Thomas Krause Says Trump Had to Close USAID because of Trump’s Poor COVID Management
In the last few days, Trump has started doing a better job of messaging with his responses to lawsuits. I’ll attempt to explain that going forward. But one instance is the Thomas Krause declaration filed in the Attorneys General challenge to the DOGE access to Treasury systems (which I also wrote about in this post). Krause — still serving as the hatchet man CEO of Citrix (which probably creates a serious conflict) — uses his declaration to claim that he is attempting to “improve the accuracy of financial reporting.”
I am responsible, among other duties, for reducing and eliminating improper and fraudulent payments; waste, fraud, and abuse; and improving the accuracy of financial reporting. To that end, I am focused on improving the controls, processes, and systems that facilitate payments and enable consolidated financial reporting.
Later in the declaration, he provides a notably different explanation for his job.
My role on the Treasury DOGE Team is to find ways to use technology to make the Treasury Department more effective, more efficient, and more responsive to the policy goals of this Administration.
To justify the focus of DOGE, Krause cites several Biden-era GAO reports.
7. As illustrated by several reports released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), we have our work cut out for us. On January 16, 2025, GAO released a report entitled “Financial Audit: FY2024 and FY2023 Consolidated Financial Statements of the U.S. Government.” In the report, GAO summarizes that they were not able to determine if the Financial Report of the U.S. Government is fairly presented. Among other reasons, GAO highlighted “problems in accounting for transactions between federal agencies.” GAO found many material weaknesses including “the federal government’s inability to determine the full extent to which improper payments, including fraud, occur and reasonably assure that appropriate actions are taken to reduce them.” GAO also reported that Treasury and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) officials expressed their continuing commitment to addressing the problems this report outlines. In short, the GAO report identifies the Federal government’s inability to account for all of the improper payments including waste, fraud and abuse across federal agencies.
8. On September 10, 2024, the GAO released a report entitled “Payment Integrity: Significant Improvements are Needed to Address Improper Payments and Fraud.” The report found that since 2003, cumulative improper payments1 by executive branch agencies have totaled about $2.7 trillion dollars. Some of GAO’s top concerns [1] included fraudulent or improper Earned Income Tax Credit refunds, Social Security payments, unemployment and Medicare and Medicaid payments. In fiscal year 2023 alone, federal agencies estimated $236 billion in improper payments across more than 70 federal programs. In addition, GAO estimated that the total annual financial losses across the government from fraud are between $233 and $521 billion. These numbers are truly staggering—billions and billions in hardearned American taxpayer dollars are being misspent every year. GAO highlighted a number of steps that Congress and federal agencies could take to help reduce fraud and improper payments, including that “[a]gencies should improve oversight to ensure that funds aren’t paid to ineligible recipients” [2] and that “[a]gencies should improve their collection and use of data for preventing and detecting fraud.” [3]
9. Similarly, GAO has identified areas for improvement in BFS’s systems related to identifying and tracing transactions to determine whether they were complete and properly recorded in the correct general ledger accounts and line items within the Schedules of the General Fund. See GAO Report, “Financial Statement Audit: Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s FY22 Schedules of the General Fund” (March 30, 2023). Specifically, GAO has found inconsistent reporting, lack of traceability, and need for improved controls with the Treasury’s Central Accounting and Reporting System (CARS), which federal agencies use to track their spending for budgetary and accounting purposes. These kinds of improvements and others can enhance BFS’s ability to ensure accountability in the spending of taxpayer dollars.
1 Improper payments and fraudulent payments are related but distinct concepts. An improper payment is a payment that should not have been made, or that was made with an incorrect amount; fraudulent payments occur due to willful misrepresentation. All fraudulent payments are improper, but not all improper payments are fraudulent. [emphasis and links added]
Elon Musk parroted a lot of this language at his presser at the White House yesterday (which is one reason I say they’re beginning to coordinate this better).
If you don’t look too closely, the declaration almost makes DOGE look smart. Except I decided to look at one of the reports — the second one — more closely.
