Let's Cut Some Spending: $532 million to dead people

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Remember the absolutely critical Omnibus spending bill Congress muscled through at the end of last year? It was 4,000 pages that no one read and cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion.

In our Let's Cut Some Spending series, ForAmerica will chronicle parts of the 2021 and 2022 spending bills from a variety of sources that you probably don't know about - programs, grants and spending of all kinds that should have never happened in the first place and many that are still happening.

Today’s offering: $532 million in improper payments to dead people!

The Epoch Times reports:

Federal officials made more than $247 billion in improper payments in 2022, with more than half of the total—$132.4 billion—coming from five major Medicare/Medicaid programs in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), according to a June analysis by nonprofit government watchdog Open the Books (OTB).

The $247 billion for 2022 was the second-highest annual improper payment total since 2004, when such expenditures were first documented. The two-year total of $528 billion spanning President Joe Biden's tenure is the highest ever…

Among the perennial sources of improper payments are checks to dead people.

"Dead people received $532.5 million in 2022 and $441.7 million in 2021 in mistaken payments. Federal retirement services [pensions]—old-age, survivors, and disability insurance, and Social Security were sent to dead recipients," the OTB analysis reads.

While most Americans are having to hold on to every last cent thanks to inflation, our government can't even figure out if our tax dollars are going toward people who are no longer with us.

If that's not bad enough, the story also notes, "The two-year total for all improper payments would almost certainly have been even bigger were it not for how officials responded to the COVID-19 pandemic."

No doubt. That was a record-breaking amount of tax dollars doled by the US government during the pandemic - about $4.6 trillion!

We are forced to give them our money and they just toss it around like nothing.

Even giving it to the dead.