OPINION:
High-end department stores aren’t the only things looted when Democrats are in charge. When Donald Trump ordered his Cabinet to clean up the mess he inherited from his predecessor, he didn’t realize how widespread the pilfering of the Treasury had become.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told the president last week that 686,000 chiselers had been kicked off the SNAP dole since January. This included 186,000 recipients who used Social Security numbers that belonged to corpses. She caught half a million double-dipping on food stamps.
“We had a couple of people receiving benefits in six states,” Ms. Rollins said. “In February this year, we asked for all the states for the first time to turn over their data to the federal government to let the USDA partner with them to root out this fraud to make sure those who really need food stamps are getting them, but also to ensure the American taxpayer is protected.”
Not surprisingly, 21 Democratic-run states refuse to allow Uncle Sam to audit their books. Because their programs draw from the federal purse, the likes of California and New York have no standing to resist the request for transparency. The administration is showing it’s serious about solving the problem by cutting off these quarrelsome states.
Their SNAP funding will resume when they agree to boot the loafers, charlatans and illegal aliens from the books, a fate blue states are desperate to avoid.
Democrats might not trust Ms. Rollins to point out their failings, but she is not the only one raising an alarm. The Government Accountability Office is also uncovering scams, and the outgoing comptroller general is hardly a fan of the president.
GAO investigators logged into the Obamacare website and demonstrated how trivial it is to hustle a few thousand dollars out of the system.
“As appropriate, we used publicly available information to construct our applications for coverage and subsidies. We also used publicly available hardware, software, and materials to produce counterfeit documents that we submitted,” the new report explains.
Embezzlers could even bypass the need to create bogus records by using a broker to complete the con. Out of 24 attempts made, two failed in a process that made no real effort to verify citizenship. The cash kept flowing through September, which means the system remains broken.
Liberals mocked Department of Government Efficiency guru Elon Musk when he insisted that Social Security numbers were being used in massive swindles. GAO just confirmed Mr. Musk’s intuition.
“For example, the most frequently used SSN in plan year 2023 was used to receive subsidized insurance coverage for over 26,000 days (over 71 years of coverage) across over 125 insurance policies,” GAO auditors wrote.
At least 66,000 SSNs were linked to accounts receiving multiple benefits despite the requirement that one individual receive one subsidy. The living used another 58,000 numbers belonging to dead people to grab entitlements they didn’t deserve.
Democrats will likely shut down the government a second time to leverage expansion and extension of the Obamacare giveaway. The liberal mind lacks any capacity to evaluate costs because doing so gets in the way of feeling virtuous about “helping the needy.” Thus, the left doesn’t care if a few billion here and a few billion there go to waste.
Republicans must reject demands to rescue this fraud-riddled program that Democrats unilaterally imposed on the nation.
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