As Washington Post readers know, there has been extensive corruption in the District of Columbia government for many year, but I’ve been surprised about the relative dearth of news articles on corruption in the suburbs, particularly the Virginia suburbs.

The Trump administration’s 2019 budget would eliminate funding for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) run by the Department of Commerce.

You can learn about how the federal government works from Washington Post obituaries.

The federal government runs more than 2,300 subsidy programs, and they are all susceptible to fraud and other types of improper payments.

The Government Accountability Office has released its third annual report on fragmented, overlapping, or duplicative federal programs and activities. Proponents of making the government more efficient view the findings as an opportunity to achieve cost savings. While there’s obviously nothing wrong with the government spending less money than it has to, the goal should be to permanently shut the trains down – not just try to get them to run on time.

A report from the Internal Revenue Service’s inspector general “estimates the IRS could issue $21 billion in potentially fraudulent tax refunds resulting from identity theft over the next five years.” The inspector general told CNBC that the fraud is a “growing problem” and that the numbers are growing “exponentially”:

The Washington Post reports that a doctor in Texas bilked Medicare and Medicaid out of $375 million. That’s a lot of money, but improper payments represent somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of total spending on these two health programs. Thus, more than $100 billion of taxpayer funds could be going down the drain each year.