The explosion of financial updates out of Washington in the past week has been overwhelming, the “breaking news” equivalent of projectile vomit. (The zone was flooded, as it were.) It’s reminded me a little of the flashes of bottomless panic I felt in March 2020 when it was clear there was a fundamentally unknown quantity wreaking havoc on my experience of normalcy; this sense that reality had veered off its tracks and we were now barreling down the side of a mountain in an uncontrolled slide.
Markets are absorbing this anxiety about the future and reflecting it back to us in the language of complex financial transactions: Over the weekend, the Daily Telegraph shared a Goldman Sachs report about a “surge of ‘short’ bets against US stocks” at a volume 10x those going long. After that, even the Wall Street Journal couldn’t hide its mystification at a torrent of tariffs, with headlines like “The Dumbest Trade War in History” (6,863 comments, if you know, you know). A population exhausted by years of higher-than-normal inflation collectively embodied the “Ben Affleck smoking” meme and braced, again, for price increases on goods from China (probably), Canada (in about a month), and Mexico (maybe). That is, if the tariffs remain in play—the back-and-forth on other pronouncements has created an environment of generalized uncertainty, though economist Isabella Weber would probably warn that our corporate conditions tend to wield “outside shocks” as cover for raising prices anyway.
Perhaps the most jarring developments come attached to the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), a group whose name should be permanently written in Comic Sans, named for a memecoin that was funny four years ago. Led by Elon Musk and designed to “provide advice and guidance from outside of government,” we were assured last year it would be a non-governmental entity with no real authority. Approximately two days into Trump’s second term in a move Nobody Could’ve Seen Coming, DOGE swiftly became part of the government, body-snatching the office of the US Digital Service (that’s US DOGE Service to you).
Then, on Saturday, news broke that the new Treasury Secretary, ex-hedge-fund billionaire Scott Bessent, let the DOGEs out: He agreed to provide what Politico classified as “read-only access” to the Treasury systems responsible for, among other things, making payments associated with programs like Social Security and Medicare. Musk, who is an unelected, random person with no legitimate claim to the power of the state beyond making some modest campaign donations, had reportedly become “fixated” on these payment systems, and a “top Treasury Department official” was placed on administrative leave after “resisting requests.”
Most of the reporting on this story explained the reason for DOGE’s existence with reluctant references to overspending, usually citing a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that estimated the federal government made $236 billion in “improper payments” in 2023. This eye-popping sum was peppered throughout this coverage, presumably to provide context for why Musk might be so “fixated.” At least superficially, it appears to justify taking unorthodox measures.
Few Americans doubt the existence of bureaucratic waste, and it doesn’t exactly strain credulity that a quarter of a trillion dollars could be vanishing annually after what we witnessed with the pandemic-era stimulus that produced things like absurd Maserati PPP fraud and, I don’t know, the Church of Scientology receiving legitimate paycheck protection funds. There’s just one problem: This figure (and statistics like it) fundamentally misrepresents the big picture of how public funds are most egregiously abused. GAO’s full report reveals a far less salacious story, one that’s more “administrative headaches” than “it’s time to hand the terminally online man passwords to treasury.gov’s Bank of America account on a greasy McDonald’s napkin.”
First, consider that 74% of the funds were categorized as “overpayments,” meaning payments that were made to the right entities, just in excess of the approved amount and should be, according to the third footnote on page 13, returned. 19% of payments were classified as “unknown,” as in, it could not be determined whether they were improper. 5% were underpayments (money that should’ve been paid, but actually wasn’t), and 2% were “technically improper,” which meant “recipients received funds they were entitled to, but the payment failed to follow all applicable statutes or regulations.” It’s obviously important that there’s accountability in how our nation’s money is spent, but the oft-cited $236 billion is a red herring that obscures a more insidious dynamic hiding in plain sight.
Moreover, the largest reporters of improper payments of this kind were Medicare and Medicaid at around 43% of the total, not exactly agencies you’d expect to covertly fund “terrorist groups” like Musk suggested (unless you count private health insurers like Humana, which incidentally, I do). In light of the state of our healthcare “system” and United HealthCare having been caught on more than one occasion defrauding Medicare Advantage of billions of dollars for diagnoses that didn’t exist, one has to wonder how much waste could be traced back to this style of public-private partnership, rather than the specter of legions of individuals living on the dole. (How many times do we have to tell Granny to stop hoodwinking Part D for extra insulin?)
