Tag Archives: spending

US Foreign Aid—Where Has It Gone?

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The Wall Street Journal‘s lede lays out the general idea:

The US was the world’s largest funder of foreign aid for decades—propping up education, health services and human rights in developing countries and supporting the militaries of strategic allies.

And the next paragraph led with this:

Programs often associated with foreign aid, such as humanitarian assistance, made up a large slice of the total.

There are a lot of useful data in the article, but it’s incomplete.

Two questions the WSJ didn’t address: of all that foreign aid for “developing countries,” how much went directly to the nominally intended recipients in the target nation’s people? Of the foreign aid that went to the target nation’s government, how much of that flowed on through to the nominally intended recipients in the nation’s people?

It’s interesting, too, to see that of all the OECD nations, the US is last, in percent of GDP terms, in handing out foreign aid. It would be good to see the answers to those two questions for the other member nations.

Lots of Angst

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DOGE personnel have been granted, by newly seated Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, access to Treasury’s payment system that distributes trillions of dollars in entitlement benefits, grants and tax refunds. The bodice-ripping from the Left, from Progressive-Democratic Party Congressmen, and from too many Republicans is awesome in its loud anxiety. No small part of that hysteria centers on those personnel’s ability to cut off all payments to everyone—including Social Security payments! Except that the access is read only; there is no ability to change anything, only to see and then to report.

The need for the seeing and reporting centers on this: the payment system is one that is run by career civil servants. It’s certainly true that allowing an entity not itself subject to oversight except by the President is fraught with danger. More than the privacy aspect of the access, though, I suspect the danger primarily is to Party and those career civil servants’ prerogatives.

We’ve already seen the extent, depth, and expense in dollars and liberty the danger already realized from so much of Federal government being run by career civil servants, bureaucrats entrenched in their long-term incumbency. It’s useful to have a group not beholden to the Bureaucratic State take a hard look at the doings and spendings of Treasury’s payment system and the “career civil servants” running it.

Stipulate that the vast majority of those personnel are entirely on the up and up and do their work diligently and with honest dedication. It would only take a few to do vast damage through misspending or stealing funds. A Treasury inspection, or an inspection run by civil servants from elsewhere in the administration, leaves too much room for papering over gross mistakes, for covering up outright wrong-doing.

The gains from largely unaccountable DOGE personnel doing this inspection is worth the risks involved, especially given the size of the realized risk from current practice.

Mission Addendum

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I posted a bit ago about the missions of DOGE and Congress. Here are some data that lend concreteness to that post’s claims; these data concern some $162 billion in misspent monies.

That figure is likely an undercount because not all federal agencies follow reporting guidelines.
Under the Payment Integrity Information Act, agencies are required to manage payments by identifying risks, taking corrective measures, and reporting on their efforts. However, the GAO found that some agencies are not fully following the required guidelines for reporting data annually.

GAO’s 2023 report on the matter had this, summarized at the JtN link above (the second one):

10 federal agencies under the Chief Financial Officers Act were noncompliant in fiscal 2022. Additionally, nine of these agencies failed to meet standards for the same programs in 2021 and 2022.
Agencies that remain noncompliant with payment integrity standards for two or more consecutive years must submit additional proposals to the Office of Management and Budget. OMB is key in dealing with improper payments and outlining improvement plans.
The plans must be included in the agency’s annual budget submission….

GAO identified those agencies that are noncompliant for two consecutive years as

  • DoA
  • DoD
  • DoEd
  • HHS
  • HUD
  • DoL
  • DoT(!)
  • VA
  • SBA

GAO then asked for this:

GAO recommended that OMB ensure that noncompliant agencies explicitly include plans of improvement and plans to achieve compliance in their annual financial statements, post the plans on PaymentAccuracy.gov, or communicate them directly to the relevant congressional committees. OMB agreed with the recommendations.

