American families are struggling with high costs for groceries, housing, and health care. Due to careless errors, the federal government hands out billions of dollars every year to the wrong people, in the wrong amounts, or to other programs that lack responsible oversight. These errors rob those who truly need the support and rewards the dishonest.
According to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, the federal government made $186 billion in improper payments across welfare, Medicare, and other social programs in fiscal year 2025 alone. That’s a $24 billion increase from the previous year.
For perspective, $186 billion could fund significant tax relief for working families, shore up Social Security, or reduce the national debt that our children and grandchildren will inherit. Instead, it’s vanishing into a black hole of bureaucratic errors.
Where Did the Money Go?
The largest shares of these improper payments came from major entitlement programs:
- Medicare: $57 billion
- Medicaid: $37 billion
- Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC): $21 billion
- SNAP (food stamps): $10 billion
- Pandemic-era Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program: $10 billion
The remaining $51 billion was spread across dozens of other programs.
These represent real taxpayer dollars, not just plain accounting errors. These are your hard-earned dollars that have been misallocated through poor verification, outdated systems, or insufficient fraud prevention.
Further, the GAO notes that most improper payments were overpayments, and these figures likely understate how much waste actually occurred. Certain high-risk programs weren’t even fully included in the tally. Since 2003, cumulative improper payments have reached around $3 trillion.
When these programs are riddled with inefficiency, resources that could go to truly vulnerable seniors, disabled individuals, or struggling families get diluted. Working women and their spouses pay higher taxes (or face more debt) to subsidize errors. Public trust in government erodes, making it harder to build support for genuine safety-net reforms.
Pandemic-era expansions made the problem worse by rushing out funds with little oversight. While emergency relief had a purpose, the hangover of poor controls continues to cost us dearly.
The GAO has made repeated recommendations to Congress and agencies to improve payment integrity, which include better data matching, eligibility verification, and post-payment recovery. Yet action has been slow. Only one of the ten key recommendations from 2022 had been implemented as of early 2026.
Some practical steps forward should include stronger work requirements and time limits where appropriate, paired with robust job training and modernized eligibility systems that use data analytics to prevent overpayments upfront. Further, there must be full transparency and regular audits of high-risk programs, and the recovery of improper payments should be prioritized rather than writing them off. Lastly, any aid must be targeted to those who need it most, rather than expanding universal-style entitlements.
The bottom line is that $186 billion isn’t “someone else’s problem.” It’s money extracted from American paychecks and misappropriated, and it’s a problem that needs to be fixed now.