded watchdogs demonstrates they are most likely just the tip of another very large iceberg. Most of the highest-funded school districts are unrepresented here, and among smaller districts the per-student losses to fraud are unacceptably high.

Of the 20 largest school districts in the country with the most federal funding, only three (Broward County Schools, Houston Independent School District and Chicago Public Schools) were included in the more than 6 years’ worth of fraud investigations uncovered by Open the Books. Fraud investigations among the other 17 large districts were not found in OIG records. But dozens of smaller districts did turn up reports, along with individual schools, charter schools, online schools and individual programs.

With that in mind, stronger oversight of federal education dollars is more than some bureaucratic exercise—it is an economic and moral imperative. Families deserve assurance that the public institutions meant to serve their children are not being looted by the very officials entrusted to lead them. Robust auditing, transparent procurement processes, and swift prosecution of bad actors are essential tools for protecting both students and the communities already bearing the full weight of America’s affordability crisis.

Finally, every step must be taken to unwind the enormous bureaucracy and spending housed at the Department of Education, returning education to the state and local level. Not only is that in keeping with the founders’ vision for a limited Executive Branch, but state and local officials are much better equipped to understand the needs of their communities, find efficiencies, innovate for better student outcomes and keep foxes out of the proverbial henhouse.

FURTHER READING

Schooled by Schemers: Fraud, Waste and the Money that NEVER Reached Kids, State Financial Officers Foundation and Open the Books, July 2026

Progress Report: Cutting Waste, Ridding Radicalism, and Returning Education to the States, Open the Books, May 2026

Report: $225M in K-12 fraud found across six years, The Center Square

Report: Roughly $225M in alleged fraud found in K-12 education, Baltimore Sun

Roughly $225 million in alleged fraud found in K-12 education: report, The National News Desk

$225,000,000 In ‘Hideous’ Fraud Schemes Found Across US Schools, Report Alleges, The Daily Caller

Open the Books worked for three years to uncover the ideologically charged philosophies guiding the Pentagon’s K-12 school system. The Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA, now known as DoWEA) educated roughly 67,000 children of active-duty military across more than 160 countries and territories at a cost of roughly $2.3 billion per year.

For that expense, the schools were a hotbed of content related to DEI, social and racial justice, and gender identity politics. The philosophy permeated not just curriculum and classroom activities but also teacher training materials.

Further, parents complained of being locked out of an increasingly byzantine set of steering committees, making it all but impossible to get their concerns heard by the policymakers in Washington.

But last week, the key committee advising the school system discussed a new series of priorities and posted video of their meeting publicly for the first time.

The public meeting was a huge win for transparency, but more importantly, the discussion contained a number of major wins for military servicemembers and their families deployed in the United States, its territories and abroad.

From teaching priorities to staffing to pilot programming and performance standards, it’s clear the Pentagon’s school system has an overhaul underway.

BACKGROUND

The saga began when racially charged X posts from DoDEA’s first-ever DEI chief, Kelisa Wing, began circulating in the media. Open the Books followed up and found her radical children’s books (e.g., What Does It Mean to Defund the Police? and What is White Privilege?) available in some school libraries. Wing was promoting her books and outside consulting business on taxpayer time and dime.

The Pentagon’s then-Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness Gil Cisneros, told Congress in Spring 2023 that the DEI unit would be dismantled at the school system’s HQ and Wing would be reassigned.

Adapted from our previous report:

The Pentagon’s climb-down was a big win for Open the Books. We had worked alongside whistleblowers, journalists, other investigative nonprofits, and ranking members of Congress to expose alleged conflicts of interest, violations of military ethics policies, and radical ideologies being forced on the kids of servicemen and servicewomen.

Unfortunately, Cisneros wasn’t totally honest. Further Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests uncovered evidence that the radical curriculum was not dismantled. Instead, it was stealthily embedded into the lesson plans and classrooms throughout the entire school system.

Equity and Access Summit presentation slide.

…It was critical that taxpayers understand the scope of the DEI philosophy within the DoD’s schools because deployed servicemembers often have no alternative.

Here are some examples of what was happening in the Pentagon’s schools, found in teacher training materials and internal webinars:

• Chat rooms to facilitate teacher-student conversations that were closed off to parents about sexuality and gender, and likely without their knowledge or consent.

