They want you to believe it’s incompetence. It isn’t. The federal government’s “improper payments” are the clearest proof yet that the Swamp doesn’t just waste your money — it runs on it.

This week the GAO admitted the feds pushed out an estimated $186 billion in improper payments in fiscal year 2025 — and that’s only the part they can measure. As PJ Media laid out, more than half of all federal spending can’t even be traced to confirm it reached the right recipient. Read that again: trillions move through Washington every year, and nobody can say with certainty where it went.

The rot isn’t hiding in the shadows — it’s baked into the programs. Citizens Against Government Waste reports that roughly 6.2 million Obamacare enrollments this year — about 27% of all ACA sign-ups — were improper, costing up to $25 billion in subsidies. Add business loans handed to “entrepreneurs” as young as 11 and unemployment checks mailed to infants and people listed as 115 years old, and you stop seeing a glitch. You see a machine that feeds itself.

To their credit, House Republicans are finally swinging the axe. The National Taxpayers Union is pushing a stack of bills aimed straight at the rot — Rep. Comer’s Pre-Payment Fraud Prevention and Treasury Data Access Act, Rep. Self’s Federal Program Integrity and Fraud Prevention Act, Rep. Palmer’s ZOMBIE Act, and Rep. Biggs’ TRUE Accountability Act.

Good. But don’t go lukewarm on me. This didn’t grow overnight, and it didn’t grow under one party. Both sides of the aisle built and guarded this machine for decades, because the money flows to the right friends — the contractors, the NGOs, the activist outfits that vote the way the donor class wants. Every “improper payment” is somebody’s paycheck, and that somebody has a lobbyist.

Here’s the truth underneath the spreadsheet: a government that can’t account for half of what it spends has stopped serving the people and started feeding itself. Scripture doesn’t blink at this — “The wicked worketh a deceitful work” (Proverbs 11:18, KJV) — and there is nothing more deceitful than dressing up theft as bureaucracy and calling fraud a rounding error.

The mask is off. The question isn’t whether Washington wastes your money. It’s whether the men finally holding the axe will swing hard enough to sever the hand that’s been feeding itself — or whether these bills become one more press release that changes nothing.

Watch the votes. Names matter. So does follow-through.