Welfare fraud is a design and enforcement problem
In The National News Desk, Cory Smith reports that Treasury’s new verification process “flagged more than 4,900 federal payments worth about $99 million that were going to be sent to dead people.” He turns to Boccia on how much fraud remains uncaught:
Romina Boccia, the director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, previously wrote that the federal government’s Do Not Pay program is underutilized and underequipped.
And she told The National News Desk on Tuesday that the $99 million Treasury just announced it saved taxpayers was “just the tip of the iceberg.”
Boccia said only about 4% of eligible federal programs are fully using the Do Not Pay system.
And she noted a particular concern over federal welfare programs, like food stamps or Medicaid, where the federal government provides the dollars but the states run the programs.
She said the Office of Management and Budget wants to require states administering federally funded welfare programs to make use of the Do Not Pay verification system before sending out payments.
[…]
Boccia applauded Treasury’s increased use of technology to root out fraud, along with its hiring of former Department of Government Efficiency workers with tech savvy to drive the effort.
When federal payments are sent to deceased recipients, Boccia said the money could end up in phantom accounts or in the hands of family members making fraudulent withdrawals. Either way, she said, the money is lost once it’s out of the government’s hands.
[…]
Boccia said the improper payments stopped by Treasury might not move the needle much on the nation’s deficit or debt, but “taxpayers deserve an honest accounting of where their money goes. So, in that sense, any dollar of fraud is $1 too many.”
In Yahoo Finance, Danielle Liverance sets the same $99 million against GAO’s estimate that fraud costs the federal government between $233 billion and $521 billion a year. She cites Romina Boccia and Tyler Turman’s analysis:
The Cato Institute has proposed restructuring federal welfare, converting Medicaid and CHIP into a zero-growth block grant and eliminating federal funding for SNAP, TANF, and child nutrition, for claimed savings of nearly $6 trillion over a decade. That is a program-design proposal, not a fraud fix.
On FreedomWorks!, Boccia joined host Paul Malloy to argue that enforcement alone won’t get there.
Boccia argued that prosecuting bad actors does far less than repairing the design flaws that make the fraud possible. Block granting SNAP and Medicaid to the states, as Congress did with TANF, would leave states bearing the cost of their own administrative failures rather than passing it to federal taxpayers. She noted that the SNAP cost-sharing requirement in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act would reach 41 states and the District of Columbia, even as Congress weighs delaying it.
Trump accounts function as a welfare program
In Roll Call, Justine Wang examines whether the new accounts can make children from low-income households rich. She cites Adam Michel’s analysis:
[S]ome experts argue that the Trump accounts are not as tax-efficient as other investment accounts for many families. Adam N. Michel, the Cato Institute’s director of tax policy studies, wrote an analysis that found the Trump accounts would yield the lowest after-tax value of savings compared with other types of accounts, such as a health savings account or a traditional or Roth IRA.
“The most attractive feature of a Trump Account is not its treatment of personal contributions but the ability to receive transfers from governments, employers, and nonprofit organizations,” Michel wrote. “These contributions represent direct government subsidies or tax-free contributions from employers or nonprofit organizations. In that context, the accounts function less as a neutrality-enhancing investment vehicle and more as a welfare program. Any financial advantage of the accounts therefore derives primarily from the presence of these external contributions rather than from improved tax treatment of the contributions made by the beneficiary’s family or friends.”
Reconciliation can’t force blue states to adopt voter ID
On Hearst TV, Jackie DeFusco reports on the $95 billion budget framework the House passed. She quotes Boccia on the limits of what reconciliation can deliver on Trump’s voting requirements:
“The best that Republicans can hope for is to authorize new incentive grants that support primarily Republican states that were already inclined to adopt the measures in the SAVE Act with additional funding to enable them to do so,” Boccia said. “The real components of the SAVE America Act that are trying to force more Democratic states to enforce voter ID and similar restrictions, you cannot force on them through reconciliation.”
A savings mandate takes retirement decisions away from workers
Also on FreedomWorks!, Romina Boccia joined host Paul Malloy to talk through President Trump’s interest in Australia’s compulsory superannuation model. Boccia granted the appeal of a fully funded system built on savings workers own and control. But she argued that forcing workers to save a set amount in a set way hands too many decisions to the government. Americans who want to save already can, and a mandate layered on top of payroll taxes mainly benefits the asset managers lobbying for it. Mandatory savings would not fix Social Security either. The better alternative is to slow the growth of future benefits: adjusting initial benefits for inflation, reducing or eliminating COLAs for higher earners, and increasing the retirement age with improvements in longevity. These would address the Social Security shortfall without expanding Washington’s role in retirement, while freeing up workers’ wages for private savings.