• Engaging four-year-olds in LGBTQ+ conversations. Elementary schools are the “perfect time” to “really show students the diversity of the gender expression and gender activity.”

• Video content on “dissent” and “equity” to “help educators facilitate classroom conversations and much-needed discussions about implicit bias and systemic racism, human rights, equity, social justice, dissent, protest, and empathy.”

• Activism to dismantle systems of “power” and “privilege.” Suggesting a refusal to teach a “white-washed” curriculum and instead teach “social justice rather than heroes, holidays, and celebrations.”

• A teaching handbook that recommends “critical conversations” with students about race, identity, and privilege and the way “injustice” affects our lives and society. These “explicit conversations” provoke “strong emotions” and crying students are expected.

• Social Emotional Learning (SEL), which involved collecting sensitive information about their emotional state from students daily. It was not at all clear how or how securely this data was stored and DoDEA refused to specify.

Read the details about these vendors, their payments, and the full background dossier on our investigation here.

BACKGROUND: RADICAL TEACHING GOES UNDERGROUND

In February 2025, the popular social media account LibsofTikTok posted audio of an internal conversation at the school system. The prior month, high-level DoDEA staffers were recorded stating they would no longer be using the term “social emotional learning” because of the negative attention SEL practices had received thanks to reporting 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.”

At a teacher training summit in 2021, DoDEA staff had referred to the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and their concept of “Transformative SEL,” which deploys SEL to create “equitable” environments. This is done in part by asking children to fixate on their “identities” and “privileges.” Techniques for doing so were discussed in-depth during the Equity and Access Summit, including through “difficult conversations” where children are expected to cry. Once children divulge their socio-economic, racial, ethnic, sexual, and other “identities,” they can situate themselves and others in a hierarchy of “power,” or as SEL proponents say, become “self-” and “socially” aware.

Per the February 2025 recording, instead of SEL, staffers would use the word “resilience” to avoid being detected by FOIA requests like the ones filed by Open the Books.

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

BACKGROUND: SCHOOL PERFORMANCE AND PARENT CONCERNS

In our most recent report, “No Voice, No Choice,” Open the Books reported survey responses from parents of DoDEA students via FOIA request. They uncovered frustration about their inability to have their concerns heard by decisionmakers, including frustration about teacher shortages, classroom content and test scores. Because military families tend to be more transient, it was the view of many parents that individual schools could skate by on shortcomings because families would depart before their complaints gained any traction.

DoDEA has never had traditional school boards due to the transitory nature of the military, and four decades ago, parents were denied a representative on the school system’s highest-level advisory committee. Under the Biden Administration, DoDEA President Tom Brady’s leadership saw even further restriction:

• There are five levels of committees or councils that can provide recommendations and advice to DoDEA leaders, ranging from school-specific (School Advisory Committee) to agency-wide (Dependents Education Council). Historically, parents could only be elected into the lowest two committees, and then could be selected into the next two highest levels. There are no parents on the Dependents Education Council (DEC).

• In a congressional hearing in 1988, parents testified about the ineffectiveness of the school advisory board system and recommended that elected parents sit on every level of advisory board, including DEC at DoDEA headquarters (HQ).

• Recent changes to DoDEA governance drastically altered the form and function of the advisory committee system, diluting parent presence and influence within the organization.

• The names of DEC attendees were no longer published—as used to be standard practice.

Are members of unions, nonprofits, or other “experts” pushing radical ideology onto military children involved with the DEC? For example, we know Modern Military Association of America and PFLAG have worked with DoDEA to craft policy, like allowing “chosen name” updates in Google Classroom. There were no official channels for parents and the public to find out who is attending DEC meetings.

Feedback and School Performance

• In 2016, DoDEA created its own Inspector General (IG) office, so the agency now investigates itself rather than the Pentagon IG. The parent of a special needs 4^th grader called it “the fox guarding the hen house.”

• DoDEA leadership often brags about its place as the top public school system due to higher-than-average NAEP scores, while ignoring its own College and Career Ready Standards assessments. Those are a truer picture of how well students are learning material taught in the schools over the course of a year, and those results are not as flattering.

