Special Report
Elon Musk and Donald Trump Will Love Slashing This Government Agency's Waste
Published:
Yesterday, news broke that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) focused on radically restructuring federal spending during Donald Trump’s presidency. What parts of government will be some of the easiest targets?
Using data from the OMB, 24/7 Wall St. identified the government agencies wasting the most taxpayer money. The 13 federal agencies on this list are ranked by the dollar value of overpayments made in the government’s 2023 fiscal year. All supplemental data in this story also came from the OMB report. Among these agencies, overpayments range from about $16 million to nearly $99 billion.
While some of this money is recoverable, taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for much of that wasted spending. The agencies on this list recovered a reported $25.2 billion in improperly made payments in fiscal 2023, some share of which was paid in error in a previous year. Still, this amounts to only about 14% of the total overpayments made in 2023. (These are the companies that receive the most in government subsidies.)
Notably, government agencies themselves are not always directly responsible for overpayments. In seven of the 13 agencies on this list, 50% or more of the total value of overpayments in the last fiscal year were determined to have been outside of agency control. A small share of these cases are attributable to fraud.
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