The federal government spent $186 billion of your money on payment errors last year alone.
Now a bombshell GAO report has exposed something even worse – Washington has no way to check if the people cashing those checks are even allowed to receive them.
Find out what Joni Ernst just revealed about the government's "do not pay" list that has taxpayers furious.
The Federal Government Cannot Cross-Reference Its Own Banned List
A new Government Accountability Office report – shared exclusively with Sen. Joni Ernst before release – confirmed that Washington has no system to match the public spending database against its own list of banned recipients.
That list exists for a reason.
It contains individuals and entities the government has already barred from receiving taxpayer funds – fraudsters, bad actors, people who already stole from you once.
But Washington has been writing checks with no ability to verify the people cashing them.
"Washington made $186 billion in payment errors just last year and fraudsters are stealing $1.4 billion from taxpayers every day," Ernst said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
"Despite all the systems in place designed to prevent ineligible payments, the information isn't always compatible, complete, consistent, or connected."
The database of who receives government awards and the database of who is banned from receiving them exist in parallel – with no bridge between them.
Three Decades of Warnings, Zero Action
This is not a new problem.
The GAO has flagged improper payments as a weakness in the government's consolidated financial statements every single year since 1997.
That is nearly 30 years of warnings.
Since fiscal year 2003, federal agencies have made an estimated $2.8 trillion in improper payments – payments that should never have been made or were made in the wrong amount.
Trillion. With a T.
The report confirmed that for more than 30 years, there have been no specific requirements enforcing compatibility between recipient eligibility databases.
No requirements.
"The inability to fully analyze SAM Exclusions and USAspending.gov data is an example of government-wide issues with data matching for recipient eligibility determinations," the GAO draft stated.
Ernst called out exactly who suffers when bureaucrats refuse to fix basic accounting: "Until that is achieved, taxpayers will continue being robbed in plain daylight."
Minneapolis Was Not a One-Time Scandal – It Was a Preview
Ernst pointed directly to Minnesota as the living proof of what happens when these systems stay broken.
More than 70 defendants – 72 of them of Somali descent, five of them currently fugitives in Africa – were charged in connection with stealing approximately $250 million from Feeding Our Future, a federally funded program meant to feed children during COVID.
Fraudsters submitted fake meal counts, invented children's names, and filed fraudulent invoices for meals that were never served.
The money went to luxury homes, luxury cars, overseas wire transfers, and island vacations.
That $250 million scheme is now considered the largest pandemic relief fraud in American history.
But it sits inside a far larger scandal – an estimated $9 billion in Medicaid dollars fraudulently distributed across Minnesota.
"As long as government offices and computers cannot or do not talk to each other, serial fraudsters, like the ones being exposed in Minneapolis, will keep getting away with scamming Uncle Sam," Ernst said.
She is right.
The GAO report is not describing a technical glitch.
It is describing a systemic failure that fraudsters have been exploiting for decades – and that Washington has chosen, year after year, not to fix.
Ernst and Trump Are Forcing Washington to Act
Ernst is not just sounding alarms – she is legislating.
Her bipartisan Stop Secret Spending Act, co-authored with Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, passed the Senate unanimously just days ago.
It requires government spending arrangements known as Other Transaction Agreements – backroom deals hidden from public view – to be posted on USASpending.gov the same way grants, contracts, and loans are.
The Pentagon alone ran $25.5 billion worth of these hidden arrangements over the past two years, with another $44 billion already committed.
That money has been invisible to the American public until now.
Meanwhile, President Trump launched the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud by executive order in March, chaired by Vice President JD Vance.
Vance announced in May that the administration has already tracked or recovered up to $160 billion in fraudulent small business loans, COVID-19 relief, and student aid.
The GAO report lands at exactly the right moment.
Tim Walz had four years of warnings while $9 billion walked out of Minnesota's Medicaid program – and did nothing.
Joe Biden had four years to fix the federal government's broken data systems – and did nothing.
Trump and Ernst are building the government that finally checks.
Sources:
- Nicole Silverio, "Robbed in plain daylight: Federal government has no idea if it's handing out taxpayer dollars to wrong people," Daily Caller News Foundation via WND, June 16, 2026.
- "Senate Unanimously Passes Ernst-Led Bipartisan Bill to Stop Secret Spending," Ernst.senate.gov, June 12, 2026.
- "Improper Payments: Agency Actions Needed to Help Save Taxpayer Dollars," U.S. GAO, June 2026.
- "Federal Jury Finds Feeding Our Future Mastermind and Co-Defendant Guilty in $250 Million Pandemic Fraud Scheme," U.S. Department of Justice, March 2025.
- "GSA Joins Presidential Task Force to Eliminate Fraud," GSA.gov, May 28, 2026.
- "Ernst Unveils Legislative Package to Stop Fraud," Ernst.senate.gov, April 23, 2026.