That’s much too soft. Years of such Pretty Pleases are how we got to these billions of misspent—and willfully unreported—dollars. The management personnel below President Donald Trump’s (R) replacing appointees who remain after those appointees are installed need to be terminated for cause and reallocated to the private sector. Those agencies’ budgets also need to have portions of their budgets equal to the un- or misreported expenditures withheld until reporting and actual spending is brought into compliance.

Given DoD’s blatant disregard for spending requirements, it’s necessary to be especially draconian with that bunch—their refusals to comply cost lives and endanger our national freedom. It’s true enough that DoD’s contractors contribute to the money failures, and they need to be dealt with including contract cancelation, but the overarching failure here is DoD’s decision to not bother with enforcing the financial reporting requirements of those contractors.

DOGE’s Mission

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And the mission of the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress has cutting spending at the top of their lists. Fraud, waste, and abuse has been the empty word chants of politicians from both parties for far too many years.

Now there’s a concrete example of waste, and of waste of a magnitude that it could easily obscure double potsful of outright fraud and abuse.

The federal government reported net costs of $7.4 trillion in fiscal year 2024, but it couldn’t fully account for its spending. The US Government Accountability Office, which is Congress’s research arm, said that the federal government must address “serious deficiencies” in federal financial management and correct course on its “unsustainable” long-term fiscal path.

Absolutely. One way to light a fire under the behinds of the bureaucrats who manage these departments and agencies—from the political appointees nominally in charge on down through middle management—along with those entities and personnel required to report to the former is to cut those department and agency budgets by the amount of unaccounted for spending by each department and agency. In parallel with that, identify by name the personnel responsible for the tracking, and identify by name and entity those responsible for reporting to these trackers, and deal with them, publicly shaming where useful, firing for cause where necessary, and terminating contracts of those responsible for reporting and not doing so or not doing so accurately.

Yes, that includes DoD, which hasn’t bothered to track its own spending well enough to pass an audit in the last too many years. We’re not plussing up our military, we’re not building a combat force, when DoD is losing track of its money and so isn’t spending its money on training, equipment, and logistics.

The incompetence, laziness, and criminality of those responsible for actually spending—and tracking their spending—the monies allocated to them are threats to our national security regardless of the specific spender. So are those not bothering to report accurately and completely up the chain to those trackers. That alone should make the laziness and incompetence involved as felonious as the fraud itself.

Detention Beds?

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ICE thinks that, were the Laken Riley Act, which mandates immediate detention pending deportation of illegal aliens who have been arrested for theft of one sort or another, to be enacted, they would need, among other things, an additional $3 billion due to the agency needing an additional 60,000 detention beds.

That cost is heavily impacted by the fanciness of the beds.

Sixty thousand army cots from a big-name store would cost just $8.7 million, assuming no discount for such a large buy.

Other cots are available through big-name general marketer Amazon.com for prices around $55 each, or $3.3 million, again assuming no large buy discount.

Military surplus cots can be had for as low as $31—$1.86 million for the 60,000.

A 50ftx100ft Quonset hut can be had for $29,000 in construction kit form that, when assembled, provides a complete, weather tight shelter. That hut could easily shelter 120 illegal aliens on those cots. That works out to some 500 huts for $14.5 million. Add porta-potty latrines and a couple of Quonset huts for food preparation and eating, and we’re bringing in the detention facilities for less than $20 million.

Of course, those numbers make no allowance for segregating the detainees by sex. Having male- and female-only huts, though, would add only trivially to the cost, and most of that increment would be in added personnel to enforce the segregation.

If those $3 billon really are committed, the remainder should be for personnel. At an estimated $80k salary plus $13k payroll tax per additional ICE, CBP, and ESO agent, those remaining $2.8 billion could hire 28,500 more.

Whether an additional 28,500 are needed or not, the larger point is that the money should go toward the men and women who put their lives on the line going after these thugs, and not in housing them in unneeded luxury.