In fifty times. an obscure academic from an obscure college will write an obscure paper about” The Total Waste, Fraud, Abuse, and Mismanagement of$ 4 Trillion in COVID-19 Relief Funds During the 2020 Pandemic” . ,
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Three people will read it and then forget about it right away. It will end up being forgotten and never seen or heard of afterwards.
That’s a pity for many reasons. First is responsibilities. The dozens and dozens of government managers who wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on everything and hundreds of billions on theft, misuse, or completely lost did go unidentifed. In some countries, like as Japan, this kind of stupidity is severely punished. In America, you get promoted.
Second, without learning the lessons from wasted pandemic investing, we’re sure to duplicate the same mistakes, hire the same kinds of idiots and morons to receive the money, and then desperately try to hide their incompetence to prevent responsibility.  ,
A recent Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General ( OIG ) report reveals some incredible examples of waste, fraud, and abuse at the Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA ) during the pandemic. What was FEMA doing issuing trillions of support during the non-disaster COVID-19 crisis? I don’t suppose anyone’s gotten a sufficient answer to that question.
Like all national agencies during the pandemic, FEMA developed” streamlined” techniques to dish out money. What did that mean? In essence, it meant that the majority of the guardrails put in place to stop fraud and other abuses were abandoned in favor of dumping income as much money as possible into the system.
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FEMA could as well have engraved invitations to fraudsters to offer themselves some money, not just in the United States but also all over the world.  ,
The condition, which the OIG does not title, received about$ 853 million from FEMA in September 2020 to handle staffing shortages at over 200 heath care facilities nationwide. Over the next year, FEMA incrementally increased funding, eventually awarding over$ 9 billion, which the state did not need. From May 2021 to April 2023, unspent grant funds reached$ 4 billion, before falling to$ 1.5 billion. This was not known to FEMA until April 2023, when an OIG investigation was conducted. The agency subsequently de-obligated$ 500 million of the state’s funding.  ,
According to the OIG, FEMA did not “validate cost estimates or determine cost reasonableness before obligating funds.” One of the cost estimates, which totaled$ 1.1 billion, was supported by one sheet of paper, which did not include itemized costs and was not conducted by a” cost-estimating professional” ( which is required under FEMA guidelines ).  ,
How could they be so clueless? Tracking the money, asking if it was being well-spent, checking to see that the expenditures were justified — the normal, day-to-day duties of any manager anywhere— were simply not followed.  ,
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The OIG also looked into 20 other FEMA grants, which included billions of dollars in improper payments, and concluded that it had awarded more than$ 32 million in improper payments. According to OIG, six of these projects “did not have the necessary supporting documentation to verify completion of the work and actual costs incurred before project award and reimbursement.” In addition, according to the report, three FEMA employees were told not to “deep dive” when evaluating project eligibility in 2020.
Does this mismanagement escalate to the level of criminal activity? The perpetrators of this mess were well aware that there would be a lot of fraud and waste. How could they not, when the very steps in place to stop fraud had been purposefully eliminated?
There should be a criminal statute if there isn’t one that addresses this kind of shocking disregard for the public purse.  ,