• For results from the 2023-24 school year, English Language Arts and Math shows widely varying results for 160 schools. Some schools show 0% of students exceeding or meeting expectations, while others post high percentages of students exceeding or meeting expectations.

• Tests like NAEP “don’t provide scores for individual students or schools,” so they’re not the best way to measure a student’s success.

Because of these wide-ranging challenges, Open the Books advocated that the Pentagon allow military families to choose the school that best fits their family’s needs, whether that be a charter school, their local DoDEA school, or homeschooling. Families of State Department diplomats already enjoy that choice when on assignment overseas.

BREAKTHROUGH: REFOCUSING ON STUDENT OUTCOMES

After sharing our reports with the media, lawmakers and public officials in Washington, changes are coming.

Current Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness Anthony Tata (Cisneros’ successor), Director Paul Craft and Chief Academic Officer Tiffany Hoben laid out several changes during last week’s Dependents Education Council meeting. They indicated the school system will:

• Prioritize getting prepared teachers in front of every student, including building a talent pipeline and reducing hurdles for military spouses

  • Craft contrasted hiring challenges (such as mid-year attrition) with measurable improvements in onboarding rates. Leadership discussion emphasized proactive problem solving, including the goal to “get good, well-qualified licensed instructors in front of every one of our kids.” He went on to explain his focus on recruitment innovation, prioritizing military spouse hiring to make DoWEA a more reliable job prospect, and pipeline development through student teachers.

  • Using the DoWEA “Hiring Tiger Team Initiatives” and Senior Leadership Support, the projected onboard goal is 100%+ for School Year 26/27.

• Instill uniform performance reporting up the chain of committees

  • On the topic of Advisory Committees, Craft emphasized the critical role of stakeholders, and the need for structured communication. He stressed the importance of improving transparency and engagement, noting past gaps in communication and reporting. He added he will strengthen the connection between schools, installations, and leadership through a more standardized and accountable advisory framework.

• Refocus on academic rigor and life skills over ideological teaching

  • Hoben emphasized the importance of data-informed decision making, noting that “one assessment alone will not show us what we need to know.” She highlighted improvements to assessment systems that provide timely, validated results for families. She emphasized building a more coherent academic system, while reinforcing transparency and alignment across curriculum, instruction, and accountability measures.

  • Craft emphasized literacy as a foundational issue, stating that DoWEA is “behind the times on the science of reading implementation.” He also highlighted the need to return to foundational learning methods, remarking on the importance of “books back in the hands of kids” and reducing excessive screen dependency. He told the council his focus is on curriculum rigor, parental engagement, and the integration of classical education and AI-enabled learning.

  • Both clearly focused on reading, math, civic understanding life skills rather than the ideological agenda we covered extensively before.

In perhaps the biggest win of all, the school system is taking the advice of parents and Open the Books, requesting funding for an FY27 pilot program to bring school choice to the Pentagon.

The program would offer “financial assistance to active-duty Servicemembers in the United States to support educational choice for their dependents, including tuition and related costs for private, faith-based, or public charter schools; support for homeschooling; and other allowable expenses as determined by the Department.”

As we wrote in The Federalist:

“The Trump administration has both the will and the ability to undo the damage of the Biden-Brady era and has already made remarkable headway. Helping parents formally advocate for their own children can make the fixes durable.

“Finally, few things are more American than competition. Should a future administration return to ideology as a guide, military families deserve a chance to choose a school that works for them. The State Department gives Foreign Service families education allowances to select a school abroad that meets their family’s needs. Our servicemembers should be offered the same.”

CONCLUSION

The major turnaround underway at the Pentagon’s K-12 schools demonstrates the power of transparency. That’s why Open the Books spends its days fighting to maximize it across every unit of government, and to make it real-time.

Years of dogged investigation into how these schools were spending their budgets surfaced controversial teachings and parental concerns that had gone unheard for too long.

The Founding Fathers built transparency into our Constitution because they understood that citizens had the right to inspect the government’s books, and that transparency was fundamental for accountability.

Just in time for America’s 250^th birthday, their vision delivered again for military families.

Thank you for reading our Substack! Our work is only possible through your support. If you’d like to fund more investigations like this one, please consider making a contribution. Any amount helps us fight for transparency and accountability!

