One of Washington’s favorite tricks is keeping an “emergency” alive long after the emergency itself is over.

The Trump administration says it just found a $1.22 billion example — and the money spigot is being shut off.

The General Services Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday that five COVID-era contracts carried more than $1.2 billion in suspected fraud, even though the national emergency ended in 2023.

GSA released a short video announcing the finding and putting the contractors on notice.

Officials caught the contracts before every dollar had already vanished.

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According to the administration, roughly 93 percent of the money had not yet been distributed. GSA suspended payments, cutting off the contracts while officials review the suspected fraud and determine what should be referred to law enforcement.

That distinction is enormous.

Finding fraud after taxpayers have been cleaned out is important. Finding it before most of the money leaves the Treasury is how government is supposed to work.

GSA says the five contracts continued disbursing money after the COVID-19 national emergency ended and after the agency canceled the related emergency acquisition flexibilities. The review was conducted with HHS under the direction of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which Vice President JD Vance leads.

The official release says the agencies are following the money, exposing suspected wrongdoing and preparing law-enforcement referrals where the facts support them. It also says the government will pursue recovery of taxpayer funds and tighten safeguards designed to stop the same abuse from happening again.

No criminal charges have been announced, and the contractors remain unnamed.

The basic question is already unavoidable: Why were contracts carrying emergency privileges still sending out money years after the emergency ended?

GSA Administrator Edward Forst said the old contracting machinery had become a weapon against taxpayers. His response makes clear that the review will not end with a press release.

The numbers inside the finding are just as revealing as the headline figure.

Fox News reports that about 6.78 percent of the contract funding had already been expended, while approximately 93 percent remained undistributed. The task force also says it stopped another $41 million connected to the five contracts.

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Fox reports that some vaccine-related contracts were awarded after the pandemic had already ended under the Biden administration. GSA says the review is part of a much wider fraud crackdown that has uncovered more than $13 billion in suspected contractor fraud since late August.

The White House task force says the Trump administration has uncovered more than $245.7 billion in suspected fraud across the government and prevented an annualized $62.9 billion in improper payments. It also says more than $59.1 billion in indictments and settlements is being enforced.

Those larger figures will require case-by-case proof, recoveries and prosecutions. No honest administration should confuse a suspicious payment with a conviction.

But no honest administration should look away from obvious warning signs either.

The national emergency ended. The emergency contract advantage did not.

That gap created exactly the kind of dark corner where waste and fraud thrive: old authority, weak scrutiny and vendors still drawing money from programs that most Americans assumed had closed.

A current visual summary shows how the Vance-led task force, GSA and HHS connected the review across agencies rather than leaving each department to police itself.

This is where President Trump’s whole-of-government approach matters.

A contractor that depends on agencies operating in silos has a much harder time when procurement officials, benefit agencies, inspectors and law enforcement are forced to compare notes.

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It also changes the incentive inside the bureaucracy.

For years, federal managers often had more reason to keep spending than to ask whether a program still made sense.

Unused authority could be treated as a budget opportunity. An inherited contract could keep rolling because challenging it created work and political risk.

The Trump-Vance task force is sending the opposite message: an old contract does not become legitimate merely because nobody stopped it yesterday.

HHS Secretary Kennedy said his department is following the money and will refer suspected wrongdoing to law enforcement.

The proper sequence is straightforward: secure the funds, preserve the evidence, identify the responsible parties and build cases that can survive in court.

Taxpayers deserve names and charges when investigators have the proof.

They also deserve the $1.22 billion to remain in their hands while that work is done.

The pandemic emergency may be history.

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The bill for Washington’s emergency spending culture is still coming due.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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