The bill always arrives — the question is who pays it

The Washington Examiner reports what any careful keeper of accounts should dread: a $10 billion apparatus of fraud, rooted in the emergency spending of the COVID era, draining public programs in New York and, by extension, the federal treasury that every American fills. The Trump administration, the piece notes, has correctly identified such fraud as a critical issue given the size of the current deficit. On that narrow point of diagnosis, I will not quarrel.

I spent years as a printer before I held any public office, and I learned early that a ledger does not lie. When a government prints obligations faster than it can account for them, the difference does not vanish — it is carried, invisibly, by the people who deal honestly. Every dollar drawn out by a fraudulent claim is a dollar that either raises someone's taxes, reduces some genuine service, or — and here is the danger I know best — erodes the soundness of the currency that common people hold. Paper money badly secured is a slow theft; fraud against public programs is merely a faster version of the same crime.

The emergency conditions of a plague are precisely the moment when oversight is hardest to maintain and fraud is easiest to commit. I do not say this to excuse those who designed programs carelessly; I say it to explain that the discipline of accountability must be built before the crisis, not scrambled for after. A ship that has no captain at the helm in calm weather will not suddenly find one in a storm. (This is inference on my part, not something the Examiner's lead addresses directly, but it follows from the nature of institutions.)

There is a civic dimension here that troubles me as much as the arithmetic. When citizens see that well-connected parties can extract billions from the public purse while the small shopkeeper is audited for a $400 discrepancy, they lose faith in the fairness of the whole arrangement. A republic runs on the belief that the rules apply equally. Destroy that belief, and you have not merely lost money — you have lost something harder to recover than money.

I will note, with the humility appropriate to one who cannot have lived through these events, that the political framing of such stories often tells us more about the messenger than the message. Fraud in public programs is not a partisan phenomenon; it follows opportunity. The honest work is non-partisan: close the holes, recover what can be recovered, and design the next program with tighter controls from the first day.

A counsel for the working person: If you want your tax dollars to mean something, demand that your representatives insist on independent audits of emergency spending while the emergency is still ongoing — not three years after the money is gone. The time to inspect the lock is before the thief arrives, not after.