THE PARASITIC STATE: US GOV FRAUD

Some of these allegations are based on the testimony of Elon Musk. Others are blatant fact. Research to find the truth.

Musk has recently pulled back the curtain on what may be the most devastating scandal in American government: a system so riddled with fraud that it bleeds hundreds of billions of dollars annually—money extracted not just from today's taxpayers, but from children not yet born who will inherit this debt.

During his podcast with Joe Rogan, Musk detailed findings from his work with the Department of Government Efficiency. The conversation revealed a government that has evolved from servant to parasite, with a protected class of bureaucrats and beneficiaries fighting to preserve the graft.

The Scope of the Theft

The numbers demand attention. According to the Government Accountability Office, the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud. Since fiscal year 2003, cumulative improper payment estimates have totaled approximately $2.8 trillion.

Musk highlighted a particularly egregious example in the Social Security Administration database. Analysis revealed millions of people listed with impossible birthdates—some with future birth dates, others allegedly over 130 years old. "Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security," Musk quipped darkly, before adding: "This might be the biggest fraud in the history of humanity."

The Social Security Administration's own Inspector General confirmed serious problems, reporting nearly $72 billion in improper payments between fiscal years 2015 and 2022. At the end of FY 2023, SSA had an uncollected overpayment balance of $23 billion.

The Payments That Never Stop

Musk discussed what he called "zombie payments"—government spending that continues flowing long after it should have been terminated. The mechanism is devastatingly simple: once a payment stream begins, bureaucratic inertia ensures it never ends.

"The payments were not turned off," Musk explained. These aren't sophisticated fraud schemes. They're simply payments that keep flowing because nobody bothers to verify eligibility, systems are deliberately designed to resist oversight, or the political cost of stopping them is too high.

Political Calculus Over Fiscal Responsibility

According to Musk's claims on the Joe Rogan podcast, when he attempted to address fraud in government programs, he estimated that 80-90% of fraudulent payments benefited Democratic constituencies, while only 10-20% benefited Republicans. Yet even touching that smaller portion triggered fierce resistance from their own party.

This is the dirty secret: fraud has become a constituency. People whose livelihoods depend on improper payments vote. Bureaucrats whose jobs exist solely to administer these broken systems have unions. Politicians benefit from spending largesse through campaign contributions and vote-buying.

Both parties tacitly agree not to look too closely at the books, lest their own supporters' fraudulent claims be exposed.

God-Like Power and the 50% Solution

Musk's most provocative claim was that with "God-like" power, his DOGE initiative could have cut federal government spending in half while running what remained more efficiently. This wasn't hyperbole—it was acknowledgment of a brutal truth: meaningful reform is impossible within the current system because the system itself has evolved to resist reform.

If half of federal spending could theoretically be eliminated through fraud prevention and efficiency measures, the government operates at roughly 50% waste. Every dollar taken from a working American's paycheck, half disappears into fraud, redundancy, and deliberate mismanagement.

Musk's vision wasn't just about cutting spending—it was about demonstrating that government could function better with dramatically fewer resources. We don't have a funding problem. We have a competence problem, an honesty problem, a structural problem.

The Department of Education: One Example

The Department of Education serves as perhaps the clearest example of how federal bureaucracy metastasizes while outcomes deteriorate. It is far from the only example—merely the most measurable, the most expensive, and the most damaging to our nation's future.

President Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act into law on October 17, 1979, with operations beginning on May 4, 1980. The department started with 3,000 workers and a budget of $12 billion before Congress increased that to 17,000 employees and $14.2 billion.

That was 45 years ago. What do we have to show for it?

In the 2022 Program for International Student Assessment, the U.S. placed 16th out of 81 countries in science and ranked 34th in math, scoring 465 compared to the OECD average of 472. The 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study shows American students still score above the international average, but they rank below children in the highest-performing nations, including Japan, Singapore, and Korea. Countries that previously lagged behind—Poland, Sweden, and Australia—now leapfrog the United States in some subjects.

Average U.S. fourth- and eighth-grade math scores were lower in 2023 than in 2019 by 18 and 27 points respectively. Math results for both grades are now the lowest they have ever been since TIMSS began in 1995.

The Department of Education was established in 1979. Education outcomes have either stagnated or declined ever since. The budget has exploded from $12 billion to over $268 billion. The staff has grown from 3,000 to over 17,000 employees. Student performance has gotten worse.

Centralized federal control of education has been a spectacular, measurable failure. We spent 45 years proving that Washington bureaucrats cannot educate children better than local communities can.

