Posted on 11/18/2025 2:27:32 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
The USDA used the shutdown crisis to shine a light on flagrant food-stamp fraud.
It’s amazing, and somewhat depressing, that this year marks two full decades since Hurricane Katrina blew through the central Gulf Coast and inundated the city of New Orleans once its defective levees broke from the strain of the storm surge. Just acknowledging that time span has a way of making one feel quite old.
But a memory from just before Katrina’s arrival — a couple of weeks earlier — remains relatively fresh.
It’s of a newspaper article from the New Orleans Times-Picayune about efforts by the accounting firm of Alvarez and Marsal to stanch the fiscal bleeding of the New Orleans public school system, which at the time was the worst in the nation.
The accountant in charge of the forensic audit and attempted cleanup of the system was specifically talking about the utterly broken payroll of the bloated district, and he was saying at least 20 percent or so of the money leaving its treasury was being paid to people who did no work. He said through the imposition of normal fiscal controls, he thought it was possible to reduce the fraud to 10 percent, but to completely stamp it out, he knew of but one remedy, which he didn’t think was possible in the real world.
Namely, to stop all the paychecks from going in the mail, and force all the payees to show up and be interviewed in order to collect. In that way, the accountant said, they’d be able to do a granular accounting and separate the wheat from the chaff.
“Yeah, right,” I remember thinking. “It’d take a miracle to make this possible.”
Well, it wasn’t quite a miracle, but when those levees broke, so did New Orleans. And in the...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
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In this age of direct deposit, my company used to issue paychecks instead of direct deposit without warning twice a year. This forced the bosses to give out checks and see if any were not picked up.
They did this to catch fraud of paying people who were no longer at work. Any checks left over would be investigated. They caught a few that way every time for a little while.
They stopped doing it about 10 years ago. I wonder why.
TO CONTINUE WITH THE EXCERPT:
“...when those levees broke, so did New Orleans. And in the wake of Katrina, the entity that had been the New Orleans school system went away, to be replaced by, essentially, an ecosystem of charter schools.
“And New Orleans isn’t the worst school system in America anymore. It isn’t the best, either, but it’s a hell of a lot better than it used to be. And while I won’t make the case that the books are clean, there is no current perception that systematic payroll fraud is a standing feature of public education in the Big Easy.
“Silver linings abound if you know where to look.
“Similarly, we’ve got the full-on reset of the SNAP food-stamps program, which is now underway, and that could never have happened but for the Schumer Sombrero Shutdown and the Democrat Media Complex’s landing on SNAP as the alarmist narrative of choice.
“On Thursday, as you might have seen, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that the Trump administration is going to run a FULL RESET of the SNAP program. Its recipients are going to have to reapply because that’s the fastest and cleanest method of scraping off the layabouts and fraudsters, not to mention illegal aliens, among its astonishing and disgraceful 45 million recipients”.
I am glad that they are going after fraud but stopping fraud is not enough. Obama expanded food stamp eligibility into the middle class and made it permanent for a lot of people. His goal was to get the middle class hooked on entitlements. The Republicans never cut it back. Only the poor should be eligible, and then it should be temporary other than for the elderly and disabled.
People are going to be stunned at the fraud in SNAP
45 million SNAP receipients divided by 131 million households in the US equals about 34% of households on SNAP.
More than a third of the households. Even if no fraud, that is disgraceful. Accounting for the obvious fraud, it is unforgivable.
I live in a very liberal area of the country. They never update voter rolls or SNAP beneficiaries - but, you have to show ‘in person’ every three years to update your library card - lol !!! Go figure
There was certainly fraud in the food stamp programs 50 years ago. An acquaintance purchased food stamps for cash and used the stamps to purchase meat, etc. the stamp recipient used the cash for booze.
Some years ago SNAP (or other program) recipients in Maine would buy bottled water at store, dump the water out and return the empties for money.
Judge Judy has shown her audience how many capable lowlifes are able yet claim disability
I doubt that this will happen. A federal judge is right now preparing his injunction to stop this and leave the system as it currently exists.
This is all true. Case in point...basically all of the people that are in homeless shelters are on SNAP. A huge number of them exchange them out at crooked corner stores for half their value in cash so they can buy booze or dope. Food is easy enough to get for free at pantries or shoplifting grocery stores.
or churches handing out free food that a person can get every week or two. sign up at multiple churches and stop at various other places with free meals. Lots of people feel good helping people while they stay hooked on drugs, alcohol or other reasons that made them homeless or in need.
We throw away enough food across this country that we could feed the world over every year. From farmers and the Government destroying annual crop. To crop sitting and collecting mold. To waste across restaurants and homes. I don’t care how many people get food off snap. We are, as people, gluttons of waste.
Even before Katrina, something like 30% of school children went to private schools — I’m a bit hazy on whether that was the city or the metro area.
Quite a few of those schools are Catholic.
Num one Waste Fraud Abuse is not the poor but poverty pimp DELOITTE and it’s IES Integrated Eligibility System in 25 states, both red and blue.
It is Deloitte, not the poor, the makes the dead eligible for SNAP, Medicaid, WIC, TANF, Sec8, etc.
It is Deloitte , poor, who give 2 & 3 ID to the same person with the same SSN.
It is Deloitte that has an EMPI Enterprise Master Person Index that is a crime.
It is Deloitte that has add on programs that are a total waste of taxpayer money.
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