Most who encounter these stories amid the flurry of other updates likely won’t have time to read the footnotes in the report linked two sites away, or know that public-private partnerships often transform publicly owned funds into private gain—they’ll just remember “$236 billion in improper payments,” get a vague sense of the government’s excesses as the source of our financial woes, and move on with their day. The fog of stats about wrongdoing impresses upon the average citizen a photonegative of reality: a sprawling, greedy bureaucracy engaged in widespread fraud, waste, and abuse in sore need of being disbanded, defunded, and privatized further to make it more “efficient.”
It’s true our public funds have an efficiency problem, but it has little to do with one-off civil servants who can be lured away with resignation offers or poor single parents collecting extra on their EBT cards. Since the 1980s, the federal government has functioned less like a state providing benefits directly to its citizens, and more like a shell company employing for-profit subcontractors to provide its services (the “public-private partnership”). As of 2015, there were 2.6 private contractors for every one federal employee. In theory, this outsourcing was supposed to lead to less spending and lower taxes, which has turned out to be exactly half true. But in practice, it’s more like a one-way funnel of public funds into private coffers, a transfer of wealth and power that creates more opportunity for corruption.
The welfare system in Texas, for example, was outsourced and privatized decades ago in the name of “small government.” Now, the publicly traded Maximus plays the role of “welfare agency” in Texas. According to its 10-K filing, Maximus earned $4.9 billion in 2023, $4.2 billion of which came from the US federal government or other state actors. Its gross profits were $1 billion, a margin of about 20%. Don’t worry—I’m sure the company is putting our tax dollars to efficient use. (The linked story is a Maximus press release from December about a $200 million stock buyback that reiterated its “disciplined approach” to “maximiz[ing] value for our shareholders.”)
“If [a] person wants to interact with the government to get access to the benefits to which they are entitled, they have to interface with the company that the government has outsourced these services to,” Anne Kim, author of Poverty for Profit, told Nathan Robinson in an interview with Current Affairs. And since there are “really only a handful of companies that compete and…swap contracts every few years around the country,” there’s little incentive to provide the best service at the lowest cost, the purported benefit of privatizing public goods. This sort of anticompetitive arrangement is common, and at scale, it’s the reason why things like the poverty rate seem so intractable despite steadily increased spending. Thanks to contracts like these, public funds—distributed in ways considered “proper,” thereby raising no internal alarms about impropriety or waste—are simply pooling in the wrong places, like Maximus’s 20% margins, instead of being invested in the people and communities they were earmarked to benefit. This setup reduces citizens seeking public services to customers of private companies. It replaces elected officials who are accountable to their constituents with the board of a publicly traded company that’s responsible only to its shareholders.
This isn’t the type of waste that Musk appears intent on rooting out. And why would he, when you could argue he’s the single most fortunate recipient of this sort of public funding of private wealth in American history? For his part, he’s recruiting an army of “high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” who are “willing to work 80+ hours per week” (read: this is an unpaid internship) to chase down the bogeyman of Fat Cat Bureaucrats kicked back in their taxpayer-provided Eames chairs re-reading White Fragility for the latest installment of their Safe Space Seminar Speaker Series. But beyond the apparent refusal to recognize an overreliance on for-profit providers for basic government services, there’s almost impressively little interest in acknowledging the private sector dynamics that put nearly a quarter of Americans on programs like Medicaid in the first place.
The roughly 42 million American adults on Medicaid earn somewhere in the ballpark of $20,000 per year or less, assuming they have no children. As of 2020, 12 million of these individuals worked; around three in four of that group worked full time. (About half of full-time wage workers on Medicaid and SNAP benefits worked at least 35 hours each week for between 50 and 52 weeks per year.) Fewer than 10% worked for the public sector, which means the biggest beneficiaries of all this government largesse are private employers whose full-time employees are paid so little that they require publicly funded assistance to afford food. If we’re intent on eliminating waste, might it make sense to look upstream at which American businesses are most enthusiastically engaged in this indirect pilfer of public funds? (Something tells me we won’t!)
