Waste, fraud, and abuse

Speaking of "abuse," what's abusive is the Trump administration's consistent misuse of language, which varies from highly misleading to downright Orwellian.

A March 7 Washington Post headline was: "DOGE redefines ‘fraud’ to defend cutting federal employees, programs." The article said Trump's recent speech to the nation "illustrated how Trump is trying to rally Americans behind Musk’s project to shrink the government — by attacking vast swaths of federal spending as fraudulent" when in fact they are no such thing. "Fraud" becomes a label attached to whatever you want to get rid of, as does "waste." The authoritarian playbook requires changing the meaning of words.

Or take "efficiency," as in "Department of Government Efficiency." DOGE isn't working to make government operations more efficient; only vastly smaller by pursuing a vicious anti-government ideology. That means cutting large swaths of services, on the one hand, and making many work less well, on the other. Doing the analysis to make a process more efficient is hard work. Hacking it indiscriminately is easy. In any case, a citizen who spends hours on hold with the Social Security Administration because DOGE laid off 7,000 of the agency's workers won't agree that his time is being used efficiently. One might even suspect the objective is to make the 90-year-old social insurance program less efficient in order to turn the public against it—the better to make huge cuts, or even eliminate it. Elon Musk called Social Security's inter-generational compact the "biggest Ponzi scheme ever."

As George Orwell warned long ago, the corruption of language, along with the flagrant misstatement of fact, is a necessary prerequisite to installing and maintaining an authoritarian and certainly totalitarian government. Authoritarians cannot exist without creating their own alternative realities.

Social Security is an excellent example of a pervasive alternative reality. Trump told the American people that "we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old" receiving Social Security benefits, which he concluded was either "fraudulent or incompetent." The actual number of 100 or older receiving benefits is 67,000, which according to demographers is about two-thirds of the centenarians living in the U.S., and thus a reasonable match for the demographic composition of the country. By sensible estimation one could conclude that the number of 100-year-old beneficiaries, far from fraudulent, looks to be about what one would expect.

Do you think calling Trump's language "Orwellian" is too strong? Consider that he called Ukraine's democratically elected president a "dictator," when in fact Putin, with whom Trump is now aligning, is the actual dictator. Trump said Ukraine started the war, when obviously Russia did, by invading its neighbor. These are 180-degree inversions of reality that Orwell would have recognized as emblematic of his thesis. That Trump's statements are ludicrous does not mean they won't be accepted as true by large numbers of people, which is why they're so dangerous.

Clearly, Trump's followers have a very high tolerance for alternative realities, as evidenced by the realization that even now tens of millions believe the 2020 election was stolen, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We can also presume that large numbers of people voted for Trump despite rejecting his stolen election claims. I find that particularly inexplicable and indeed odious in light of the profound threat Trump poses to the constitutional order. There's a palpable sickness in the country, both intellectual and moral, that's hard to fathom.

Surely incessant lying is an "abuse" of truth, which is the fundamental ground upon which all else depends. The abuse proceeds nonstop.

Consider Trump's continual and quite remarkable torrent of lies in the aftermath of the historic Los Angeles wildfires. When some hydrants ran dry, Trump claimed there was a water shortage caused by not allowing water to flow to the LA region from northern California. That is egregiously false. The reservoirs that supply LA were full. The problem was that the pumping and storage infrastructure was overwhelmed during the fires and could not keep up due to so many hydrants being open simultaneously, and large high elevation storage tanks being depleted (especially in Palisades). Simply put, the system lost pressure because of abnormally high demand.

"There's no shortage of water in Southern California," said one expert, a civil and environmental engineering professor at UC Davis, "but there was a shortage of water in the areas that had the fires because the storage they had locally in the neighborhoods, in the towns, was not enough for the event." By "storage" he meant the kinds of large elevated tanks that every municipal water system relies upon to maintain pressure. Such systems are designed to supply normal municipal needs, with some additional capacity for fighting a few large fires. But the massive scale of the fires overwhelmed the system, and it couldn't keep up.

The professor added that "the reason why they ran out of water was that the [fire] was much bigger than what the hydraulic systems in the local storage systems were designed for, even though the region, in California, has really quite a lot of water." [my italics -mb]

Bringing in more water from outside would have achieved nothing, but Trump nevertheless kept falsely blaming the state's water policies, in essence confusing the fire situation with a long running and unrelated dispute pitting agriculture against environmental considerations elsewhere in the state. On January 26 Trump ordered the federal government to override the state of California's water-management practices and laws to bolster firefighting efforts, directing the Bureau of Reclamation to deliver more water and hydropower through the Central Valley Project, a network of dams, canals and other infrastructure that supplies agricultural users and has nothing to do with Los Angeles. On January 28 he posted on Truth Social that "The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond."

