In the Press: Fixing Federal Waste, Upside-Down Safety Net, and Rethinking FEMA
Fraud finally being treated as a systemic problem
In The Washington Stand, Mark Tapscott examines the effort by the Trump administration and House GOP chairmen to root out waste, fraud, and abuse across federal spending. He quotes Boccia on what makes this moment different from past crusades:
“We’ve had episodic anti-waste crusades before, like the Grace Commission in the Reagan years, post-Katrina oversight, Great Recession stimulus failures, and COVID-relief fraud investigations. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has brought broad public attention to the possibility that weak financial controls are a government-wide problem rather than a program-specific one. What makes this moment different is that the conversation is moving beyond isolated scandals toward questioning whether the federal government actually has the systems and incentives necessary to track taxpayer dollars in real time,” Boccia told The Washington Stand.
Tapscott also draws repeatedly on Boccia and Turman’s blog, “Expanding Treasury’s Do Not Pay System Would Strengthen Welfare Program Integrity.”
Seniors’ benefits are on track to consume most of the federal budget
Thérèse Boudreaux reports in The Center Square that more than half the federal budget will go toward benefits for Americans 65 and older by 2036. She cites Boccia on the regressive fallout of the looming 2032 Social Security cuts:
“This is an upside-down safety net. When automatic benefit cuts kick in in 2032, the retirees who rely most on Social Security will be hurt the most, while wealthy households will scarcely notice the change,” the Cato Institute’s director of budget policy, Romina Boccia, wrote in a recent piece for the Daily Economy.
“Social Security, if it is to exist at all, should focus on preventing old-age poverty, not provide wealthy retirees with an ever-growing worker-funded annuity layered on top of substantial private savings,” Boccia added.
Raising the federal disaster threshold would push states to prepare
On NPR’s All Things Considered, Rebecca Hersher reported on the FEMA Review Council’s recommendation that only the largest disasters should unlock federal dollars. She quotes Lett on the issue:
“If the federal government raises the threshold for disasters, that means that there are fewer scenarios where the federal government is going to spend money, which will reduce disaster costs and incentivize states to take a more proactive role.”
Social Security is already adding to the debt
Boccia and Nachkebia presented at the Pension Research Council conference at Wharton, highlighting the fact that from a unified budget perspective Social Security is already a major driver of federal debt. The program has run cash-flow deficits since 2010, with Treasury borrowing projected to total roughly $4 trillion through trust fund exhaustion around 2032. They argue the deeper cause is program design, not demographics. Check out an edited version of the remarks here.
Delaying entitlement reform only makes the eventual fix more painful
CBN’s, The 700 Club covers the national debt’s approach to $40 trillion and the political reluctance to touch its main drivers — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Lett appears on the show and comments:
“These three programs are the entire budget problem, and unless we address them, it’s pretty much impossible to balance the budget or achieve some level of fiscal sustainability.”
[…]
“We can make relatively small, if painful, adjustments now, but if we delay them, the adjustments will need to be much larger. We’ve run some numbers ourselves. You need several trillion in cuts or additional taxes in order to get to a sustainable measure.”