The Department of Education stands as just one cautionary tale among thousands. Across every sector the federal government touches, the pattern repeats: bureaucracy expands, spending explodes, outcomes decline. The Department of Energy, created in 1977, has utterly failed to make America energy independent. The Department of Homeland Security, established after 9/11, has become a bloated security theater apparatus. The Veterans Administration fails our veterans with wait times that kill. The list extends infinitely—each department a monument to the iron law that government programs never shrink, never improve, never deliver on their promises.

A Leaching Class

What we're witnessing is the emergence of a parasitic class. It includes government employees who resist audits, contractors who bill for services never rendered, beneficiaries who continue collecting after they no longer qualify, state agencies that lose track of billions, federal programs that operate with no accountability, and politicians who protect fraud because it benefits their districts.

This class doesn't produce wealth—it extracts it. Unlike the private sector where failure means bankruptcy, in government, failure means bigger budgets and more staff.

Stealing from the Unborn

The most morally reprehensible aspect of this fraud is who ultimately pays for it. When the government borrows money to cover fraudulent payments, it's not borrowing from itself—it's borrowing from our children and grandchildren. Every dollar fraudulently paid out today is a dollar, plus interest, that a child born tomorrow will be forced to repay through taxation during their working years.

This is generational theft. This is taxation without representation applied to people who won't even be born for decades. Our grandchildren will labor under the burden of fraud committed today, paying interest on money stolen before they drew their first breath.

The Case for “Treason”?

If deliberately undermining the fiscal integrity of the nation, systematically stealing from the treasury, and saddling future generations with unpayable debt isn't a betrayal of the American people, what is?

The Constitution defines treason narrowly as levying war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies. While the systematic looting of the treasury may not meet that legal definition, it meets any reasonable ethical standard for betrayal of the public trust.

Those who perpetuate this fraud—whether through active theft, passive incompetence, or deliberate obstruction of oversight—wage war against the fiscal future of the nation. They undermine the foundation of American prosperity, creating a debt bomb that will detonate with catastrophic consequences for everyone except those who have already collected their ill-gotten gains.

The Path Forward: Smaller Government, Greater Freedom

The solution is not more oversight, more auditors, or more regulations. The solution is radical simplification: a government so small, its capacity for fraud is inherently limited.

Sunset Every Program: No government program should be permanent. Every five years, Congress must affirmatively vote to renew each program or let it expire.

Mandatory Real-Time Auditing: Every government payment over $10,000 should trigger automatic review. Modern technology makes this trivial—the only reason it doesn't exist is because bureaucrats don't want it.

Personal Liability for Fraud: Government employees who approve fraudulent payments should face personal financial liability.

Radical Transparency: Every government expenditure should be publicly searchable in real-time. No exceptions.

Eliminate Most Federal Programs: The vast majority of federal spending goes to programs that either duplicate state efforts or shouldn't be government functions at all. These programs should be reformed or eliminated, with states free to create their own systems.

Abolish the Department of Education: Forty-five years of evidence proves centralized federal control of education doesn't work. Return control to states and local communities.

The Moral Imperative

This is about fundamental honesty versus institutionalized theft. This is about whether we will leave our children a nation of opportunity or a wasteland of debt.

Every dollar fraudulently spent is a dollar stolen from someone who worked for it. Every fraudulent payment is an act of theft against a child who will inherit the debt. Every bureaucrat who looks the other way, every politician who protects the system, every beneficiary who collects what they know they don't deserve—they are complicit in one of history's greatest robberies.

Musk's warning should echo in every American's mind: without dramatic reform, the system will continue extracting wealth from the productive economy until there's nothing left to extract. The parasite will kill the host. Our children will inherit the corpse.

The time for incremental reform has passed. The system is too corrupt, too entrenched, too resistant to change. What's needed is demolition. Revolution. A fundamentally different relationship between citizen and state.

Our founders created a government of strictly limited powers precisely because they knew that unchecked government always becomes a tyranny of waste and corruption. We've spent two centuries ignoring their warnings, building a Leviathan that now devours its own people.

The question is no longer whether we can afford to shrink government. The question is whether we can afford not to. The current path leads to a future where our grandchildren labor as debt slaves, paying interest on fraud committed before they were born, supporting a parasitic class that produces nothing yet takes everything.

That future is immoral. It is unconscionable. If we don't change course now, it is inevitable.

The fight against government fraud isn't about saving money—it's about saving America itself.

Up next: the Federal Reserve.

Everything = Everything

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