Staff Reports
The Project On Government Oversight dropped a bomb this week. Its new report shows that much of the federal grant money taxpayers send out into the states can’t be found once it leaves Washington. If you like surprise mysteries, try explaining $712 billion that nobody can track.
POGO’s report: the numbers that should make Congress squirm
On July 21, 2026 POGO published a deep dive into USAspending.gov data for the 60 biggest domestic grant programs. The headline is brutal: roughly 74% of fiscal‑year 2024 grant dollars — about $712.6 billion of $958.6 billion — had no traceable local place of performance. Prime awards included local data for only 20.7% of dollars, and subawards added just another 5%. Medicaid, which moves more federal money than most programs, showed only 0.2% of its $614 billion traceable to cities or ZIP codes. Nearly 97% of transaction descriptions were duplicates or useless. In plain English: the trail goes cold way too often.
Why this matters
Fraud, waste, and no way to measure results
When you can’t follow the money to the local level, you can’t tell who got it or what it bought. That invites waste and fraud. It also leaves honest communities in the dark about whether they’re getting their fair share. Taxpayers pay the bills. They deserve to know where the dollars end up and whether programs are working. A system that reports only the state capital but refuses to show the ZIP codes is a headline for lazy oversight — and a dream scenario for grifters and bureaucratic incompetence.
Rules on the table, and bureaucrats who like paperwork more than results
To the administration’s credit, OMB has a big rulemaking under way to update the federal grant rules and requires clearer reporting. Treasury also points to payment‑integrity pilots meant to stop obvious scams. Those are steps in the right direction. But a proposal on a rulemaking docket is not the same as real enforcement. Agencies can write good rules on paper while field offices and recipients keep doing the same sloppy reporting. Congress and inspectors general need to stop treating this problem like a homework assignment and start treating it like an audit with teeth.
Fixes conservatives should push — and fast
If Republicans are serious about fiscal responsibility, here are simple demands: require reliable city/ZIP‑level place‑of‑performance fields where privacy allows; make subaward reporting mandatory and verifiable; force unique, useful transaction descriptions; empower IGs to flag and sanction chronic offenders; and hold hearings until agencies clean up their data. No more shrugging. We can have better transparency without shutting down programs. If Washington won’t follow the money, voters will. It’s time to make federal dollars as traceable as the tax bill that paid for them.