And once I did, I realized that Thomas Krause is, in part, using Trump’s management failures during COVID as an excuse to start shutting down government. Start with the fact that the first agency Krause focused on after arriving at Treasury was USAID — pursuing his goal of making Treasury, “more responsive to the policy goals of this Administration.” But that’s not one of the high risk agencies, all of which have to do with direct payments.
Since 2003, which is when they first tracked the data, the amount of improper payments has steadily increased. But it has declined in recent years, under Biden.
There’s a reason for that. Look more closely at the estimated improper payments, their sources, and their timing.
For longstanding programs — Medicare and Social Security, the ones Krause mentions in his declaration — the number of improper payments in recent years is about what it was under Trump. What has spiked in recent years (and then receded) are programs that expanded under COVID: Expanded Medicaid and unemployment access, and the PPP program rolled out under Trump, something Krause neglects to mention at [1]. A key thing this report measures is COVID mispayments — that is, improper payments made under programs set up under President Donald Trump, 1.0.
The quotes at [2] and [3] are not actually from the report. They’re from this website (which links to this report).
Many of the recommendations and data used in this report pertain to COVID or lessons learned from it. For example, the report recommends making the payment tracking center set up in response to COVID permanent.
Establish a permanent analytics center of excellence to aid the oversight community in identifying improper payments and fraud.28 This could be achieved by building upon and expanding PACE and making it permanent.
And it recommended building in such collection in case of any future emergency response — in part, to avoid the two to three year delay in finding these payments reflected in the table above.
Require OMB to (1) provide guidance for agencies to proactively develop internal control plans that would be ready for use in, or adaptation for, future emergencies or crises and (2) require agencies to report these plans to OMB and Congress.
Amend PIIA. Quickly reporting improper payment estimates for emergency relief programs is critical for agency accountability and transparency over whether appropriated funds were spent for their intended purposes. In addition, estimating improper payments and identifying root causes help ensure that agencies develop and implement corrective actions to reduce them.
In November 2020, we recommended that Congress consider, in any future legislation appropriating COVID-19 relief funds, designating all executive agency programs and activities that made more than $100 million in payments from COVID-19 relief funds as “susceptible to significant improper payments.31 Such a designation would require, among other things, agencies to report improper payment estimates for such a program and develop corrective actions to reduce improper payments. In March 2022, we recommended that Congress amend PIIA to apply this criterion to all new federal programs for their initial years of operation.32 The current approach resulted in 2-to-3 year delays in reporting improper payment estimates for short-term and emergency spending COVID relief programs.
Much of the fraud, too, pertains to COVID relief.
When it is discovered, the Department of Justice (DOJ) can bring charges of fraud against the alleged fraudsters. For example, DOJ has prosecuted over 2,000 COVID-19 fraud-related cases, and hundreds of additional cases are pending. We analyzed the department’s public statements and court documentation and found that, from March 2020 through March 2024, at least 1,998 individuals or entities facing fraud-related charges were found guilty or liable.16 This includes charges in cases involving SBA’s loan programs, DOL’s Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs, and Treasury’s economic impact payments. Of the individuals found guilty, at least 1,596 had been sentenced as of March 31, 2024, and many have also been ordered to pay restitution and fines. There were also federal fraud-related charges pending against at least 632 other individuals or entities involving federal COVID-19 relief programs, as of March 31, 2024.17 We expect the number to continue to increase as investigations take time to develop and given the significant number of investigative leads. For instance, SBA’s IG office reported that its actionable leads represent more than 100 years of investigative case work.18 The government has 10 years to prosecute individuals who committed fraud related to the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program.19 DOL’s IG has requested Congress similarly extend the statute of limitations for the pandemic relief UI programs as well.20 Additionally, in a June 2024 press release, the Internal Revenue Service requested to Congress that the statute of limitations for fraud be extended for the Employee Retention Credit.21 We support their requests.
