Seniors Paid Billions in Extra Premiums Due to Alleged Medicare Overpayments

A congressional committee finds that controversial practices like adding diagnoses in Medicare Advantage triggered higher bills

By Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Mathews of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"The average American senior’s Medicare premiums last year were about 10% higher, or more than $200 annually, because of alleged overpayments to private Medicare Advantage plans, congressional investigators found.

Medicare Part B premiums that most seniors pay were partly pushed up by controversial health-insurer practices such as adding diagnoses to trigger higher payments"

"Overpayments to Medicare Advantage insurers increased Part B premiums by $13.4 billion in 2025"

"Medicare Advantage costs the federal government more than traditional Medicare, partly because of insurers’ billing practices. The insurers are paid more to cover enrollees who have more health conditions, and they can boost their reimbursement by recording more diagnoses."

"in 2025 Medicare Advantage cost roughly 20% more than traditional Medicare."

"insurer practices contribute to potential overpayments. For instance, insurers sent nurses to patients’ homes, where they documented diagnoses that trigger more payments."

"Medicare officials nevertheless moved in January to remove some of the tools insurers use to increase their payments, such as certain behind-the-scenes reviews of medical charts that can lead to extra diagnoses." 

How a $30 Billion Welfare Program Became a ‘Slush Fund’ for States

Republicans and Democrats alike decry the lack of oversight for America’s famous antipoverty experiment. ‘Fraud by design.’

By Cameron McWhirter, Dan Frosch and Scott Calvert of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, has long been plagued by poor financial oversight and questionable spending in states led by both Republicans and Democrats.

"Auditors in numerous states . . . . have uncovered problems with TANF"

"TANF funds flow annually through block grants to states, which have wide latitude to spend them and minimal reporting requirements—a structure critics say hampers oversight."

"States now award most of the money to nonprofits, companies and their own state agencies. An average of about 849,000 families got direct cash aid each month in fiscal 2025, federal data shows, down from about 1.9 million in fiscal 2010."

"states inaccurately reporting large expenditures and disbursing millions of dollars to contractors without tracking how the cash was spent."

"states  . . . have directed hundreds of millions of dollars to programs with tenuous—or no—connections to TANF’s goals."

"college scholarships that benefited middle- or upper-income families, antiabortion centers, a volleyball stadium in Mississippi, and an Ohio job-training nonprofit where leaders and employees were later sentenced to prison after prosecutors said they used TANF money for vacations, real estate and salaries for people who didn’t work there."

"the GAO identified 37 states where recent audits found 162 deficiencies in financial oversight, “56 of which were severe.”"

"“opaque accounting practices”"

"States often use TANF money as a “slush fund” to plug budget shortfalls and finance initiatives that don’t help poor people"

"The most prominent scandal involving TANF funds, at least $77 million, took place several years ago in Mississippi."

"officials have often failed to track where the money goes or whether it is spent properly."

"Louisiana . . . state employees didn’t verify or document the hours worked by some TANF enrollees"

"hadn’t accurately documented TANF distributions to contractors."

"In Connecticut, auditors said the state in 2024 didn’t sufficiently review the financial reports of 131 subcontractors who received $53.6 million in TANF funds"

"states don’t have to spend all their TANF money in a single year, and many have built up large surpluses. In times of fiscal pressure, such as the 2007-09 recession, many states used TANF funds for purposes that had little to do with the program’s original goals"

"Several states have also used TANF money for programs available to people well above the poverty threshold.

Between 2011 and 2024, Michigan faced criticism for pumping more than $750 million in TANF funds into two college scholarship programs that aided many students from middle-income and even affluent families" 

Billions Spent, Few Trucks Delivered: The USPS EV Fiasco

By Craig Eyermann of the Independent Institute.

"At any given time, the U.S. government is spending taxpayer dollars that are being wasted. Today’s example is being delivered by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).

That’s a shame, because with around 533,000 career employees and another 106,000 non-career employees, the Postal Service accounts for about one out of every five of the U.S. government’s three million civilian employees. From post offices to stamp machines, mailboxes, and mail trucks, they represent the most visible connection Americans have with the federal government in their daily lives.

But that connection doesn’t prevent them from squandering the resources of the taxpayers whose interests they are supposed to serve.

In August 2022, when the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act became law, taxpayers provided over $3 billion to government contractor Oshkosh Defense to design and build 35,000 electric battery-powered mail trucks. These supposedly environmentally friendly vehicles were intended to replace the Postal Service’s fleet of gasoline-powered mail trucks.

It has been described as both “unusual” and “ugly.” It’s certainly very different than the very familiar vehicles that have preceded it

Three years later, the U.S. Postal Service is far behind schedule in its ambition to switch over to battery-powered mail trucks. As of November 10, 2025, it is operating a total of 612 electric battery-powered mail trucks.

Oshkosh Defense’s production of the Postal Service’s Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) has been troubled. According to the New York Post, the company is producing the vehicles at a rate of about 3 to 4 per day. That is far short of the 80 vehicles per day the company projected it would be making by December 2024.

The massive shortfall in actual versus projected deliveries of functional battery-electric mail trucks has prompted several fiscally responsible members of Congress to attempt to claw back funding and halt production of the vehicles, in favor of other vehicles that the Postal Service can acquire and operate in greater numbers.

They have a strong case. If Americans want to rely on receiving regular mail service, having postal carriers in mail trucks that can be built and operated as needed is vital to meet that demand. Despite its years in development and billions of dollars in cost to taxpayers, it doesn’t seem that the Postal Service’s battery-electric NGDV is going to deliver anytime soon."

