Letter to the Editor: Fighting Fraud Won’t Fix the Federal Budget

The vice president rightly called on Congress to support the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse in federal welfare programs. Better oversight, stronger eligibility verification and improved data matching can reduce improper payments and strengthen public trust.

But the scale of the problem must be kept in perspective. Vance reported that the administration has stopped $56 billion in fraudulent spending — a worthwhile achievement. Yet that figure is small compared with the more than $1 trillion the federal government spends every year on more than 90 welfare programs.

America’s broader budget challenges are far bigger. And they are driven primarily by the unsustainable design of federal spending programs, not by fraud. Even eliminating every fraudulent payment would do little to change the federal government’s fiscal trajectory. The main debt drivers are structural: an aging population, rising health care costs, flawed federal-state financing arrangements and entitlement programs whose spending grows automatically under existing law. Congress should thus go further than addressing fraud. Aligning spending authority with fiscal responsibility would do more to improve stewardship than federal fraud-fighting efforts can accomplish alone.

Stabilizing the nation’s finances will require structural reforms to major entitlement programs so that they better align benefits, incentives and financing with fiscal, demographic and economic realities.