“Oh, I am very weary, Though tears no longer flow; My eyes are tired of weeping, My heart is sick of woe.” Anne Bronte
We have been seeing and hearing a great deal about waste, war and woe these days. We are weary and weeping, but I hope our tears still flow. Anne Bronte, a feminist writer in the 1800’s, had no idea of the woe and weeping that was still to come. In 2026, when I see Happy Hegseth smirking as he describes raining death and destruction on Iran, I am filled with woe and just want to weep. I’m sure I am not alone.
Let me start with all the claims about the “successes” of eliminating fraud within the US and all our foes outside the US. Not only do these claims need to be put in perspective, but we also need to ground the claims in facts. More importantly, perhaps it’s time to step back and look at all of the waste that is occurring from multiple sources and how waste might be viewed differently given all the wars in which we are involved.
First, let’s look at the two types of waste in our five largest budget items. Waste not only consists of fraud (intentional misrepresentation) but also of improper payments (extravagant spending, overpayments, and administrative errors). This chart shows the approximate numbers for 2025 based on government figures.
|
|
Total Amount of budget |
% abused by fraud |
% wasted by improper payments |
|
Social Security |
$1.46 trillion |
.5% (1/2 of 1%) |
1.5% |
|
Medicare |
$1.2 trillion |
4% |
8% |
|
Defense |
$1.0 trillion |
6% |
12% |
|
Interest on Debt |
$1.0 trillion |
0% |
0% |
|
Medicaid |
$700 billion |
5% |
10% |
Note that defense spending shows much higher proportional waste, inefficiency, and fraud than any of the other line items. Also, notice that improper payments account for more than twice the amount wasted on fraud. More importantly for this post, please note that the actual fraud in Medicaid is about 5%. Might it be possible that we are overreacting to the amount of fraud, abuse, and waste going on? Could it be that stories about fraud and waste serve to distract from bigger priorities? What about the waste of lives and suffering caused by our policies?
- Here’s a quick look at the facts (to the extent that we know them) behind the narrative of the Somali fraud in Minnesota, which managed to capture the headlines until we started bombing Iran. From what I can gather, about 50,000 Somalis live in Minnesota. 85 are being charged with fraud. The central case involves a nonprofit, Feeding Our Future, which prosecutors say was used by individuals—mostly of Somali descent—to steal approximately $250 million to $300 million in federal funds intended for child nutrition programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have estimated that the total fraud across a range of federally funded state programs (including some Medicaid services) in the state since 2018 ranges between $1 and $9 billion. Official reports on total national Medicaid improper payments in 2025 are approximately $37 billion.
To be clear, I’m not minimizing the extent of improper payments, nor am I denying that a significant amount of fraud was perpetrated by a large group of Somali refugees. What I’m arguing for is to put these numbers in perspective AND to question why and how these stories are attracting so much media attention. For me, the two key facts are that fraud accounts for about 5% of the total Medicaid budget and Somalis who committed fraud in Minnesota represent less than 1/10th of 1% of the Somali population there.
The Trump administration used these cases to highlight what they describe as “rampant fraud” and waste in Minnesota by Somalis, which prompted increased immigration enforcement and investigations into potential ties to overseas terror groups. It also provided cover to send 3,000 ICE officers into Minnesota, where two American citizens were shot and killed exercising their First Amendment rights and hundreds of immigrants were illegally detained (over 4,000 arrested, 70% of whom had no criminal record). Imagine the amount of wasted spending on detention centers ($45 billion budgeted in the “beautiful bill”) AND the weeping caused by the families of immigrants and citizens who were deported, terrorized, or killed as a result of this targeted attack on a liberal American city.
