The $186 billion in improper federal payments can’t be simplified as a fraud story. It’s a complex story about a government still operating on a fifty-year-old payment model in a real-time economy.
The Government Accountability Office just released its latest tally on improper federal payments. The number for fiscal year 2025 is $186 billion, $24 billion more than the year before. Cumulatively, since 2003, the federal government has reported about $3 trillion in payments that should never have gone out the door. A handful of folks have sent me the report over the past few days, so I wanted to take a second to share my thoughts.
The problem here is deeper and more systemic than fraud or waste. It has to do with process. Too much of the government still works the way it did 50 years ago. Money goes out the door, and agencies try to claw back bad payments later. The answer is to flip the script – use modern tech to verify at the front door, before the money moves. Allow me to explain.
The way the commercial market handles it
Think about the last time you used your credit card and it got declined because the bank thought it might be fraud. That happened in a millisecond. The bank didn’t pay the charge and then tried to chase the money back later. It made the call up front, before any money moved. That’s how almost every modern institution works now. Your bank, Amazon, Uber, your insurance company… they all make fast decisions about risk in real time, before the transaction goes through. If something looks off, they flag it. If it looks fine, you don’t even notice.
The way government still handles it
Now think about how a state agency decides whether to send out a benefits check, approve a tax credit, or process a healthcare-related payment. Someone fills out a complicated form, a caseworker reviews it, the check goes out, and if it turns out months later that the information was wrong or eligibility changed , the agency tries to chase the money down and get it back. In programs like Medicaid and SNAP, residency or eligibility status can change. Caseworkers are being asked to validate complex, moving information at massive scale, often with manual tools and limited time.
Pay first, ask questions later. That used to be how pretty much everyone operated. The government is one of the last places that still does.
A 21st century approach
A modern system shouldn’t treat every application the same way. It should sort at the front door. The clearly straightforward cases move through quickly and easily, and the ones that need a closer look get flagged for a human review. For most of modern history, even if the government wanted to do this, the tools weren’t really there. You could verify a document or run a database check. But there was no way to actually detect signs of risks in a high-volume process at scale, without an in-person interview. The good news is that now there is.
The company we created, Clearspeed, does this with voice. With just a few yes-no questions answered over the phone, our tech can help agencies quickly identify which responses indicate low risk and which should be routed for further review.Instead of searching for a needle in a haystack, we can instantly ‘clear the hay’ – the majority of people – so they’ve got faster access to the benefits they need, and trained teams can focus their follow up where review is actually needed.
That distinction matters. This is not about labeling people as risky or deciding who deserves benefits. It is about giving agencies a faster, more objective way to prioritize review before funds go out the door — while allowing trusted applicants and providers to move through the process with less delay. We originally built this tech for battlefield environments, where U.S. Special Operations forces needed a faster way to vet foreign partner troops in high-stress, high-consequence situations. Today, it is used across government, defense, insurance, and financial services.
There are other companies tackling adjacent parts of the problem in different ways. The point isn’t any one tool, but rather that the capability finally exists, and the government should now catch up.
This matters even more as public benefit programs enter a new phase of accountability. Medicaid redeterminations will put more pressure on already overloaded caseworkers. SNAP error rates now carry financial consequences for states. State agencies are being asked to reduce improper payments, protect program funding, and maintain access for eligible households — all at the same time.
The bottom line
If we want to reduce the hundreds of billions in improper payments going out the door, we need the government to get with the times and start making decisions the way the rest of us already do: checking before the money goes out, not after.
The path forward is avoiding anything that creates slowdown or friction. It is better front-end integrity: being fast for eligible individuals, being fair across applicants, and being focused on the small number of cases that need human review.
The government does not need to choose between access and accountability. With the right tools, it can do both.