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After years of historic inflation, still at elevated levels today, most Americans are facing an affordability crisis that reaches nearly every staple category from groceries to health care.

When it comes to housing, headlines are dotted with tales of recent generations recasting the American dream. Rather than focus on home ownership, picket fences, 2.5 children and a steady retirement, younger generations who feel locked out of the market are focusing on fulfilling experiences and portable careers that allow them to break even on a short-term basis.

Open the Books is spending the summer examining government’s role in the cost of goods and services, including housing. One way that potential homeowners can look to afford mortgage payments is through short-term rentals, including on popular sites like Airbnb and Vrbo, but government regulations are increasingly making it a non-starter in major cities.

By ratcheting up the costs on both homeowners and travelers alike, local governments are working to snuff out free-market activity in favor of preferred interest groups like hotel chains. Among the major metro areas that responded to data requests from Open the Books, nearly $1 billion has been added to the cost of doing short-term rentals since 2019.

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Major Metro Areas Clamp Down

Tourists seeking to book a stay in sightseeing destinations like Charleston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, New Orleans or Washington D.C., would find slim pickings and inflated prices for short-term rentals.

That’s because city regulations make it impossible, or close to it, for homeowners to legally rent out their properties for less than 30 days. If you do find a legal rental, you’re forced to pay high fees. For example, Atlanta, GA, Burlington, VT, and Lexington, KY all charge between 8% and 9% occupancy taxes.

If you’re hoping for a West Coast visit, San Francisco and Santa Monica each charge a 14% occupancy tax.

On the homeowners’ side of the ledger, they would have spent hundreds just to get the property registered. That’s before considering other costs like increasing their homeowner’s insurance coverage, making repairs/upgrades to the property, and, in many cases, paying fines to the city.

Major U.S. cities have severely limited — and in some cases, like New York, effectively banned — the use of short-term rentals, limiting them to small, specific areas, only issuing a small number of licenses to homeowners, requiring hosts to be present when renters are there, or limiting the number of days owners can rent units.

The municipalities charge owners a combination of registration fees, and fines for those who don’t comply with strict regulations, as well as transient occupancy taxes (TOT) to patrons who rent the units.

Registration fees vary widely from $150 in Atlanta, all the way up to $1,600 in Hermosa Beach, CA. San Diego charges $1,000 just to register your home, while San Francisco charges $925.

While Chattanooga, TN charges up to $500 for fines for violations, Clark County, NV charges up to an outrageous $10,000 per day.

Open the Books received records from more than 20 cities that heavily regulate short-term rentals (anything less than 30 days) and tabulated the inflated costs for tourists and homeowners.

The High Cost of Renting Your Home

[CLICK TO ENLARGE THE IMAGE]

No Keys to the Big Apple
Case Study: New York, NY

New York City could be described as having an effective ban on short-term rentals. While the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement claims they’re legal — and charges a $145 registration fee to register a legal unit — the parameters under which a unit is considered legal is so highly constrained, no reasonable person would consider it anything other than a ban.

First, the unit owner must be living in and present in the unit while renting it out. This alone makes renting an Airbnb or Vrbo in NYC impossible to do legally.

Each legal unit is limited to two guests, so there’s no booking a family trip to the Big Apple to see a Broadway show or visit the Statue of Liberty.

Doors cannot be locked such that it creates a separate space within the unit. Locking a bedroom or bathroom for privacy is allowed — but locking any other part of what would be a shared common space is not allowed.

NYC’s effective ban — a three-year-old regulation known as Local Law 18 — has been the subject of a lawsuit, with Airbnb arguing in June 2023 that the city’s regulations was “its most extreme and oppressive regulatory scheme yet, which operates as a de facto ban against short-term rentals.”

An NYC judge shot down the lawsuit in August 2023.

An Airbnb spokesperson said, “New York City’s short-term rental rules are a blow to its tourism economy and the thousands of New Yorkers and small businesses in the outer boroughs who rely on home sharing and tourism dollars to help make ends meet.”

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The city has gone after owners who illegally rent out entire apartments. In one case, the city claimed nine apartments in two rent-stabilized brownstones on Manhattan’s Upper West Side were rented illegally, with the city seeking fines over $4 million.