There was no exercise of "emergency powers." (And by the way, emergency is another word that's being dreadfully abused, including to justify Trump's spasmodic application of tariffs on our closest friends and trading partners.) Within hours California's Department of Water Resources responded that "The military did not enter California. The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful." Nothing to see here.

Oh, and there is no water infrastructure connecting California to the "Pacific Northwest," as Trump claimed, much less "beyond." It does not exist, except in Trump's deranged mind.

On January 31 Trump lied that he finally solved the water problem, posting: "Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!"

What actually happened was that Trump administration officials began releasing significant amounts of water from two federal dams supplying California’s Central Valley which, yet again, has no connection to Los Angeles, and which amounted to a gratuitous waste of water that will be needed later for crop irrigation, which is its primary intended purpose. According to the New York Times, "The releases, as ordered, have sent water toward low-lying land in the Central Valley, and none of it will reach Southern California, water experts said."

The water releases came from reservoirs managed by the federal government that feed (along with state reservoirs) a vast agricultural irrigation network. The reservoirs store water from the winter wet season and release it during the agricultural growing season later in the year. Because of the need to maintain supplies for the summer, the only legitimate reason to release water during the winter is to ensure enough excess reservoir storage capacity to handle inflow from large winter storms in order to protect the dams. To state it yet again, the system he's irresponsibly playing with has nothing to do with Los Angeles or its fires. Trump just made it all up.

I belabor this because it demonstrates not just the kind of chattering falsehoods that Trump continually emits into reality's Geiger counter, but rather an elaborately constructed false narrative built on a sequence and assemblage of lies developed and expanded over a period of time inside a deranged mind, all constructing a completely fictitious version of a matter where empirical fact is quite unambiguous and easy to verify.

While California water is a useful case study, Trump's lies overall are too numerous to catalog. Last fall we had Trump and Vance claiming Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets, and that Venezuelan gangs were overrunning Aurora, Colorado. More recently Trump said falsely that China is operating the Panama Canal, as an excuse to justify his warning that "we're taking it back." The canal is sovereign Panamanian territory, and it's operated by Panama. A month ago Trump insinuated that DEI was to blame for the fatal DC plane crash that killed 67. Trump keeps saying the U.S. has given $350 billion in aid to Ukraine when the actual number is less than $200 billion. It goes on and on. You cannot take anything he says at face value. Indeed, a good rule of thumb would be to suppose that the opposite of whatever Trump says is the actual truth.

Such a torrent of lies can overwhelm the epistemological capacity of even a determined truth seeker which, alas, most people aren't. For its part, MAGA utterly lives in alternative realities continually fertilized by credulity and ignorance. As with the words we use to describe things, truth itself can cease to have meaning. When truth no longer holds, society comes apart. Corruption pervades government. (It's happening right now at massive scale.) The constitutional order collapses. All the originally false claims about government—waste, fraud, abuse—become actually real in the corrupt conduct of a government that is not beholden to fact. That is where we're headed. Maybe we've even arrived.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Dead people vote AND collect Social Security benefits

Mike Johnson: "What he's [Musk's] finding with his algorithms going through the data of the Social Security system is enormous amounts of fraud, waste and abuse."

Ted Cruz (who else?): "More than 13 million people on the records receiving benefits who are over 119 years old."

Leave it to Mike Johnson to incessantly insinuate falsehoods. And leave it to Ted Cruz to make the absurdity ("receiving benefits") explicit.

Actually, what "his" (Musk's) "algorithms" are finding is that "he" doesn't understand the data—which is a disturbing, recurring theme. The guy who's hacking up the government has no idea what he's doing.

So let me put all howling, hyperventilating, gullible right-wing minds at ease. A recent AP headline said, comfortingly, "Tens of millions of dead people are not getting Social Security checks, despite Trump and Musk claims."

Sorry, Ted.

Trump, of course, disagrees with the AP, and not just about the name of the Gulf of Mexico. Tuesday, Trump said at a press briefing in Florida that “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits. “They’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent,” Trump added. [my italics -mb]

No, we don't. And they're not.

“If you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200 years old,” Trump said. He also said that there’s one person in the system listed as 360 years old. [my italics -mb]

Leave it to Trump to come up with a 360-year-old "listed" beneficiary. Bet that's a big hit in outraged yokeldom. (In a recent interview, David Brooks said our differences are "fundamentally about culture and respect." Sigh. How does one respect willful ignorance?)