Now, to be fair, there was likely to be overpayments and fraud regardless of who was in charge when COVID hit (or when avian flu and measles become pandemics in months ahead).
This is not all attributable to Trump’s COVID failures.
But one other thing about this report deserves mention: It is full of discussion of the role of Inspectors General in finding this fraud, including a bunch of the people Trump fired four days into his term — six of whom just filed suit today (which I’ll turn to shortly). Indeed, one of them — Mike Ware — is cited in the report Krause invoked.
18 Stolen Taxpayer Funds: Reviewing the SBA and OIG Reports of Fraud in Pandemic Lending Programs Hearing Before the House Committee on Small Business, 118th Cong. 45 (2023) (statement of Hannibal “Mike” Ware, Inspector General of U.S. Small Business Administration).
Thomas Krause says we need to fix the errors created by Trump’s poor management of COVID. But one of the first things Trump in his second term did was to fire the people who’ve done the most to do so.
Update: Corrected Mike Ware’s last name.
Update: I’ve linked Ware’s testimony, above. Among other things, he estimated that SBC IG identified up to $200 billion in fraudulent COVID relief.
Using OIG’s investigative casework, prior OIG reporting, advanced data analytics, and additional review procedures, we estimate SBA disbursed more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID-19 EIDLs and PPP loans. This estimate represents approximately 17 percent of disbursed COVID-19 EIDLs and PPP funds — specifically, more than $136 billion COVID-19 EIDLs and $64 billion in PPP funds. Since SBA did not have an established strong internal control environment for approving and disbursing program funds, there was an insufficient barrier against fraudsters accessing funds that should have been available for eligible business owners adversely affected by the pandemic.
In other words, a huge chunk of the fraud Krause says he is looking for was IDed by one of the guys Trump fired on day four.
Yeah, just about as I expected use of GAO identified problems, but no use of GAO identified solutions.
This is the formula that will repeat:
1. Real problems (and suggested solutions) found capable dedicated government people and agencies.
2. Problems trumpeted by Trumpsters (as if they found them).
3. Much hand waving and crowing then real problem used as a reason to do what they wanted to do anyway, often unrelated to real problem.
4.Actual proposed solutions to real problems are ignored by Trumpsters (and sadly most press). People who identified problems and suggested solutions fired or sidelined.
5. More hand waving, crowing and false claims of efficacy.
Don’t forget:
None. Of. This. Is. About. Ending. Waste. Fraud. Or. Abuse.
You’re right. It’s about shifting fraud and abuse, from the relatively small-scale variety occurring in the periphery of just about anywhere money is in motion, to the huge, central operation of the oligarchs.
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Hey Donnie, want tariffs on aluminium?
We’ll raise your tariffs on aluminum by even more tariffs than you want on aluminum:
Quebec Premier Francois Legault said Canada should consider putting export taxes on products such as aluminum to create leverage in negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.
If Trump follows through, “I think we should consider also putting exportation tariffs on products like aluminum where they really need us,” Legault told reporters in Washington. That would drive up costs even more for US manufacturers and builders that use the metal.
Canada is the source of more than half of US aluminum imports, according to research from Morgan Stanley, and most of that is produced in Quebec.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/politics/2025/02/12/quebec-says-canada-should-consider-aluminum-tax-to-create-leverage-against-us/
Dems poor messaging and mismanagement of Oversight Committee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dcp0TC2q0OU
Here’s more lack of knowledge of the art of messaging by, this time, the LEADER of the House Dems, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oEaIJIiCQVg
Aaah!
Dems couldn’t find an older fart? CT US Rep John Larson suffered a complex partial seizure mid-speech on the House floor Monday. The 76-year-old Democrat, in his 13th term.
Attacking Democrats is NOT going to force a GOP “trifecta” to become moral actors. Your insistence on pummeling the very people, most of them doing their admittedly human best, who ARE trying to stop the proverbial runaway sociopathic train? It gets none of us here anywhere.
