Have you ever looked at the scandals involved in President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration and wondered how such corruption occurred?
Well, it’s time to check your arrogance at the door because future generations are going to view the past two and a half years with the same disbelief.
The United States just experienced billions of dollars in pandemic-related fraud. According to one inspector general, it will take 100 years to fully investigate.
On Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger charged 47 individuals in a “massive scheme” to fraudulently take $250 million in U.S. taxpayers’ money that was meant to feed low-income children during the COVID pandemic.
According to prosecutors, employees at the non-profit Feeding our Future established shell companies during the COVID pandemic that claimed to be giving away meals to thousands of kids in Minnesota. Because certain rules were waived as part of the public-private response to the virus, participating parties were then able to receive reimbursement for those “meals” through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food nutrition programs.
As noted by CBS News, an FBI affidavit unsealed earlier this year claimed that “Feeding Our Future received $307,000 in reimbursements from the USDA in 2018, $3.45 million in 2019 and $42.7 million in 2020. The amount of reimbursements jumped to $197.9 million in 2021.”
Except authorities say that food was never given to needy kids. The accused individuals had allegedly submitted fake receipts and, in turn, pocketed the money given to them by the government. Rather than help those in need, the perpetrators bought a litany of luxury items.
The U.S. government has called it “the largest pandemic fraud in the United States.”
It might very well be the most significant case as of now, but it is just a sliver of the overall swindling that took place under both the Trump and Biden administrations.
The Department of Justice has already “taken enforcement action to more than $8 billion in suspected pandemic fraud, including bringing charges in more than 1,000 criminal cases involving losses in excess of $1.1 billion,” according to CBS News.
In total, authorities believe that there were likely hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud from all COVID aid programs combined.
Hannibal Ware, Inspector General of the Small Business Administration, told CNN in late August this agency alone has “over 280,000 hotline complaints” about fraud.
“Over 40,000 of those are actually actionable,” he continued, “which means we have 100 years’ worth of work.”
Of course, knowing how the government works — over budget and over time — the final tally of how much U.S. taxpayers were fleeced during this period will likely never be revealed. If it is, Americans probably won’t know how much money was stolen until well past 2122.
By then, all the offenders will be long dead. In fact, empirical evidence suggests there will be government corruption during the government’s investigation of pandemic corruption.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.