Let's start with a high-level look. According to audits, Social Security's rate of "improper payments" (which would include paying dead people) from 2015 to 2022 was 0.83%. (That's $71.8 billion in improper payments divided by $8.6 trillion in total payments. If you don't do numbers, that's less than 1 percent.)

That rate is actually quite good. In the private sector, accounts payable errors tend to run a bit higher. 80% of companies that remit over 500 payments a month report an error rate of 1% or higher, and 44% of those had an error rate over 3%.

(And interestingly, especially if you think the private sector is the standard by which the government should be measured, life insurance fraud in the U.S. costs the insurance industry $10-20 billion annually. Fraud across all insurance sectors is estimated at $308 billion annually.)

Sure, Social Security's "improper payments" have a large (but not that large) absolute dollar value. How could they not? Social Security is the old-age social insurance program for the entire country with, as I said, $8.6 trillion in payments from 2015 to 2022. The "improper payments" (of every kind) annual average over that period was $7.2 billion—not quite chump change, but not earth shattering either, especially compared to the insurance industry figures I provided above. (If you want to go after real money, instead of gutting the IRS's enforcement arm, as is currently happening, empower it to pursue tax cheats as the previous administration was trying to do.)

According to a July 2024 inspector general's report, the vast majority of "improper payments" were not to deceased persons at all, but to living beneficiaries. But some minority were indeed dead. A November 2021 audit estimated that approximately $298 million (the horror!) in payments were issued to about 24,000 deceased beneficiaries, and about $80 million of that was subsequently recovered.

If I may take editorial license at this point, it matters greatly which reality you live in, which is the fundamental theme in my epistemology. How can we properly govern ourselves if we don't know what's real?

Trump's reality is that "we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old" receiving Social Security benefits, whereas the actual number is 67,000. (Somehow Ted Cruz thinks there are 13 million alleged beneficiaries on the books who are over 119 years old and getting paid. Poor Ted.) 

According to demographers, there are approximately 101,000 centenarians living in the U.S. (Google says 90,000 as of 2021, but the number is growing rapidly.) So just two-thirds of persons age 100 or over are receiving Social Security benefits. I wonder: Why so few?

Trump said "if you take all of those millions of [dead] people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security." Translation: Because the fraud is so enormous, all you need to do to ensure Social Security's solvency is to quit paying dead people. It's as easy as that! Who knew? (To reiterate, the 2021 audit found 24,000 deceased beneficiaries at a cost of a couple of hundred million dollars in improper payments. Not quite enough dollars there to save Social Security, I'm afraid.)

Wouldn't it be nice if the president didn't spew ignorant nonsense? Alas, that's too much to ask.

As for Musk not understanding the data, he is multiply confused. Part of Musk's problem is that Social Security's ancient software is written in the COBOL programming language (which was on its way out when I took a course in it in 1984), which led to certain puzzling (to Musk) conventions in how the data is coded. Part of the problem is that Social Security doesn't have death records for a goodly number of people (which we shouldn't find surprising), but that doesn't mean they're receiving benefits, as Trump's acting commissioner recently noted. The system is coded in such a way that, when complete data is not available, it looks as if there are impossibly old (eg., 150-year-old) persons on the records, but in actuality nobody is sending "them" money. (Sorry, Ted.) Persons who know and work with the data understand what's going on. Musk doesn't. And by the way, the Social Security payment system is programmed to automatically stop sending payments to people when they reach 115 years old. (Sorry again, Ted.)

All this has been widely reported in recent weeks, with numerous debunkings of all the false claims. That didn't stop Trump from talking nonsense in his Tuesday night speech, or Mike Johnson disseminating disinformation as only he can.

Here's the thing. You have a choice of whether you live in a made-up reality, or the actual one. The persons running and ransacking our government live in a made-up reality. Which one do you live in?

 Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Why must the war end now?

Seemingly everybody from clear-eyed commentators to heads of state to Trump himself have insisted it's time for the Ukraine-Russia war to come to an end. But why?

Because the war has gone on for three years, and that's long enough? Because the cost in lives, devastation, and resources has been enormous?

Those aren't good reasons, not least because they're arbitrary, as if the timetable should account for our stock (or deficit) of patience. Or as if the suffering must end because we are decent, caring people who can't bear to observe it. Which, frankly, rings a bit phony to me anyway.

Indeed, the brutal destruction wrought by a vicious aggressor should steel our resolve, although putting it that way runs the risk of cheapening the real resolve before which we should stand in awe: namely, Ukraine's. By comparison, "our" resolve comes at such trifling cost and with almost no sacrifice.