The chart, facts, and examples above, however, don’t begin to capture the waste of lives inherent in any war. If we really want to reduce waste, we might want to start avoiding wars. And we might want to consider the lives being wasted as well as the dollars. This chart puts waste and war in a larger context:
|
|
Total $Cost of War |
Total Dead |
Total Wounded (not including psychological trauma) |
|
Vietnam |
$1 Trillion |
1.3 – 3.5 million |
??? |
|
Afghanistan |
$2.3 Trillion |
176,000 – 241,000 |
??? |
|
Libya |
$1.5 Billion |
25,000 |
??? |
|
Iraq |
$2.4 Trillion |
300,000 – 1.0 million |
??? |
|
Ukraine |
$400 Billion |
200,000 – 500,000 |
??? |
I consulted multiple sources to create this chart. I was struck by the range of estimated deaths in each of the wars suffered on all sides. What it tells me is that we don’t even begin to know the carnage created by war. I decided to leave the estimates of wounded soldiers and civilians as an open question for two reasons: 1) If we don’t even have an accurate count of people killed, we can’t begin to understand how many were physically wounded; and 2) I didn’t want to ignore the psychological trauma and forever mental health problems experienced by people coming home from war. Psychological casualties from war far exceed the number killed and haunt people for the rest of their lives. Having participated in state-sponsored murder in Vietnam, count me as one.
While this administration makes a practice of demonizing immigrants and blaming them for “huge” amounts of waste, abuse, and fraud, it has wasted so much more with its wars of choice, its “efficiency” initiatives, its mass deportations, its toxic tariffs, and its ally bashing. For example, in his first year, Trump has initiated or supported 8 foreign military interventions (Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, and Ecuador) while withdrawing from the one intervention (Ukraine) that actually demands and deserves as much support as possible.
The war in Iran costs about $1 billion per day. So far, we have lost 3 planes with replacement costs of over $100 million each. More importantly, the human cost of war continues to mount. As of this writing, 6 US soldiers have been killed, over 1,200 Iranians (including over 100 kids killed by a bomb in a school), and a growing number of other people in neighboring countries. Those numbers will surely grow as the war grinds on. Imagine the amount of weeping caused by each one of those lives lost.
Waste may be bad, but war is worse. Whether it’s a war on immigrants, a war on “others,” or a war against a sovereign nation, each intervention results in untold weeping. I’m afraid we have overreacted to selected causes of waste, underreacted to the wastes of war, and cruelly ignored the weeping that has taken place as a result of lives lost or displaced.
Delusion, drama, and demonization don’t make a strategy. Bombing, blaming, and boasting don’t produce results. Gold, glitter, and glad-handing are not meaningful measures of character. Lying, lording, and listing demands don’t build trust. Fantasies, fallacies, and firings don’t get us any closer to reality. Vanity, vulgarity, and violence do not serve as effective role modeling for our youth. Corruption, chaos and cruelty don’t result in sustainable solutions. I could go on and on with these alliterative threesomes without even beginning to scratch the surface of the depths of depravity of this administration. I would prefer, however, to focus on the main purpose of this post—to call attention to all the weeping caused by destructive decisions and the wastes of war independent of who is in power.
How easy it is to recite the casualty counts without considering the devastating impacts on the families of loved ones lost. How easy it is to be enraged by the billions wasted in fraud without fully facing the $7.5 trillion wasted in unnecessary wars in the last sixty years. How easy it is to forget that the deaths of 20 million people in World War I and 70 million people in World War II didn’t teach us that wars cause weeping beyond imagination. How easy it is to forget that over 5 million people were killed in the wars since World War II and a large multiple of that number still suffer from physical and emotional trauma. How easy it is to forget that none of those wars ended well.
Perhaps the lyrics in the last stanza of Bob Dylan’s Blowin in the Wind say it best:
How many times must a man look up, before he sees the sky
How many tears must one man shed, before he can hear people cry
How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind; the answer is blowing in the wind.
As we enter this new round of waste and war, I’m hoping we will remember the weeping. I’m hoping we will learn from past mistakes. I’m hoping we will become sensitized to the loss of all the people affected by war. I’m hoping we will look to the sky, hear people cry, and finally realize that too many people have died. May it be so.