Office of Special Enforcement claims Local Law 18 protects the city’s housing stock and affordability, with Mayor Zohran Mamdani saying, “New York City’s rent-regulated buildings exist to house New Yorkers — period.”

City officials and housing advocates have argued that short-term rentals remove apartments from the housing stock as the city is facing its worst housing shortage in more than 50 years with a 1.4% vacancy rate.

Airbnb, on the other hand, is encouraging bills before the city council that would loosen these restrictions. According to the New York Post, “Airbnb is framing its services as an economic lifeline for black homeowners who want to rent rooms during major tourism events, especially with more than 1 million visitors expected in the region for the World Cup.” They’ve even deployed Rev. Al Sharpton to make the case, putting him at odds with the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, which represents hotel employees in New York City and is a major opponent of Airbnb and its competitors. The Council and policymakers are effectively defending notoriously expensive hotel inventory across the city, shielding it from potentially more affordable offerings in an open market.

In an interview with The New York Times, Sharpton said, “We have always been supportive of the hotel workers’ union, but there is, in this particular case, unintended consequences, and that is black homeowners. Who are we protecting when the hotels are not sold out and people cannot rent rooms in their homes right there in Southeast Queens?”

Airbnb told the New York Post that almost three years into the short-term rental crackdown, “rent is higher than ever and virtually no additional housing has been added to the market.”

“The broad and diverse coalition of outer-borough leaders leading the fight for modest changes to the law know that homeowners deserve every shot at making additional income right now,” claiming loosened regulations “would do just that without impacting New York renters.”

For his part, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has rejected efforts to ease up on short-term rental restrictions amid the World Cup, despite a media tour touting his sports fandom.

Spokesperson Carlos Mendoza told reporters, “The Mamdani Administration is excited to welcome visitors from all over the world to enjoy our city and the World Cup. But we will not do so at the expense of working-class families.”

Of course, as Sharpton and Airbnb would tell it, many of those families might appreciate the chance to raise some capital to spend at the grocery store, the gas pump or the doctor’s office.

As for how much revenue has been collected since the de facto ban began, The Big Apple has kept its cards close to the vest. When Open the Books asked for data on their fee and fine collections, they told auditors it would be delivered in May 2026. By publication time, city officials had punted again, this time until Fall 2026.

Whatever they’re collecting, it seems to be having its intended chilling effect: OSE estimates only about 3,000 legal short-term rentals in all of New York City — down from an estimated illegal 60,000 listings on major booking platforms in 2018.

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The House Doesn’t Always Win?
Case Study: Clark County, NV

Home to Las Vegas, Clark County is required by state law to issue short-term rental licenses to qualified homeowners.

But the county commissioners have slow walked the approval of licenses, as of December 2025 issuing only 212 licenses since August 2023 — when a single, very brief application period ended. As of December, 287 applications were still waiting for review, while 331 applications were denied. There have been no other opportunities to submit applications since the window closed in August 2023.

There are an estimated 13,500 illegal units in the Las Vegas area.

Clark County Commission Chair Tick Segerblom said in an October interview about the short-term rental law and how the county is handling it, “It’s very complicated, and I think we’re trying to do it the right way. From my perspective, there’s no rush because I don’t like them anyway.”

But by slow-walking the licenses — and issuing fines for those homeowners who continue to operate illegal rentals — the county is violating the spirit of the law, a judge found in December.

Greater Las Vegas Short-Term Rental Association, a group of homeowners who operate short-term rentals, filed suit against the county, arguing that the rules removed the rights of property owners to lease and operate their homes on a short-term basis.

In its December order, the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada ruled that Clark County’s short-term rental enforcement scheme likely violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The judge found that while the county requires homeowners to obtain licenses, it has failed for years to provide a meaningful or functional way to do so — yet continues to aggressively punish owners for operating.

So the judge issued a preliminary injunction, stopping Clark County from requiring licenses, issuing fines, penalties, or liens against homeowners for short-term rental activity.

The county permits must be renewed annually, and fees for the first year are either $945 or $1,695 depending on the size of a home.

Between 2019 and 2025, Clark County has collected $1,322,124 in registration fees, according to records provided to Open the Books.

