The Department of Government Efficiency and its leader, Elon Musk, allege that the federal government’s accounting has run amok and become so unwieldy that it is wasting millions, or even billions, of taxpayers’ dollars. 

Questions have been raised about whether DOGE is accurately interpreting databases while it shares what it says is proof of widespread fraud or waste. A new report from the Government Accountability Office, however, is lending some credence to the allegation that billions of dollars are being improperly spent.

According to the GAO, in the 2024 fiscal year, the federal government “reported an estimated $162 billion in payment errors — or ‘improper payments.’”

“This marks a steep decline from the prior year—$236 billion in FY 2023,” the agency says in a report released Tuesday. “This decline was largely due to the termination of or winding down of certain pandemic-related programs.”

All those “payment errors” add up, and the GAO says that since the 2003 fiscal year, the government has made $2.8 trillion in “improper payments.”

Mr. Musk has insisted he can trim $2 trillion from the federal budget by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending. 

The GAO reports that the issue of improper payments has ballooned over the last 20 years. In 2003, $35 billion was spent on improper payments. That figure mainly stayed level until 2008, when it jumped to $72.5 billion, and then in 2009 when it hit $109.2 billion. 

Every year since 2009, the government has reported more than $100 billion in payment errors, reaching a high in 2021 of $281.4 billion. 

In 2024, the GAO reports that more than $135 billion, or 84 percent of the “errors,” were so-called “overpayments,” which it describes as “payments to deceased individuals or those no longer eligible for government programs.” 

The report states that $7.9 billion were underpayments, and $5.9 billion were cases where the “recipient was entitled to a payment, but the payment failed to follow proper statutes or regulations.”

Another $12.6 billion in improper payments were “unknown payments” or incidents where it was “unclear whether a payment was an error or not.”

In the last fiscal year, 53 percent of the errors were made by Medicare and Medicaid. Five percent of the errors were made by the Restaurant Revitalization Fund — a Small Business Administration program set up to provide emergency assistance to restaurants and bars during the Covid pandemic — 7 percent were made by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and 10 percent were attributed to the Earned Income Tax Credit. The remaining 25 percent of payment errors were simply attributed to “all other programs.”

The GAO suggests that federal agencies could “use help identifying susceptible programs, developing reliable methods for estimating errors, and implementing effective corrective action.”