Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is promising significant monetary rewards to citizens able to turn whistleblowers on fraud enabled by COVID-19 measure.
Appearing on Fox & Friends Monday, Bessent said, “We can pay up to a 30% reward for the recovered funds.” The Biden administration “gutted” the fraud departments and removed the guardrails supposed to prevent mass fraud in COVID-19 relief, and now the Trump administration is trying to pick up the pieces.
Bessent explained to Fox, “We are all hands on deck because this is money that is not going to where it’s supposed to go, but more importantly, it’s being stolen from the American taxpayer. We need to be a high-trust society. We need to understand where the money is going.”
The secretary added, “This could be hundreds of billions of dollars in recouped money.” Individuals who believe they have valuable information on fraud can report it at the Treasury Department’s website and receive between 10% and 30% of the sanctions the government collects. There are already 700 leads the department received on the website.
Arguing for more transparency and stronger oversight, Bessent explained, “A lot of this is a result of during COVID. Many of the agencies under the Biden administration gutted their fraud departments, their fraud detection, or took down the fraud detection to get the money out quickly for COVID relief. But they never brought back the guardians of our money. So, we have to have integrity in these programs.”
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Bessent referred to the necessity of having a high-trust society, which raises an interesting point. One of the common terms that the hosts of The China Show, one of my favorite podcasts, use is that Communist China is a “low-trust society.” Theft and violent crime are extremely common in the cities there, especially theft. And it is quite typical for people, the hosts say, to see someone attacked or suffering and for people to go out of their way to avoid helping that victim.
But what really alarms me is that the sort of impersonal indifference and outright societal chaos that has long been a feature of Communist China has arrived here in America’s cities, also. A grocery store near me is closing down because there is so much theft going on. People will just walk out with carts of stolen groceries, and employees are not allowed to intervene.
And the reason this connects with COVID-19 fraud is because that fraud, like the endemic fraud in food stamps, childcare, and multiple other welfare programs, is a symptom of America becoming more socialist in its government spending and more low-trust in its national culture. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government told Americans they couldn’t make any decisions about their lives; government officials must make all those decisions for them. The flip side of that was that people began to feel they were entitled to a great deal of taxpayer money from the government because their lives were so ruined by the shutdowns. Government dependence breeds entitlement.
Whenever a government program consist in re-distributing wealth, fraud is inevitable. But the Biden administration made COVID relief and welfare as vulnerable as possible to fraud.
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