But it has collected more than triple that — $4,591,853 — in fines against homeowners. No other municipality came close to that figure, showing just how much the county focuses on enforcement and fines, versus issuing the licenses that state law requires them to.

The county makes no bones about its desire to protect the many hotel/casinos that exist within its borders. The short-term rental regulations prohibit rentals from being within 2,500 feet of a resort hotel and within 1,000 feet of other licensed short-term rentals.

Each owner can only have one rental. While there is a cap of about 3,000 licenses the county can issue, they’re nowhere near that cap.

Income Crunch

By creating such a high barrier to entry for homeowners, cities are ensuring that large corporate hotel chains have limited competition. All the while, homeowners operating as small business owners are met with regulations and fees that make it difficult to make money and use it to pay their mortgage, utilities or any other home expenses.

At a time when Americans are struggling with affordability, our data suggests that heavy-handed government regulations are making matters worse for both homeowners and travelers.

In the 2021 black comedy Don’t Look Up, Leonardo DiCaprio plays an astronomer who discovers a comet is about to collide with Earth. Politicians claim they will avert disaster despite having no plan for doing so. The rest of the world mostly ignores the problem, even after seeing the comet with their own eyes. The film ends with humanity being wiped out.

The same thing is happening with entitlement spending. Under current policy, Social Security and Medicare will cause the U.S. to default on its debt within 25 years, upending life as we know it. Republicans claim they can balance the budget without cutting benefits; they’ll instead root out fraud and cut other spending. Democrats say they can do the same by increasing taxes.

Anyone with a calculator and the math skills of a fourth grader knows those claims are baloney. So why does no one talk about it?

The Numbers

The federal government spent $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025 but collected only $5.2 trillion — a gap of $1.8 trillion that was added directly to the federal debt. Even in an extreme scenario where Congress axed all discretionary spending — eliminating the entire military and almost every other federal government function — the budget would have just barely been balanced.

Let’s try it another way. The Government Accountability Office estimates that $233 billion to $521 billion is lost to fraud annually. The top one percent of wealthiest Americans pay $824 billion in income taxes, and corporations pay $497 billion. That means even in a fantasy world where fraud was nonexistent and corporations and wealthy individuals both doubled their tax payments, the budget would just barely be balanced.

A slightly more feasible, if unlikely, scenario: eliminate 50% of fraud, increase income taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans by 25%, and cut discretionary spending by 25%. Nope, it still doesn’t work. The federal deficit would have been $800 billion last year. And that was before President Donald Trump proposed a 19% increase to the discretionary budget for 2027, which would be the second-largest one-year spending spike since at least 1962.

The Politics

Most Americans are blissfully unaware of those dollar figures, and the resulting dissonance drives almost every decision Washington makes.

A 2025 Harvard-Harris poll found that 80% of voters think Congress should balance the budget “in the next few years.” That would require substantial cuts to Social Security and Medicare — but 80% of voters oppose even minor cuts, according to the Cato Institute and KFF.

Only 24% of Americans know that Social Security is “extremely underfunded” (It’s short by an incomprehensible $75.6 trillion). Almost half of retirees think their benefits will never be reduced (It’s mathematically impossible to avoid cuts within the next decade).

Gen Z doesn’t even know what Social Security is. Just 29% of workers under 30 realize their payroll taxes fund benefits for current retirees, the Cato Institute found.

Faced with those poll numbers, most politicians choose to peddle the illusion that Americans can have their cake and eat it too. Trump claims that Vice President J.D. Vance will “literally be able to balance our American budget” by stopping fraud in blue states. Democrats exclaim that fighting fraud is equivalent to taking food from the mouths of the hungry or, in classic political parlance, throwing grandma off a cliff.

Merely acknowledging the inevitability of reducing benefits opens politicians up to partisan attacks. House Republicans absurdly said of the 2025 budget, “President Biden’s plan would cut benefits by 23% in 2033.” Those cuts were not a “plan” — they were a mathematical certitude calculated by the Treasury. Trump’s Treasury Department reached the same conclusion this year.

Rather than explain that certitude, Biden’s spokesperson falsely claimed that “We could extend the life of Medicare’s Trust Fund permanently — without cutting benefits — if Congressional Republicans would get on board with the President’s historic budget proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy.”

