Beyond Fraud: Citizen Journalists Unmask Crazy Government Waste

The mainstream media has pooh-poohed Shirley’s work (no doubt while lounging at their desks), but he continues to show them up with the kind of shoe-leather, public-service reporting that journalists used to do.

While Shirley’s work is important, he’s looking at only part of the problem. There is no question that outright fraud against federal entitlement programs is rampant. And we hope the fraudsters face swift and sure judgment and that laws are changed to stop fraud at the source. (See “The Fraud Industry Is Thriving, And Guess Who’s Happy About It.”)

But not all government fraud is illegal. In fact, we’d say that legal fraud is an even bigger scam than what Shirley is uncovering.

This fraud involves lawmakers opening the spending floodgates for projects that line the pockets of unions and politically connected businesses, while doing nothing to improve the lives of the taxpayers who foot the bill. And this is a decidedly bipartisan scam. And it needs just as much attention as the schemes Shirley is documenting.

For example, Bess Byers, a digital marketing specialist at Reason magazine, took viewers to a slab of sidewalk that taxpayers spent just under $1 million to repave — in the name of climate change.

She goes through the numbers in the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2021 and finds that among the multitude of spending programs was $6.5 billion for “carbon reduction” projects. One of these was $961,000 to replace what looks like 5 square feet of concrete in San Bernardino, Calif. How would that reduce carbon emissions, you ask? Because it would allegedly improve walkability.

But Byers goes there and finds that not only is there a giant telephone pole in the middle of the slab, the “repaired” sidewalk ends right past the point where it was repaired.

As if that weren’t bad enough, “in 2025, the city dug it up again,” she notes. In another, she takes viewers to the Ivanpah Solar Power facility, a 3,500-acre boondoggle in California built with a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee that is shutting down just 12 years after it opened.

These are small potatoes compared to the billions wasted on EV charging stations that were never built, or the $42 billion for a broadband program that connected zero homes, or the countless other spending programs that are little more than legalized graft.

But what matters is that these reporters are on the scene. They are providing viewers with direct evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse. People knew about the fraud in Minnesota for years, but it wasn’t until Shirley brought his camera to the “Learing” centers and confronted the employees who were defrauding Medicaid that the public took notice. Likewise, everyone knows about government waste. But there’s nothing like seeing it firsthand to make you appreciate how pernicious it is.

We need much, much more of this kind of journalism, and much less of the preening blowhards who spend their days sitting at their desks regurgitating Democratic talking points.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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