What is your point, xyxyxyxy? What are *your* messaging suggestions? Given all these lousy old Dems, how do you account for AOC and Chris Murphy? Jasmine Crockett?
And your attack on John Larson for suffering a seizure is despicable. I pray that you never experience the symptoms of a seizure disorder; they affect people of any age, as you seem not to recognize in your joining this medical event to the phrase “older fart.” Larson has represented his district ably and with more honor than the vast majority of his colleagues.
In short, why don’t you just shut up about the failings of the Democrats. You are not helping.
If they’re doing their human best, then they need to get out of the way.
Because it’s completely ineffective.
Who is “they”? And “ineffective” by what standard? Have you not noticed the protests sparking up around the country? Are you unaware of the numerous town halls and Zoom meetings, ALL held by Democratic representatives–none by GOP?
You have a personal problem, xyxyxyxy. This is on YOU, not “the Democrats.” Get out there and do something yourself. In the meantime, stop bringing your issues to a place where folks are trying to fix things, not tear them down.
“with Rahna Epting, executive director at MoveOn, to discuss recent reporting that Congressional Democrats are frustrated by efforts to urge them to fight back more forcefully against the Trump administration.”
at 1:16:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87PMqee_sAo
You know why they are frustrated with people like you? Because you seem unable (or, in your case, unwilling) to grasp what it means to be in the fucking minority in both houses of congress, pitted against a majority party that has abandoned its job.
You can yell at and fault “Democrats”–an unfair generalization–all you want. It helps nothing. It’s lazy, a copout for people who don’t want to figure out their own constructive path.
Do you want help with that? I will help you. If not, you need to ask yourself why, aside from baiting me, you keep this drumbeat up.
I was looking for information about the timing of the creation of the latest elements of the Treasury system, and did find evidence that Booz Allen Hamilton received contracts in 2019, but also that much of the impetus for the changes came during the 2nd Obama term. (& that there is currently “a bug” when searching for recipients via usaspending.gov)
Relatedly, I came across an overview from David Lebryk of pandemic-related lessons & achievements, which he begins by noting:
Also, the Krause declaration has shades of the ol’ drugs being seized at the border = open borders playbook.
Fraud in COVID relief? It’s no surprise that it was a transnational phenomenon, which would justify building in and making permanent protections against it. As for traditional, after-the-fact audit targets, I would include current members of Congress. Rumor has it MTG, among others, obtained relief and failed to pay it back
Per NPR: “An NPR analysis of data released on Jan. 8 [2023] by the Small Business Administration found that 92% of the loans issued have been granted full or partial forgiveness. That includes loans to companies with mega-rich owners.”
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/09/1145040599/ppp-loan-forgiveness
The following list consists of six Congress folks who had their PPP loan forgiven for businesses they own in additional to their Congressional job:
(The amount forgiven is listed by their name)
Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) $183.5k
Vern Buchanan (FL) $2.3m
Markwayne Mullin (OK) $1.3m
Kevin Hern (OK.) $1.0m
Mike Kelly (PA) $987.2K
Rep. Matt Gaetz (FL.) $482.3k
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/08/25/white-house-slams-republicans-who-criticized-student-debt-relief-but-used-ppp-loans/
NOTE: Each of the above complained about student loan forgiveness. Their hypocrisy is grotesque.
The IG for USAID and his staff released an “Advisory Notice” on Monday with the title “Oversight of USAID-Funded Humanitarian Assistance Programming Impacted by Staffing Reductions and Pause on Foreign Assistance.” It’s a benign title, but don’t let that fool you.
Here are some of the details:
Those last two sentences are the biggies, identifying three big problems: (1) getting the assistance where it needs to go, (2) keeping it from being stolen and going where it’s not supposed to go, and (3) shutting down the mechanisms to see to it that (1) and (2) happen.