More recently, Elon Musk vowed that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would cut $2 trillion of federal spending and balance the federal budget. While Musk never explicitly called for reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits, his goal was mathematically impossible otherwise.

The Trump administration permitted DOGE to generate flashy headlines about firing federal workers and cutting grant funds for alpaca farming. But any time Musk alluded to actually balancing the budget, the White House balked and said, “Trump will always protect Social Security and Medicare.”

The political motivation behind such a statement is clear. Though DOGE’s mission of cutting government waste drew wide support from voters, its execution was unpopular overall. However, seniors were more likely to support Musk’s approach, with roughly 50% having a favorable view. Imagine how much more backlash Musk would have received had he targeted entitlement spending.

It’s a political game of chicken. Both parties know that cuts to entitlement programs are inevitable, but neither wants to be the one that signs the bill.

The Wealth Gap

Russ Greene, managing director of the Prime Mover Institute, dubbed the phenomenon “Total Boomer Luxury Communism” in a viral think piece last year. America, by Greene’s math, has six times more wealth redistribution than communist China. He says it’s created a “Marxist paradise” that “is driving every aspect of American decline.” Federal data backs him up.

Seniors’ net worth has grown at a much faster rate than younger Americans’. In 1989, the median household aged 65 to 74 had a net worth 10 times higher than a household owned or rented by someone under 35. By 2019, seniors were worth 19 times more than young people.

Younger families started to catch up in 2022, but that was likely a one-time anomaly caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The market value of young families’ homes soared after the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates, and they also benefited from stimulus programs like student loan forgiveness.

Source: Survey of Consumer Finances

Note: All figures are adjusted for inflation to 2026 dollars.

Meanwhile, Social Security and Medicare are spending more than ever before as a function of young workers’ earnings. That’s often attributed to the sheer size of the baby boomer population; there are more seniors today than ever, and thus more Social Security beneficiaries across the retirement, survivors and disability categories.

But that’s not the whole story. Social Security costs more than twice as much per beneficiary today compared to 1970, adjusted for inflation. The total cost has grown by more than 450%. Meanwhile, the taxable income of 25 to 34-year-olds that helps support the cost has only grown by about 150%.

Advocacy groups such as the Senior Citizens League have argued that the purchasing power of Social Security checks has declined over the last decade. However, the Senior Citizens League’s calculations are based on a “proprietary dataset” compiled by the think tank. Official data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that inflation for seniors has essentially been equal to Social Security’s cost of living adjustments for the last 10 years Meanwhile, payments to recently-retired baby boomers have raised the average per-beneficiary cost higher than ever; their wages were greater than their parents’ and thus they receive larger Social Security checks than any previous generation.

At the same time, government intervention in certain sectors has made those products and services far more expensive, whether you’re on a fixed income or not. It’s true: the best way to make something expensive is for government to make it affordable. Truth in Accounting has charted the inflation in housing, health care and education-related expenses, the places where the invisible hand of Adam Smith is getting the greatest tug from government.

Truth in Accounting also notes that the purchasing power of $100 has dropped by 95% since 1925. While cost of living increases to Social Security have offset that lost purchasing power, advocates argue those increases don’t always reflect seniors’ reality. The increases are based on inflation for America as a whole. But if the increases were instead based on CPI-E — a measure of inflation for seniors only — they would have been slightly higher since 1985.

America’s fiscal outlook gets even worse when considering Medicare costs. Healthcare bills are far more expensive today than in 1970, but again, that’s not the whole story. Medicare costs per beneficiary have increased almost three times as fast as the price of the average medical treatment. Seniors are living longer and require more care than originally anticipated when the program was created. Again, the pool of qualifying seniors has grown as has the cost for each of them.

Click here to download the data.

Sources: Census Bureau, Social Security Administration, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

Framed another way, since 1970 the total cost of these safety net programs swelled to the point that it began to account for every dollar of taxable income earned by younger Americans. As of FY 2020, the combined cost of Medicare and Social Security ($2.438T) surpassed the total gross income of taxpayers 25-34 years old ($2.4T).

The end result is a federal government that spends 98 times more money per American today compared to 100 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The per-person gross domestic product meant to support that spending has increased only 6 times.

