I have to say, now I have seen everything.
Over the last few months, massive fraud has been reported around the country, including fraud that was exposed during the shutdown.
The one case that really caught my eye, however, was the case in Massachusetts, which was filed by the state auditor against the state legislature.
While we have seen fraud right across the board, to the point I have wondered just how much of the government’s budget is being flushed down the toilet every year, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) fraud was brought to light during the shutdown.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins claimed SNAP was "so bloated, so broken, so dysfunctional, so corrupt that it is astonishing when you dig in."
She made these claims while the media was accusing the administration of starving people who relied on SNAP to put food on the table.
This created a rather interesting dilemma… do you continue to fund the program for optics, or do you slam the brakes on it to rid it of fraud before relaunching it?
Now we can fast forward to February, as many states started to look for fraud on their own before Nick Shirley showed up with his camera. Mind you, states should have been monitoring this all along, but nobody wanted to be the next viral video.
In Massachusetts, State Auditor Diana DiZoglio revealed that she found nearly $12 million in fraud for public assistance programs during 2025.
Of that $12 million, $4.1 million was found in the state’s SNAP program, otherwise known as the food stamp program.
One would think that everyone would want to get to the bottom of this, but that did not appear to be the case, so DiZoglio wound up taking extreme measures.
Rather than keeping her mouth shut and protecting her party, DiZoglio filed suit against the state legislature, asking, “What are they hiding?”
She stated, “This is about transparency and accountability. This is not about whether you support the right or the left. This is about coming together and getting access to documents that should be a matter of public record.”
Seh continued, “Here in Massachusetts, we are [the] only state in the nation that unfortunately has a legislature, governor’s office, and court system that exempt themselves from the state’s public records law.”
Now, I don’t know how much fraud we have in government, but I do know fraud has been taking place since I was old enough to understand the meaning of the word. Anyone in my age bracket will remember the stories of the Pentagon paying $1,200 for hammers. Here is my question… just how much of the roughly $6 trillion the government spends each year is lost to fraud simply because state and federal oversight is not doing its job?
If they were, there would be no fraud, right? A lot of people have a lot to answer for this on both sides of the aisle. What exactly is the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability doing? What purpose did the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) serve if billions were fraudulently stolen in pandemic relief funds? Give me a microphone on a national scale, and these are the questions I would be putting to leadership on both sides of the aisle.