That $200 billion of U.S. aid and arms is chump change compared to the geostrategic value it buys us. And again, saying that runs the risk of losing sight of the most important value, which is Ukraine's freedom, and our insistence on a world order that does not tolerate wars of conquest. 

The question of when the war should end is actually easy to answer: It should end when Ukraine says it should end, and on terms of Ukraine's choosing. If Ukraine wants to keep fighting, our job is to provide it the resources it needs. If Ukraine wants to negotiate a settlement, our job is to assist it to get the best deal that it can.

Honestly, that's not a very big ask of us.

Ukraine, and only Ukraine, can determine when and if its sacrifice has become too great, relative to what it thinks it can achieve. That's not for us to say, because it isn't our country being invaded, and our people being brutalized.

To arbitrarily stop now would be to reward the aggressor, which sends all the wrong messages and creates all the wrong incentives, and would be morally bankrupt.

Expectations are crucial. Russia needs to understand beyond all doubt that there will be no arbitrary end; that it will need to extract itself from the mess it has made, or keep on bleeding. Ukraine is said to be barely hanging on, but that observation applies to Russia too.

It's under-appreciated how much Russia's military has been decimated, and its economy ravished, by its war of conquest. Inflation is 10 percent. Interest rates are 21 percent. The economy is not in recession, but current low GDP growth is driven by war spending, which is considered to be unsustainable.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Russia's military has been devastated. Ukraine says it has destroyed 10,000 Russian tanks, which should be taken with a grain of salt. But western analysts put the number in the thousands. Common estimates are around 4,000 main battle tanks destroyed or captured, and 8,000 armored vehicles. The U.K. estimates Russia is able to produce around 100 new tanks per year. According to the Institute for the Study of War, "Russian forces have sustained vehicle and artillery system losses on the battlefield that are unsustainable in the medium- to long-term given the limitations of Russia's defense industrial capacity and Soviet-era weapons and equipment stocks."

(When considering U.S. aid so far to Ukraine, it's worth pointing out that, before the war, any analyst would have considered it a stunningly good bargain to deplete Russia's military capacity so severely at the cost of a mere $200 billion. Russia is an aggressive adversary, a threat to its neighbors, and to the international order. Its diminishment at that scale would have been viewed as a good thing.)

Russia has also suffered enormous battlefield casualties. Ukraine claims 850,000 Russian troops killed, captured, missing, or wounded. The U.K. puts the estimate at 790,000, and the U.S. over 700,000. Russia has suffered more dead, by some multiples, than all Americans killed in Vietnam.

In the recent Oval Office mugging of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Trump stressed Ukraine's recruitment difficulties—difficulties that are unsurprising after three years of all-out war. (The U.S. relied on a massive draft to fight WW II, and also the wars in Korea and Vietnam.) But Russia too is facing significant recruitment challenges. Recruitment is down to around 40 per day, from perhaps 250 per day in mid-2024. Russia has been losing an estimated 1,500 troops per day for the past three months. It's exhausted its prison population recruitment pool that supplied what can only be described as battlefield cannon fodder in the early going. Russia is increasingly turning to foreign nationals, criminals, and debtors to bolster troop numbers, and of course a sizable contingent of North Koreans. But its fighting strength is far below what it would like.

Given all that, Putin would be delighted to be extricated from his dismal predicament on favorable terms that allow him to keep a big chunk of Ukrainian territory. Which, to my great consternation, is exactly what President Trump seems to be angling towards. What a monumental travesty that would be. Trump is also moving towards re-normalization of relations between Russia and the U.S., which is simply bewildering. Trump has suggested that Russia be re-admitted to the G-7, for example. And he's moving to weaken or remove sanctions enforcement. These are all shockingly inappropriate moves that send exactly the wrong message to a thuggish aggressor.

Having the war drag on indefinitely would be very bad for Russia. That's why the West and the U.S. need to make it absolutely clear that their support for Ukraine will be robust, ongoing, and open-ended, with no arbitrary limits or timelines. Trump's style of Putin-coddling negotiation is highly inappropriate. Putin needs to know that not only will he not be bailed out, but his cost will be staggering if he chooses to keep fighting. That understanding will help shape whatever peace agreement finally emerges. (At the same time China will get the message that it needs to keep its hands off Taiwan.)

It's certainly true that some kind of negotiation will need to happen at some point. But it's for Ukraine, not us, to say when that needs to happen, and whether there should be a ceasefire or other concessions. Since the true cost of the war is being paid by Ukraine, and since its own freedom is at stake, only Ukraine can determine when the war should end. It really is that simple.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.