As DOGE’s efforts shift to eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in social welfare programs including SNAP, Social Security, and Medicaid, The Drill Down podcast welcomes a nationally recognized expert in spotting how those programs are rife with fraud.
Andrew McClenahan is, among other things, intergovernmental committee co-chair for an organization called the United Council on Welfare Fraud, and has investigated fraud in the food stamp program, including one bust several years ago that stopped a $100 million fraud scheme in South Florida. The group is made up of welfare fraud investigators from every state.
In 2018, GAI published a report on fraud in the SNAP program which used McClenahan as a source. Among other things, this report found stolen funds from the SNAP program were even being sent overseas to terrorists in Yemen and Somalia. It documented how criminals have gamed the program to set up false grocery stores and farm stands for the purpose of laundering funds from EBT cards that are loaded each month with funds from the SNAP program.
The bad news is that nothing much was done to curb the fraud, then or since. The good news is that DOGE appears to be listening now and learning fast.
“Elon Musk cited a stat that there’s half a trillion dollars” in fraud going on, McClenahan tells host Eric Eggers. “According to the GAO’s own figures, there’s anywhere from $230 billion to $520 billion in fraudulent payments in [social welfare] programs across the board. So, the money is there if it’s looked at.”
“Whose job is it to identify and elevate fraudulent spending government? What was the federal government’s response when you or people like you would elevate instances like this?” Eggers asks.
“It was ‘deny, deny, deny’ or try to shift the narrative,” McClenahan says. “Before my current role, I ran Florida’s public assistance efforts and program integrity. And when we exposed some of the worst-case fraud in program history, the response was, ‘well yeah, fraud’s a problem in Florida.’”
Eggers points out that not only was the federal government sweeping the problem under the rug, but it was (as GAI’s report also shows) rewarding states that kept their fraud rates artificially low.
“Until the 2018 Farm Bill, states would receive a bonus for expanding the program and getting more recipients onto public assistance,” McClenahan added.
Romanian organized crime was even allegedly involved in EBT card fraud. In Minnesota, a network of hawalas (an informal Middle Eastern form of wire transfer system) reportedly allowed funds acquired from EBT fraud to be wired to terrorist groups in Somalia.
Going after fraud in programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP is not the same thing as “cutting benefits,” as Elon Musk and the Trump administration have tried to stress. Politically, Democrats see a potential wedge issue if they can persuade large numbers of Americans that their benefits will be cut. That was, for example, the reason Texas Democratic Rep. Al Green yelled at President Trump during his recent address to Congress, for which he was censured the next day.
Fraud is always a problem in government social welfare programs. Organizations like McClenahan’s are made up of overwhelmed, understaffed state welfare fraud investigators whose job is to root it out. He argues the federal government’s inadequate approach to stopping fraud amounts to “pay and chase,” and suggests instead the government should “pause and examine.”
A major problem he has seen is the practice of “self-attestation,” which means welfare recipients say they are eligible and attest to how many people they have living in their home, which leaves the burden with fraud investigators to have to ascertain whether that is really the case. “They’re basically running on the honor system,” he says.
The government’s recordkeeping is also under scrutiny, as Musk and his DOGE investigators have noted. The Social Security system showed millions of people on the rolls with birthdates that would make them more than 120 years old. “The problem is the ‘death master file’ has no ID verification,” McClenahan says. “It’s antiquated. And that’s just one example of the government’s lack of precision.”
Despite their federal funding, many of these programs are administered by the states. And, as McClenahan says from experience, “the feds dump trash on the states and then complain about the smell.”
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