[JtN] The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated in April 2024 that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud. It was the first and only government-wide estimate of its kind, representing 3% to 7% of average federal obligations.
The estimated losses work out to between $1,431 and $3,200 for each of the nation's estimated 162.8 million individual income tax filers, according to IRS data.
The wide range reflects different risks over the five-year period the estimate covers. GAO used a Monte Carlo simulation to account for uncertainty in fraud data, including fraud that goes undetected, noting that higher-risk environments such as pandemic-era spending are associated with estimates at the upper end of the range.
The Biden administration rejected the estimate. Jason Miller, then the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, said in April 2024 that the estimate was "not plausible" and would "create confusion and promote misleading generalizations that have no factual connection to specific federal programs."
[YouTube] Jul 24, 2025
Fox News host Trey Gowdy discusses the Justice Department's investigation into accusations that former President Barack Obama manufactured evidence in the 2016 Russian election interference hoax.
[JtN] Planned Parenthood’s network of clinics regains access to hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid funding this weekend after Republicans failed to pass an extension of the one-year defunding they passed last year in the One Big Beautiful Act, which took effect in July 2025.
As a result, clinics across the country can again bill Medicaid “for reimbursement after providing non-abortion services, like birth control and screenings for sexually-transmitted infections, to low-income patients,” according to Politico.
This has drawn the ire of conservative lawmakers and activists for prioritizing other issues, such as immigration and military spending. They have been sending angry letters to Capitol Hill, picketed outside the Republican National Committee headquarters, and even pressured the White House to intervene.
Leaders of the pro-life movement consider this a major blow to voters’ morale, even more so than the Trump administration’s inaction on abortion pills, since they see this as backsliding on something they had already won.
While Republicans did push last year to make the defunding permanent or at least make it a decade-long defunding of Planned Parenthood, the Senate parliamentarian forced them to cut it back to a one-year measure, according to the outlet.
That is why the leaders of the pro-life movement have pushed to have the parliamentarian fired.
[JtN] A federal judge slapped down by his appeals court for "abuse of discretion" — continuing a contempt investigation of the Trump administration related to its deportation flights — saw nothing wrong with secretly authorizing the Biden administration to pore over the whole digital life of President Trump's friend and former adviser.
Government watchdogs are pressing different judges in D.C. federal court to open the books on the Biden administration's alleged censorship-industrial complex and weaponization of the feds against political enemies, as the FOIA case nears its conclusion and Michael Caputo seeks a peek at the search warrant against him authorized by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg.
The FBI wrongly claims that a FOIA exemption for records "compiled for law enforcement purposes" completely shields its payments to platforms including the former Twitter, known to have received more than $3 million to process censorship requests, the New Civil Liberties Alliance said in its motion for summary judgment against the feds.
#1
About payments and the Biden FBI — though hopefully it’s those who were, not those who are now. Remember the photo of the “Patriot Front” on the Metro the other day? We have a rabid Democrat photographer and a model who had just exposed herself moments before:
BONUS INFO: Shocking coincidence that the photographer is a raging Dem and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He is also a follower of BLM and an aficionado of Justin Pearson. Not a chance that it was staged, I’m sure. pic.twitter.com/gf9BilxYnw
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
