How Money Actually Works
When the government hires private contractors to deliver welfare, often these companies essentially steal people’s benefits through a variety of mechanisms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXpqejgnaB0
Tag: Bureaucracy
This Is Why People Hate the Government | The Ezra Klein Show
When the government makes applying for welfare hard, they mostly just waste a lot of people’s time and make it so people who qualify for benefits do not get them because the application is too burdensome. Such qualifications don’t boost employment, they just make poor people suffer more.
It’s easier to get subsidies that mostly go to those with higher incomes.
When you make qualifying for benefits difficult, you make it harder to track fraud. The biggest fraudsters are organized actors that know how to get around complex requirements. More fraud is doctors and wealthy people cheating on payments and tax subsidies, than poor people cheating to get food or healthcare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oZd7wpZuAc
Socialists Are WINNING Elections. Mehdi & Sam Seder Explain Why
We can hope that Trump’s corruption and authoritarian tendencies are gone with him, but the damage done to the government’s ability to implement policies that help those in need, protect people from the powerful, and invest in the future…this destruction will be difficult to rebuild.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt0a8tR6e68
Inside Kash Patel’s F.B.I.
Trump and Patel have moved the FBI relatively more toward politics and optics and away from the criminal justice mission.
FBI agents were pulled away from their work to focus on immigration, despite that ICE got massive funding and a mass of new ICE agents.
FBI agents determined that people were peacefully protesting and that there was nothing to investigate. The Trump administration ordered them to investigate anyways.
Some FBI agents were pushed out or forced to quit on principle. These were trained agents doing their jobs well, now out of the agency.
The way Trump runs the bureaucracy is similar to how many dictators run their bureaucracies. He hires, promotes, and fires based on loyalty, not competency. Overtime, this makes agencies less effective, less principled, less competent, more corrupt, and more loyal to the dictator. This is how many dictators have ineffective governments, and their people suffer as a result.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm7n_74Wh6Y
Nate Swanson & Richard Haass: America’s War of Choice on Iran | Foreign Affairs Interview
It seems that Trump got overconfident from the military’s dazzling success in Venezuela. That, combined with Trump gutting the bureaucracy that actually knew a lot about Iran, led to a war against Iran that’s harder to win than Trump expected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgHH_y8tceI
4 Ways Trump Is Reshaping the U.S. Immigration Bureaucracy
“USCIS currently has 11.3 million pending applications, “the largest immigration backlog in its history,” reported Newsweek in November. While officials say green card and visa processing are getting faster, “agency data from January through March shows that processing times for several key immigration forms have continued to rise, leaving applicants waiting months or even years longer than expected.” The “closure of consulates abroad” and “planned firing of State Department staff,” the MPI noted in April, were also “expected to lengthen visa wait times.””
https://reason.com/2026/02/03/trumps-bureaucratic-war-on-immigrants/
The Minnesota Welfare Fraud Story Is Really About a Broken Medicaid Bureaucracy
Because states run programs like Medicaid, but the federal government pays for over half of it, states have the incentive to come up with new programs and less incentive to properly police Medicaid spending.
“state and federal prosecutors have been trying to bust fraudulent preschools and other Medicaid fraud schemes in Minnesota for more than a decade. And yet, there are always more. Law enforcement is doing its best, but the problem seems to be that the state’s welfare bureaucracy is doing a terrible job of stopping the scammers in the first place.
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This is not just a problem in Minnesota either. Medicaid fraud is remarkably common. The federal departments of Justice and Health and Human Services run a joint program to catch fraudsters, and in 2024 alone it accounted for 1,151 convictions that recovered almost $1.4 billion.
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Anyone who wants to stop Medicaid fraud should focus less on scoring partisan political points or demonizing immigrants and more on the boring work of fixing federal policy.
Telling states to pay for a larger share of their own Medicaid spending seems like an obvious step in the right direction. It would give state officials—from governors like Walz all the way down to the lowest-ranking bureaucrat—a stronger incentive to prevent waste and fraud in the first place. It would reduce the burden placed on out-of-state taxpayers when states with lax enforcement allow fraud like this to occur.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/30/the-minnesota-welfare-fraud-story-is-really-about-a-broken-medicaid-bureaucracy/
Trump’s plans to shatter the bureaucracy have a green light at the Supreme Court
“some legal experts say that as a practical matter, the administration — emboldened by the justices — has already managed to eliminate job protections that have been on the books for nearly 150 years.
President Donald Trump’s drive to replace agency leaders and his mass firings across the federal government are all based on the same basic legal concept: the unitary executive theory. It holds that every employee of the executive branch is answerable to, and fireable at will by, the president.
The most extreme version of the unitary executive theory holds that the central premise of the civil service — that rank-and-file government employees shouldn’t be hired or fired for political reasons or simply on the president’s whim — is unconstitutional because it tramples on the president’s power to control the federal government.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/07/supreme-court-trump-firings-humphreys-executor-00679728
Judge extends order barring mass firings of federal workers during shutdown
“A federal judge has indefinitely extended her order banning the Trump administration from mass firing federal employees during the government shutdown.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/28/government-shutdown-federal-workers-rifs-ruling-00626042
Judge pauses cuts to US Agency for Global Media
“A federal judge has paused the Trump administration’s plan to lay off more than 500 employees of the U.S. Agency for Global Media — most from Voice of America — while warning that senior officials there had repeatedly failed to comply with his orders to preserve the international broadcaster’s key operations.”
The Trump administration is defying the courts.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/29/judge-pauses-cuts-to-us-agency-for-global-media-00586081