As a result, a lot of assistance is just sitting there, with “more than $489 million of food assistance at ports, in transit, and in warehouses at risk of spoilage, unanticipated storage needs, and diversion.” For those who don’t speak bureaucratese, “diversion” is a polite way of saying “stolen and sold by unsavory characters.”
In addition, USAID cannot vet their distribution partners — as required by law — so they can’t hand the food over even if it’s there and ready. “USAID staff have reported that the counter-terrorism vetting unit supporting humanitarian assistance programming has in recent days been told not to report to work (because staff have been furloughed or placed on administrative leave) and thus cannot conduct any partner vetting.” In the most dangerous areas that USAID staff cannot get in and out of (Afghanistan, Syria, etc.), they work through third party monitors, and the folks who ordinarily vet these TPMs are also on furlough and/or not working. Finally, the USAID mechanisms for receiving tips about possible fraud and abuse have been similarly shut down, so that even if someone wanted to file a tip about misuse of USAID assistance, there’s no one answering the phones.
The summary is brutal:
Kind of makes a mockery of Trump’s “rooting out fraud and abuse” rationale for shutting the whole place down. They’re not rooting out the fraud, but tearing down the guardrails to prevent it. However bad things have been, Musk & the DOGE-Children have been making it demonstrably worse.
It’s not hard to see why the IG got canned within 24 hours. Calling out your higher-ups for their fking-ups is going to provoke a bit of a reaction.
The very blue land where I live has lots of Tesla cars running around. So, I laughed when I saw these headlines on some fascinating articles on a site called “electrek.co”: “Chinese car journalists are told not to be negative on Tesla as it sues customers and media”. “Tesla says not taking Cybertruck trade-ins after owner tried to return his due to ‘anti-nazi harassment”.
Elon is apparently taking four months off of work to play DOGE master, just when Tesla sales are heading south. Good work, buddy, own those libs.
The cars are pretty, but I’m not sure the repair costs make them worth buying, even if you have a convenient charger.
The trucks, however, are pure Elon: poorly designed, poorly built, and extremely unreliable, while being massively overpriced.
And they’re utt bugly.
I actually burst out laughing the first time I saw one.
I call them “Uglitruks”.
I’ve seen them in the wild, and they are definitely not better in person. “Electric-powered mobile dustcatchers” would be a fair description, if they weren’t so fragile in themselves as well as hazardous to everyone around them.
They look like rejected designs from a 1970s cheapo sci-fi flick.
I got stuck behind one those trucks at a red light the other week and what struck me is that rear window is very steeply-angled, and therefore gives the driver poor visibility out the rear of the car (any built-in cameras notwithstanding). It’s a truck, so pretty high off the ground, so when a small car, low to the ground, is immediately behind one of these things, the driver would be fairly oblivious of their presence. I think there’s some socio-economic commentary to be had in there somewhere…it’s a like a small garish concrete-and-glass office building on wheels.
A building with two large skylights and small side windows you don’t want to open because the doors might break.
IT’S OFFICIAL: THE CYBERTRUCK IS MORE EXPLOSIVE THAN THE FORD PINTO
https://fuelarc.com/evs/its-official-the-cybertruck-is-more-explosive-than-the-ford-pinto/
“IT’S OFFICIAL: THE CYBERTRUCK IS MORE EXPLOSIVE THAN THE FORD PINTO”
They say that like it’s a BAD thing.
Are these the ones that will get lightly armored and sold to the DOD, $400 million worth?
When Musk gives you lemons…
“Lightly armored”? Not sure that will help. Remember the one that exploded at the Trump casino in Vegas recently? That one didn’t hold up too well.
When they’re tested for resistance to IED explosions, make sure you’re a quarter-mile away.
They’re the ones that fall apart when you try to carry a load larger than a couple of hundred pounds, and get stuck on dirt roads or in a few inches of snow.
GM and Ford make pickups that are better. The Uglitruk is just a small car playing at truck.
Off topic but the senate confirmed Kennedy for Health and prompted a senryu:
it’s so ironic
the senate’s role is consumed
by a great white snark