The Federal Government Spent $3.3 Billion on Office Furniture as Employees Worked From Home

The Department of Defense spent $1.2 billion on furniture between 2020 and 2022, although it only uses 23 percent of its office space.

By Joe Lancaster of Reason. 

"More than three years since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears that working from home is here to stay. A March 2023 Pew Research survey noted that of all Americans who have the option, more than one-third work entirely remotely—a fivefold increase from pre-pandemic levels. Another 41 percent work a hybrid schedule of both remote and in-person work, an increase from 35 percent in January 2022.

Federal employees are no different: According to a November 2022 survey, one-third of federal employees work entirely remotely while 60 percent work a hybrid schedule; most of the hybrid group go into the office one day per week and work remotely the other four days.

So why, then, is the federal government still spending billions of dollars on office furniture?

According to a new report by the government watchdog organization OpenTheBooks.com, the federal government has spent $3.3 billion on office furniture since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report found "no material difference in the amount federal agencies collectively spent on office furniture between the years 2018 and 2022." In fact, the government spent considerably less in 2018 than in any of the subsequent four years.

A July 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) surveyed the 24 federal agencies that occupy most of the federal government's buildings. It found that 17 out of the 24 agencies "used an estimated average 25 percent or less of their headquarters buildings' capacity in a three-week sample period across January, February, and March of 2023."

In fact, none of the agencies surveyed—which included the Departments of Defense, Commerce, State, Justice, Homeland Security, and the Treasury, among others—used more than 49 percent of their capacity in an average week.

The GAO report notes that none of the surveyed agencies have returned to pre-pandemic staffing levels and have instead embraced the hybrid model. The situation presents a cost-saving opportunity, according to the report, as "the federal government retains more space than it needs" and did so even prior to the pandemic.

Not that the government seems to be paying attention. Using the GAO report's ranges, OpenTheBooks.com compared expenditures on office furniture with the agencies' respective levels of in-person staffing. In one example, despite only using around 9 percent of its office space, OpenTheBooks.com found that the Department of Agriculture spent almost $57 million on furniture between 2020–22. The General Services Administration—which manages federally owned buildings, including the purchase of office furniture—also uses only around 9 percent of its total office space, and yet it spent $308 million on furniture.

The biggest pandemic purchaser was the Department of Defense, which spent $1.2 billion on furniture although it only uses 23 percent of the space at its administrative headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, according to OpenTheBooks.com.

"Most federal headquarters are barely a quarter full on a given workday, and no major agency is at more than half capacity," OpenTheBooks.com founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski said in a statement. "Yet for some reason we've bankrolled [billions of] dollars in desks, chairs, couches and more – while employees clock in from their own living rooms."

Government furniture scandals are nothing new: In 2017, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spent over $31,000 on a dining room set for Secretary Ben Carson's office. The HUD inspector general later reported that it "did not find sufficient evidence to substantiate allegations of misconduct" as Carson canceled the expenditure once it was reported in the media.

In 2018, the West Virginia House of Delegates impeached members of the state's Supreme Court of Appeals over lavish spending of state funds. The justices reportedly spent more than $3 million on furnishings and renovations as the struggling state made tens of millions of dollars in budget cuts. One justice in particular spent over $500,000, including $28,000 on rugs; another spent $32,000 on a blue suede sectional sofa."

Pentagon suppressed study that revealed $125B in waste: report

By Mallory Shelbourne of The Hill.

"The Department of Defense suppressed one of its own studies that revealed $125 billion in wasteful spending, according to an investigation published by the The Washington Post.

The newspaper found that the study, commissioned by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work, was hidden because of fears Congress would cut defense spending.

The Defense Business Board, along with McKinsey & Company consultants, conducted the study, which produced a the 2015 report titled, “Transforming DoD’s Core Business Processes for Revolutionary Change.”

In an interview with the Post, Work said the report proposal was “unrealistic.”
“There is this meme that we’re some bloated, giant organization,” Work told the newspaper. “Although there is a little bit of truth in that ... I think it vastly overstates what’s really going on."
“We’re the largest bureaucracy in the world. There’s going to be some inherent inefficiencies in that,” he said.

In the course of its investigation into the business operations of the Pentagon McKinsey place the various operations into five groups: supply chain and logistics; financial-flow management; human resources; acquisition and procurement; and health-care management. A sixth category was later added for real property management.

A confidential memo issued by the consulting firm put the spending on these categories at anywhere from $75 billion to $100 billion.

The report ultimately found that the Defense Department was spending more than $134 billion on business operations each year. The board putting the study together decided to propose that the Pentagon try to save $125 billion over a five-year period.

But the report received backlash from top Pentagon officials, including the chief weapons-buyer Frank Kendall III.

“If the impression that’s created is that we’ve got a bunch of money lying around and we’re being lazy and we’re not doing anything to save money, then it’s harder to justify getting budgets that we need,” he told the newspaper in an interview.

Robert “Bobby” L. Stein, the chairman of the board who commissioned the study, alleged that Secretary of Defense Ash Carter suppressed the study on purpose.

“Unfortunately, Ash — for reasons of his own — stopped this,” Stein told the Post.

Peter Cook, a spokesman for the Defense Secretary, told the newspaper that Carter had “a long list of national security challenges” to handle. Cook also said that Work and other Pentagon officials “concluded that the report, while well-intentioned, had limited value.”"