Washington Has Appointed Someone to Look Into Washington
The government would like to assure you that the government is on top of it.
But first, it’s my BIRTHDAY! I am now exactly six years older than Rue McClanahan was when The Golden Girls made its debut. If anyone needs me,
I’ll be out shopping for Bengay and stale peppermints.
Apparently, we fought the British crown for independence so we could one day govern ourselves through an elaborate network of increasingly specialized… czars. We’ve had energy czars, drug czars, border czars, COVID czars, and at least one car czar during the Obama administration—which was a real job title that real Americans said out loud with straight faces. The Czar Industrial Complex™ has been quietly expanding for decades, and nobody seemed to notice or mind, because at least it sounded like someone was in charge of something.
Now, the federal government has appointed a “fraud czar” to investigate the misuse of funds inside the federal government, which feels less like public policy and more like putting the seagulls in charge of solving the mystery of missing french fries at the beach.
After being appointed our nation’s very first fraud czar, Vice President JD Vance announced this week that the Trump administration is suspending $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California over what officials describe as questionable expenditures, suspicious billing patterns, and widespread bureaucratic monkey business. Minnesota got the same treatment earlier this year.
All fifty states are now being warned that if they fail to “aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud,” the federal government will freeze funding to the very anti-fraud units created to investigate Medicaid fraud. Which is basically the federal version of, “If you’re not going to babysit the kids, I’m not paying you to babysit the kids.” Outrageous it is not.
To be clear, this is not a task force assembled to investigate fraud. Those already exist in every state. This is a task force assembled to investigate the task forces that exist to investigate fraud. In other words: new watchdogs will be watching the old watchdogs who have been sitting around watching the fraud happen. We have officially reached peak administrative state.
“No amount of fraud is too big or too small,” Vance said. “If you’re defrauding the taxpayers, you ought to go to prison. And anybody that’s helping you ought to go to prison, too.”
According to the administration, California alone needs to explain roughly $630 million in billing discrepancies, $500 million in home healthcare services, and $200 million in expenditures for undocumented immigrants. California officials say they’re being targeted for political reasons—which may be true. It is also true that asking a giant bureaucracy where enormous piles of taxpayer money went is not, historically, an act of tyranny.
Vance’s partner in this aggressive endeavor is Dr. Mehmet Oz—yes, the former daytime TV host who spent the better part of the 2000s explaining the spiritual benefits of green tea to suburban moms and peddling “magic” weight-loss supplements. As the current Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Oz is now knee-deep in coding irregularities and taxpayer-funded confusion rather than miracle metabolism boosters, proving once again that America is a land of endless opportunity.
According to the Great and Powerful Oz, one-third of all end-of-life centers in the entire country are in Los Angeles—think about just that for a second—and a full half of those are complete fakes. Money-sucking fronts. Elaborate shams. Ghost operations with zero actual patients and not a single hour of care being administered. Which is a horrible accusation to make against the Quality Hotspice Center, frankly, so I hope he has receipts.
Here’s the part I find genuinely fascinating: Nobody heard “Medicaid fraud crackdown” and gasped. There was no national moment of disbelief that someone had implied inefficiency inside a sprawling federal healthcare maze involving trillions of dollars, thousands of contractors, overlapping agencies, pharmaceutical incentives, billing codes, private providers, middlemen, and enough paperwork to bury a horse.
Americans hear “fraud in government healthcare programs” the same way medieval peasants heard “rats in the grain supply.” I mean, whaddayagonnado? Of course there’s fraud! Everyone already assumed there was fraud. The only surprising part is that it took a 23-year-old YouTuber and a television doctor to expose it because the agencies specifically created and funded to find it apparently had other things going on.
This is how every massive government system eventually evolves. First comes the program. Then the inefficiencies. Then the loopholes. Then the fraud. Then the oversight committees. Then the anti-fraud task forces. Then the analytics divisions monitoring the task forces monitoring the fraud. Then the czar. Then, eventually, cable news panels debating whether investigating obvious waste constitutes fascism.
The fact that a state can “lose” half a billion dollars in a digital economy is the real punchline. Your bank knows exactly how much you spent on Amazon this month to the literal cent, yet the federal government—with access to the same digital infrastructure—can’t find hundreds of millions in California. That’s not incompetence; it’s what happens when you let a system become the bureaucratic equivalent of a fat, drunk uncle in diapers—too bloated to manage, too messy to confront, and too old to care.
The truly staggering thing is not the waste itself. Again: expected. It’s the sheer number of people required to monitor, scrutinize, supervise, regulate, investigate, and explain the waste generated by other people tasked with monitoring, scrutinizing, supervising, regulating, and explaining things. At some point you’re not running a government program anymore. You’re running a government program that’s staffing the production company that’s making a documentary about running the government program.
Meanwhile ordinary Americans are just standing in CVS trying to figure out why a tube of toothpaste now requires a retinal scan and a payment plan.
My favorite part of this entire story is picturing someone, somewhere in Washington, finally looking around at the flaming administrative dumpster fire America has spent half a century stoking and concluding:
“You know what this needs? A czar.”
At this very moment, a taxpayer-funded committee is probably hard at work assembling a Federal Task Force to Oversee the Office of Fraud-Oversight Oversight Accountability.
P.S. Hotspice was an intentional typo. A joke. If anyone calls that out unironically, I reserve the right to manually unsubscribe you from my list.
"the bureaucratic equivalent of a fat, drunk uncle in diapers—too bloated to manage, too messy to confront, and too old to care." - now that's a creative visual I really didn't want to "see"!
“Meanwhile ordinary Americans are just standing in CVS trying to figure out why a tube of toothpaste now requires a retinal scan and a payment plan.” 🤣🤣🤣
You crack me up every time 😘.
Happy Birthday you Golden Girl Bad Ass! ❤️🤬🍑🥰