A different 91-page GAO report attempts to identify the biggest corporate offenders across 11 states. Walmart (market cap: $800 billion) is almost always first or second, and the office consistently finds that between 10 and 20% of employed Medicaid and SNAP recipients work for big-name corporations like Dunkin’ ($8.8 billion), McDonald’s ($206 billion), Meijer (privately owned, but the Meijer family is worth almost $16 billion), Kroger ($44 billion), Dollar General ($16 billion), and, of course, Amazon ($2.5 trillion).
That said, nearly half of those on Medicaid are children, and still more are elderly or disabled, so the roughly 15% of working recipients who are employed by MegaCorps is still a relatively small fraction of the whole. But the children who need it? They likely belong to the wage workers. The elderly poor? Likely just those who clawed their way through, then aged out of, this workforce. You don’t need to currently work as a cashier for Kroger to be impacted by the economic environment Kroger creates.
Opposite these Medicaid recipients, you’ll find Treasury Secretary Bessent, a billionaire who allegedly “engaged in tax avoidance” (an extremely diplomatic way to say “didn’t pay his taxes”) when he neglected to fork over $1 million in Medicare taxes. At around 2.35% on incomes over $200,000, a bill of $1 million implies wages of around $43 million. (I remain convinced that shirking your social responsibility when you’re that wealthy is humiliation kink-level #BrokeBitchBehavior.) During his confirmation hearing, he testified that the US faces “economic calamity” if Congress does not renew the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which, among other things, would keep the corporate tax rate at a near-100-year low of 21%, rather than reverting it back to modern history’s norm of 35%.
Imminent “economic calamity” is certainly curious framing, as conservative policy advisor Oren Cass warned definitively that “we cannot afford” the $4 trillion price tag to extend the legislation, and that the trickle-down, revenue-increasing argument initially used to justify it clearly did not come to pass. (“The decline in federal revenue after adoption [of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] is plain for all to see,” Cass said.) To counter the argument that extension would amount to a disproportionate handout for the wealthiest Americans, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (a Republican from Idaho) noted that, don’t worry, $2.6 trillion of the roughly $4 trillion in tax cuts would flow to those earning less than $400,000.
Spending even a minute with a calculator and income distribution data reveals that Crapo’s assurance means 65% of the money would go to around 97% of US households, and the remaining 35% of funds—or $1.4 trillion—would flow to the remaining 3% who earn more than $400,000 per year. As Cass suggests, in no universe could such a move be classified as fiscally conservative legislation, and as a member of one of these households, I can assure you we do not need another tax break. So what happens now?
Will taxes for median earners go down? Who knows. Will prices go up? We don’t know. Will Social Security and Medicare be gutted? Hard to say. What’s going to happen with the stock market? Your guess is as good as mine. In general, it’s wise to resist the urge to make major adjustments to your financial strategy right now, because it’s too easy to be on the wrong side of a bet when the terms keep changing. What we do know for certain: The longer we insist on papering over the real problems of the US economy and our government’s relationship with the private sector, the more painful things will become. Of course, when Trump or Musk post about the necessary “pain” of tariffs or spending cuts, they don’t mean pain for them—they mean pain for you.
This is why it’s more critical than ever to transcend popular talking points about “government waste” on things like transgender comic books for Serbians or the convenient myth of billionaires (13, to be exact) who “fight for the average American.” Pushing through changes faster than anyone can metabolize them is part of the plan—a strategy of “substituting perception for reality,” hoping it will make you forget what’s real by waving around flashy distractions and pointing the finger at a rotating cast of unlikely villains supposedly to blame for Americans’ ongoing financial hardship (chief among them: your fellow American across the aisle who also spends half their income on rent checks written to a subsidiary owned by the Carlyle Group). As Sarah Kendzior wrote, “They want you to hate each other so much, you agree to their plan of tearing this country into warring fiefdoms for oligarchs to plunder. They want you to prey on the vulnerable, even though you are vulnerable too, so that the powerful can escape scrutiny. They want you to cheer your own demise, mistaking it for someone else’s. Do not fall for it.”
Because here’s the reality Elon Musk is working so hard to make sure you forget:
Don’t forget it.
Graph comes from realtimeinequality.org’s Wealth Inequality data, set to “Average Real Wealth” for the Top 0.01% (the pink line), Top 0.1% (purple), Top 1% (yellow), Top 10% (red), Middle 40% (almost impossible to see), and Bottom 50% (basically nonexistent).