The only thing I have learned for more than three decades of work as an editor and reporter of the investigation: there are many waste, fraud and abuse in government agencies. The problem is to find it. Some things that look suspicious at first glance make sense when you understand how the system works. And this understanding comes not easy.
If you hope to identify serious deficiencies in the agency that make up a lot of millions or even billions of dollars, you should plunge into the intricacies, say how Medicare pays for prescription medication. Pressing oneself in such mini is inevitable is the process of samples and mistakes, in which understanding occurs only after traveling on several initially promising ways that lead to stupids.
It really helps to explain some widely publicized Elon Musk and CyberCommandos team in the government efficiency department that came to the chainsaw to the federal government’s outstanding exams. To give, but one recent example: no, social security does not pay big money to people over 150. That find, Trumbin Musk, turned Failure in the Social Security Administration reportNot evidence of large -scale fraud with the zombie army overnown.
Although it is sometimes displayed in movies and television, the work of the reporting investigation is moving slowly, with the hours of boredom, which are overlapping the excitement moments, which are sometimes canceled by further research. This may look like the domestic income service spends a large amount of money for hiring sophisticated revisions to process complex profitability. But as we have already noted recently Cutting these salaries is likely to end up public money for lost tax revenues.
I have never seen everything succeeded as smoothly as in the pilot episode of the HBO “The Newsroom” series, in which the manufacturer finds out in a few hours key corporate and government mistakes that contributed to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The manufacturer hacked the case Because he has a friend who is from both sitting in the BP dispatching room and is ready to transmit information information in real time. I had my own place for the first row before this story was actually covered, and it took Prapublica journalists for many months puzzle What was found in a few minutes in the episode.
Because the ideal familiar and casual invitations to the classified chats are rare, PROPULICA relies on simpler game books to search WFA (waste, fraud and abuse). This is little like an approach that unfolds a DOGE team against agencies such as Social Insurance Administration or Agency for US International Development. Pro Sidce for a chainsaw: You almost never understand what is happening in a difficult organization from your original passage through records and documents.
Rather, this pass raises more questions than answers how and why the agency spends staggering amounts of taxpayers. To find true answers, we are looking for people who most likely know where the bodies are buried. Sometimes this search shows that the alarm is trying to tell us something scandalous. Most often, we find sources that help us understand the agency’s real job.
Another standard step in searching WFA is the immersion in the Agency’s General Inspector report or the General Accounting General, the Congress hand with deep experience in the study of federal agencies. Inspectors are independent, and their reports can be a rich source of reporting avenues. President Donald Trump complicated any prospects that Dag had the use of this knowledge, dismissing 17 general inspectors who were responsible for some largest budgets in the federal government, including the Pentagon and the Social Insurance Administration.
As for Gao, The head of the organization told Congress that his analysts had little contact with Dogel. Gin Dodor, the concroller general, said Gao has a list of reforms that can save the federal government of $ 200 billion without delaying a large number of federal workers. Dodaro said the staff reduction was an ineffective way to reduce the budget, as the cost of accruing wages is less than 10% of the total costs.
The only thing we often try to do when investigating possible government waste or crimes is to obtain massive databases. It seems that Dodge has chosen this route as the main means of searching, and this can work.
Of course, we interfere with the presidential entry. Our requests change to the officers of the Law on Freedom of Information and return a few months later when we are lucky.
However, we found some fascinating things buried in state records.
Years ago, we persuaded the Medicare and Medicaid Services centers to release the names of doctors who prescribe drugs through a massive Medicare program that provides medication for the elderly. It took us some time to understand what we are looking at, the process that helped interview with experts inside and outside the government.
Sorting tables and data tables we have noticed that some doctors seemed to be writing a large number of recipes. One doctor Florida Seemingly signed more than $ 4 million in medicationCompared to $ 282,000 last year. None of the Medicare urged to ask her about it; She only came across fraud through years of failure with mail. (Two workers in her clinic later pleaded guilty to federal fraud and theft The recipe fraud was widespread. Medicare did not check their own records to signs of abuse, miss the chances of catching doctors or others who robbed the government.
It was the main case of WFA, combining waste, fraud, abuse and, yes, massive ineffectiveness of the government.
Things don’t always go so smoothly. Reporters often get amazing tips or notice strange numbers in the records, and then find out that there are quite clear explanations of what seemed shocking at first glance
Former head of the US Global Media Agency, Amanda Bennet, told a recent copy of this phenomenon. USAGM is responsible for foreign broadcasts such as “Voice of America” and “Radio” Europe/Radio Liberty, and Bennett resigned from his post shortly after Trump’s opening.
Curry Lek, a reporter-politician who called Trump a special advisor to the agency, immediately after his arrival outlined herself “horror” in a “brilliant, new beautiful Useagm skyscraper building.
The lake wrote that the new building was out of place, with Italian marble, leather furniture and even several waterfalls.
But as Bennett noted in Wall Street Journal Op-EThe WFA Lake account was far from completed.
In December 2020, Bennett said her agency said that by 2028 would have to leave the FDR era building. Bennett and her team started looking for a new office at the correct moment-commercial landlords in DC and elsewhere, essentially handing out offices downtown. The agricultural transaction included three years of free rent and $ 27 million for cash incentives from the building owner that can be used to modernize the agency’s aging equipment. Furniture and Italian marble were donated by a previous tenant, a law firm, which saved the government another $ 10 million. The annual rent for USAGM has fallen from almost 24 million to less than $ 16 million a year. Bennett said she left the lake a memo, in which she talked about the savings in detail, which is estimated at $ 150 million for the life.
However, the lake outlined the press release that the agency expressed “Excellent excessive costs, including almost a quarter-millionth lease for the multi-storey Pennsylvania Prosilvani Avenue.”
“Waste, fraud and abuse in this agency are playing out,” Lek wrote, claiming that Usagm was penetrating “spies, terrorist condolences and/or fans” and that he was engaged in “self-government”.
She announced that the agency is “not paid” and announced the plan of immediate termination of its activity. A few days later a federal district court judge in Washington, temporarily blocked the rally. The case is being considered.
If we reported the story of possible excessive expenditures in the USAGM, I am sure we would find the lake allegedly lush quarters of intriguing. But if we came across Bennett’s memo, and it rose to close attention, I would raise history. And maybe turned it into a work about using misinformation to justify massive cuts on Agency, which Trump is openly contemptuous.
