The House voted to fight federal fraud. Will the Senate follow through?

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In a rare bipartisan acknowledgment that Washington’s fraud problem has become unsustainable, the House of Representatives recently passed 11 fraud-fighting bills that strengthen financial oversight, improve transparency and make it easier to identify improper payments and fraud before taxpayer money is lost.

The legislation is now waiting in the Senate.

The stakes extend far beyond another package of good-government reforms. The bills represent Congress’s clearest opportunity in years to address one of the largest and most tolerated financial failures in the federal government.

Federal watchdogs estimate fraud costs taxpayers between $233 billion and $521 billion every year. Let that sink in: At the high end, fraud losses exceed the annual budgets of most federal departments. Yet Washington continues to operate under a model that would get any private-sector executive fired. It sends money out the door first, blindly. It discovers fraud later, then hopes investigators can recover what was stolen, which they rarely do.

The federal government pays benefits, grants, loans, disaster assistance, and other funds. Months or years later, agencies uncover fraud, launch investigations, issue reports, hold hearings, and recover only a fraction of the losses. Then the cycle repeats.

If a Fortune 500 company lost hundreds of billions annually through preventable fraud, shareholders would demand accountability. In Washington, failure has become institutionalized.

The House deserves credit for recognizing that the status quo is indefensible. But passing legislation is only the beginning.

The uncomfortable reality is that federal fraud defenses remain largely designed for criminals of the 1990s while today’s fraudsters operate with artificial intelligence, synthetic identities, stolen credentials, and automated attack tools capable of exploiting programs at unprecedented speed and scale.

Criminal enterprises have modernized, but Washington has not.

Fraudsters increasingly create identities that appear legitimate across multiple databases. They leverage real information, stolen credentials, and sophisticated automation to bypass verification systems that rely heavily on paperwork and retrospective reviews.

Many federal programs still operate on a faulty assumption: Pay now, chase later. This approach is no longer sustainable.

The Senate should pass the House package quickly. But lawmakers should also recognize that oversight, reporting requirements, and new authorities alone will not solve the problem. The government must become far more aggressive in adopting technologies capable of identifying risk before taxpayer dollars leave federal accounts.

That means leveraging advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, behavioral assessment tools, enhanced identity verification capabilities, and other innovations that can help agencies distinguish legitimate applicants from potentially fraudulent actors before payments are issued.

Not after, but before.

Predictably, critics will argue that the government should move cautiously when adopting new technologies. Fair enough. But taxpayers should ask a simple question: How many more hundreds of billions of dollars must be stolen before Washington decides to modernize?

Banks don’t tolerate losses on this scale. Insurance companies don’t. Major retailers don’t.

Only the federal government seems capable of hemorrhaging hundreds of billions of dollars year after year while insisting that more studies, more reports, and more working groups are the answer. Fraud prevention should not be controversial. The answer is not to study the problem indefinitely, but to give agencies practical tools that help them act.

The House has done its job. Now the Senate faces a choice.

It can pass these reforms and help usher in a prevention-first era of fraud management—or it can preserve a system that treats massive taxpayer losses as a routine cost of government.

At a time of trillion-dollar deficits and mounting national debt, that choice should not be difficult.

The era of “pay-and-chase” needs to be over.

The Senate should end it.

Donald Blersch is a former senior national security executive with more than 35 years of experience across the CIA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Reconnaissance Office, Missile Defense Agency, Department of State, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He currently serves as chair of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance’s Security Policy Reform Council and advises Clearspeed. The views expressed are his own.

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