Phone Service for 94,000 Dead People, and Other Things Congress Won’t Cut

The federal government spent $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025. $2 trillion of that was borrowed.

By Peter Schiff, Schiff Sovereign

Earlier this year, the House DOGE Subcommittee pulled spending records from the Department of Transportation and discovered that the agency had spent $55 million on office furniture over the past few years.

That’s about $1,000 per employee, which might not sound so crazy, until you realize that this was during a period when only 9% of DOT employees were actually showing up to the office.

But the furniture budget of the Department of Justice was even worse— $408 million on furniture in four years, with an average attendance rate of just 35%.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) dropped $250,000 on a single “refresh” of Herman Miller chairs. My only hope is this was part of developing some new revolutionary bulletproof chair cushion.

All told, federal agencies have spent $4.6 billion on furniture since 2021 — much of it for offices that have sat empty while employees work from home on Zoom.

If this were an isolated case of waste, you might write it off as bad management at a couple of agencies.

But it is not.

In February, the Government Accountability Office calculated the final cost of the Employee Retention Credit— a COVID-era program that ended in 2021. Total payout: $283 billion.

But 83% of that money ($235 billion) was paid out YEARS after the pandemic ended; the fraud mills kept filing bogus claims, and the IRS just kept writing checks.

Also in February, the FCC’s inspector general discovered that Lifeline phone providers in California had been billing the government to provide phone and internet service to 94,000 dead people— $3.8 million worth of calls that were never made, to phones that were never used, for people who were no longer alive.

The examples never stop.

Senator Joni Ernst recently uncovered Pentagon-funded research projects that included studies on octopus hypnosis, monkey mind-reading, snail mucus, and elephant seal sleeping habits, all funded through a contracting loophole called “Other Transaction Agreements”.

These OTAs allow agencies to spend money without competitive bidding, standard oversight, or public disclosure of costs.

How much did each project cost? That’s the beauty of the system — the government doesn’t have to tell you. But the GAO found that $77.5 billion flowed through these agreements between 2021 and 2025 without proper public accounting.

The National Science Foundation spent $14.6 million teaching monkeys to play a video game inspired by The Price Is Right. USAID spent $20 million producing Sesame Street in Iraq and $69,000 on dance classes in Wuhan, China.

And every single year, the federal government makes hundreds of billions of dollars in improper payments— money sent to the wrong person, in the wrong amount, or for the wrong reason.

Last year’s total: $186 billion. That includes payments to deceased individuals, ineligible recipients, and programs that can’t even verify whether the money should have gone out at all.

Since 2003, the cumulative total has reached $2.8 trillion, i.e. a full 7% of the national debt that simply would not exist if the government was minimally competent.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has failed its own audit for eight consecutive years. Auditors could not verify more than 60% of the department’s $4.65 trillion in assets.

Congress’s response? Hand the Pentagon its first-ever trillion-dollar budget. They cannot account for the money they already receive, so why not give them even more?!?

Then there’s the end-of-year ritual. Under “use it or lose it” rules, agencies that don’t exhaust their budgets risk getting less money next year.

So in the final five days of fiscal year 2025, the War Department spent $50.1 billion in grants and contracts, including $6.9 million on lobster tail, $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $15 million on ribeye steak, $225 million on furniture, including a $98,329 Steinway grand piano for a general’s home.

Makes sense. Perhaps a stirring rendition of “Great Balls of Fire” is just what we need to defeat Iran.

For context, only nine countries on Earth spend more $50 billion on their entire annual defense budget. The Pentagon spent that in five days.

None of this is secret. DOGE found it. Inspectors General found it. The GAO found it. Senators publish it in annual reports that make headlines for about a day.

And then nothing changes. Congress doesn’t cut a dime.

They act like it is simply impossible, that children would be starving in the streets, national security would be at risk, and farms would lay fallow, that we would all burst into flames if they cut the budget.

This might be one of the most effective lies ever perpetrated on a population— that we simply cannot, must not cut a dime in spending, for the consequences would be catastrophic.

The federal government spent $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025. $2 trillion of that was borrowed. $1.2 trillion was spent on interest to service the $39 trillion national debt.

And over the next decade, the CBO expects Congress to add another $23.1 trillion to the debt. It will almost certainly be much more.

This is arguably the single greatest threat to America. Not China, not hysteria over AI, not any of the foreign adversaries that dominate the headlines— but the slow, compounding, mathematically inevitable consequences of a government that cannot stop spending money it doesn’t have.

And the most infuriating part is that it should be so easy to cut the most obvious, most indefensible waste. The $600 billion in outright fraud Secretary of Treasury Bessent estimates in the budget every single year. The $200+ billion in improper payments. The $100+ billion in legal graft that flows to political allies.

That alone would cut nearly half the deficit, without even touching the furniture for empty offices or octopus hypnosis experiments.

But if Congress is unwilling to even lift a finger for such obvious absurdity, what are the odds they’ll tackle Social Security’s impending insolvency, just six years away? Or give foreign countries the confidence to keep investing in US government bonds? Or behave in a way to keep inflation in check?

Seems pretty low to us. Which is why it makes so much sense to have a Plan B.

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