Okay, boomer!

The Finer Things

Don’t blame today’s young people for exacerbating the wealth gap by wasting their paychecks. They spend a much smaller share of their income on “wants” as opposed to “needs” compared to 40 years ago. That’s not the case for seniors.

In 1985, both seniors and younger households spent slightly more than $4,000 per person on the following annual expenses, regardless of age: restaurants, entertainment, hotels, mass transit including airfare, tobacco and alcohol. But seniors’ spending gradually increased, and by 2024, households owned by 65 to 74-year-olds spent $5,301 per person on those “wants.” Younger households spent just $2,613 per person.

Seniors’ income has not risen any faster than younger Americans’. They’re just spending less of it on necessities and more on vacations.

Source: Consumer Expenditure Survey

Such “wants” are often covered by Medicare Advantage, a program that sees the federal government pay private insurance companies to cover seniors looking for an alternative to traditional Medicare. To attract customers, Greene says Medicare Advantage plans cover “golf balls, greens fees, social club memberships, horseback riding lessons, and pet food.” City Journal notes that 172 insurers cover hairstyling and beauty services.

Federal law used to mandate that these “supplemental benefits” be “primarily health related,” such as dental and vision coverage. The definition changed in 2018. Insurers can now use federal money to cover anything with a “reasonable expectation of improving or maintaining the health or overall function” of patients. Suddenly, expenses for hunting licenses, insect extermination, flea shampoo and high-speed internet all fit the bill. They’re often funded by prepaid “flex cards” issued by more than half of Medicare Advantage plans in 2025 — up from just 4% of plans in 2021 — which cost taxpayers $879 per enrollee on average.

When the Atlanta-based Sonder Health Plans began offering Medicare Advantage in 2022, it made flex cards a core piece of its advertisements. “It’s very marketable,” Sonder Health CEO Suzanna Roberts told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It encourages people, who maybe are sitting in the house and they’re like, ‘Oh, man, I haven’t been fishing in forever, they’re gonna pay for it, I may as well.’”

Humana advertises its Medicare Advantage plan by highlighting a Healthy Options Allowance that can be used “to pay for eligible groceries, over-the-counter products, utilities, rent, pet supplies and more.” The allowance is mentioned in the ad before any traditional medical benefits.

The federal government spent $86 billion covering supplemental benefits last year, more than quadruple the cost in 2018. Nobody has a detailed breakdown of where the money went, including Congress. Insurance companies submit “incomplete” records showing their payments for supplemental benefits or ignore the records requirement completely, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. The Commission says there has never been a full study of supplemental benefits “because the reliability of the data has been unclear.”

Medicare Advantage companies also bilk the government through “upcoding.” Insurance companies receive extra federal subsidies for covering seniors with a high risk of serious illness, so they will often exaggerate or even fabricate their patients’ pre-existing conditions. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates this scheme will cost taxpayers up to $1.4 trillion from 2024 to 2033. Overall, Medicare Advantage costs 22% more per enrollee than traditional Medicare. Read more: A Trillion-Dollar “Advantage”.

Conclusion

America’s entitlement programs have morphed into something their creators never intended: an intergenerational wealth transfer sustained by promises that are completely removed from fiscal reality.

The numbers are no longer debatable. Social Security and Medicare are on a collision course with insolvency that polite political rhetoric cannot wish away. While rooting out fraud and improving efficiency should be one of Washington’s top priorities, that alone cannot close the gap.

The baby boomer generation benefited from favorable demographics, strong wage growth and affordable homes and mortgage rates during their working years, but those conditions no longer exist. Younger Americans now face stagnant wealth, crushing housing costs and the prospect of paying into programs that may not be there for them — all while watching their tax dollars subsidize golf outings, pet grooming, and high-speed internet for retirees.

Ignoring the numbers won’t make them disappear. Politicians on both sides know the truth but fear the backlash of admitting it. The result is rising debt and a crisis that will eventually force far more painful choices than if we acted responsibly today.

Throughout the year, Open the Books will continue digging into the numbers to evaluate government intervention’s role in affordability for basics like housing, health care, education and more.

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)

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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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.

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CONTRIBUTE

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)