Lars Larson has been asking the hard questions for decades and he's not stopping now. Every weekday, Lars hosts two of the most listened-to talk radio programs in the country.
From noon to 3pm PT, he anchors a Northwest-focused program heard across more than 100 affiliates in Washington and Oregon, covering the stories and policies hitting closest to home.
Then, from 3 to 6 pm PT, he takes it national with a syndicated program reaching listeners from coast to coast.
No talking points. No agenda-driven nonsense. Just the news, the debates, and the conversations that actually move the needle. Subscribe and find out why millions of listeners keep coming back.
Michael Brickman - Is Washington Wasting Trillions of Taxpayer Dollars?
•The Lars Larson Show
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
0:00
|
9:27
Cicero Institute Policy Director Michael Brickman joins Lars to discuss $2.7 trillion in improper federal payments reported since 2003. Why does government waste keep growing despite repeated attempts to stop it?
Hey, welcome back to the Lawrence Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you, and always glad to welcome back Michael Brickman, who is policy director at the Cicero Institute, to talk about all the national debt. We've got $40 trillion in national debt, and the Federal Government is reporting trillions of dollars in improper payments. Mr. Brickman, welcome back to the program.
SPEAKER_00
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
SPEAKER_01
This just seems extraordinary. Now, I understand the number, $2.7 trillion in improper payments, is over the last about the last quarter century, about the last 23 or 24 years. It's still an extraordinary amount of money. How is it that a federal government gets so big that it can just simply shovel money out and it doesn't even know where it's going?
SPEAKER_00
Well, and that's just the payments that we know we screwed up on. There's probably so much more once you actually dig into it. And I know I've been in the federal government uh in the Trump administration, and I I know when you start turning over some rocks, every single rock you turn over, there's rampant fraud. And if we're going to get a handle on our national spending, we have to start there.
SPEAKER_01
Is there any uh can you think of, or does Cicero have uh an idea of the best method for which we could clear up these improper payments and stop them from happening? Because it sounds like we could largely solve at least the national deficit, not the debt, but the deficit could be wiped out if we could simply eliminate all the improper payments, right?
SPEAKER_00
Well, yeah, I mean there's no one single thing you have to do. You have to make sure that only the people are who are actually eligible for these benefits are getting it. Uh then you have to look at the people who are lying and and stealing to get the inf the information. You know, one program you probably don't think of as being right fraud is the student loan program, because you think, well, you know, it's got to be a real student. But it turns out it doesn't. There are students that have been stolen. Phantom students, ghost students, they're sometimes called, people who sign up and steal the money. A lot of times they're foreign fraud rings that are stealing the money. And sometimes they'll actually sign up for the classes and have AI uh get them into the classes so they can keep pulling down money semester after semester. Billions of dollars there that was effectively uh stopped by the Trump administration by simply requiring an ID check, common sense, but uh made a huge difference. I think there's a lot we can learn from that process, just putting some basic ID checks and bank level uh uh verification in those benefit programs, federal level, state level, do that one thing, that would save a ton of money.
SPEAKER_01
I mean, Cicero has reported, and this is part of your reporting, is that if you looked at the improper payments made by the U.S. government, if that were a country, it would be the eighth largest economy in the world, larger than the GDPs of Italy, Canada, or Russia?
SPEAKER_00
Well, it is a an economy, and you think about the incentives that creates for these foreign fraud rings, people in America to who set up these very sophisticated schemes to steal the money, government can never keep up with it. Those people are always going to be one step ahead. And so I think it's incumbent on the uh public sector to work with the private sector, learn from what the banks are doing, learn from what the technology companies are doing, use AI, uh, beat these people at their own game. If you expect that uh civil servants, as much as they may be trying to uh do their best, although we all we've also seen examples like in Minnesota where they clearly were not trying to do their best. Nope. Um, but even if they are trying to do their best, you need to utilize the things that uh banks are using, technology companies are using to protect your money uh in your bank account. That should also be used in the government. And I think a lot of people uh just assume that it would be, but I can tell you it is absolutely not, and you have very outdated systems that are just uh being completely compromised, uh not by hacking, but just by being more sophisticated than the government, which uh unfortunately is not always super hard to do.
SPEAKER_01
I'm talking to Michael Brickman, who's policy director of the Cicero Institute. You're actually talking about something that I bring up all the time because Ms. Brickman, I've got a I've got a credit card, I've got an American Express card that I've used for 40 years. And I think one of the best things about it is that it, you know, I can use it a number of places, but also because the company keeps a close eye. And if they say I'm out of pattern, they'll call me and say, Did you really make this charge? And I'll say, No, that's not my charge. And they will dispute it. Uh actually they'll freeze it in place. And I've always wondered if the federal government actually went to private companies like some of the credit card companies that are in charge of moving large amounts of money around and said, help us solve this problem. I I would think their track record of tracking monies and making sure they do go to the places they're supposed to go and they don't go to the places that are trying to do a ripoff would be dramatically better than anything the U.S. government does today. Am I you think I'm right or close?
SPEAKER_00
No, you're 100% right. And the good news is uh the Trump administration, the uh vice president's task force, those are some of the things they're starting to do. And I use that student loan example. Uh they're starting to put those bank-level security features into uh the federal student aid programs, and then they're looking at doing similar things for other federal programs. Uh the states have to cooperate, though, and as we've seen, not all of the states are interested in rooting out the fraud because a lot of these programs are federally uh funded, but they're administered at least in part by the states. The states have to cooperate, they have to get on board with this. And I'll give you, you know, one other thing you can do besides just the common sense, let's use the private sector's tools uh to stay one step ahead of the fraud rings because they are very, very sophisticated. But one other thing they could do is uh give average people uh the opportunity to find and report the fraud, right? The incentive, as you said, it's like a big economy, and so the incentive is for these sophisticated fraud rings to try to steal from it. Well, let's change the incentives and let's make there be an incentive for people, regular people, to go find the fraud. And if you report it, you get to actually keep a percentage. It's uh a law that's been on the books at the federal level for a long time. Uh many states have similar laws where if you find and report a fraud and the government's able to recover that money, you get to keep a percentage of it. Um that's something that's been done for big government contracting when you're talking about hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Uh, but it's it's kind of been ignored for uh you know the daycare centers and the uh people who are stealing a million dollars here, a million dollars there. Uh that's that's where the fraud is, and we need to use those types of tools and give regular uh Americans like your listeners the opportunity to seek out the fraud, find it, and then be rewarded based on it.
SPEAKER_01
Well, imagine if you could tell the person who's making minimum wage working in a daycare center, but you realize the daycare center is fraudulent because it's claiming to care for a hundred kids and it's actually claiming uh it's actually providing care for, say, a dozen kids, and you'd say, well, that's fraud. What would happen if I turned it in? Oh, you mean I'd get a check? I'd I'd get a percentage percentage of what I end up saving the American taxpayers? It seems like a tremendous way to go. That's Michael Brickman. Michael is the policy director at the Cicero Institute. Michael, thanks very much for what you do, and thanks to the Institute's work as well. Time to get to your calls at 866, hey Lars. That's 866-439-5277. Send your emails to talk at lawslarsen.com. And our poll on X today should tech companies be held legally responsible when social media hurts your children's health care? We'll talk about that as well. And you're listening to the Lars Larson show.
.png)