Bureaucracy Times

GSA Required a Second Set of Eyes on Building Inspections. Sometimes They Belonged to the Same Person.

The federal government’s civilian landlord, the General Services Administration, has a quality-control system for assessing the condition of federal buildings: one employee conducts the survey, and another approves it, at least in principle.

In practice, a new audit by the General Services Administration’s Office of Inspector General found that hundreds of building assessments were both completed and approved by the same employee — effectively allowing the person conducting the assessment to serve as their own second set of eyes.

GSA’s Public Buildings Service uses its Building Assessment Tool, or BAT, to document building conditions and estimate repair and maintenance liabilities across the federal real-estate portfolio. The OIG examined 2,949 BAT surveys completed between fiscal years 2022 and 2025 and found that 524 — nearly 18 percent — were both completed and approved by the same employee. Those assessments were not financially trivial: together, they represented approximately $5.27 billion in reported repair and maintenance liabilities.

Independent Review, With an Asterisk

Under the BAT process, GSA assigns separate roles to a surveyor and an approver. The surveyor assesses building systems and identifies deficiencies, while the approver is supposed to review that work for completeness and accuracy before the assessment becomes final. On paper, that division provides an obvious internal control: somebody checks the work. In the system as implemented, however, that somebody did not always have to be somebody else.

According to the OIG, PBS guidance did not explicitly prohibit an employee from serving as both surveyor and approver. A GSA frequently asked questions document even addressed the possibility directly.

“Can I be a Surveyor as well as an Approver for a BAT survey?”

The guidance acknowledged that employees could perform both roles, although doing so was “not recommended.” The OIG concluded that allowing employees to approve their own surveys undermined the independence of the review and increased the risk that errors or omissions would go undetected.

The Fix Had a Loophole

PBS eventually attempted to close the loophole. On June 30, 2025, GSA implemented a system control intended to prevent the same employee from being assigned as both surveyor and approver on a BAT assessment. The control, however, came with an exception: administrative and management users could override the restriction.

The OIG subsequently identified 44 surveys in which the same employee completed and approved the assessment even after the new control had been implemented. Auditors also found broader inconsistencies in how survey responsibilities were recorded. Some surveys had no approver assigned; others lacked both an assigned surveyor and approver; and in 106 instances, according to the OIG, the employee who actually completed and approved the survey was not listed as either the assigned surveyor or approver.

The OIG recommended that PBS establish policies explicitly prohibiting employees from approving their own BAT surveys and strengthen system controls to enforce the separation. GSA agreed with the recommendations.

A Much Larger Ledger

The procedural flaw matters because BAT is not merely an inspection checklist. The assessments feed into GSA’s accounting for billions of dollars in federal building repair and maintenance needs, so errors in those surveys can affect the government’s picture of the condition — and cost — of its own real estate.

The same audit concluded that GSA understated repair and maintenance liabilities in dozens of building assessments and identified broader weaknesses in how the agency gathers information about the condition of federal properties. Those findings raise a larger question: how accurately does the federal government’s landlord know what its buildings actually need, and what that will cost?

That question, and the understated liabilities behind it, are explored in Part 2: GSA Has a $17 Billion Building Maintenance Problem. Now It’s Inspecting Buildings Less Often. For now, the quality-control problem is more straightforward: the federal government required someone to check the building inspector’s work, and for hundreds of assessments, it was prepared to let the building inspector do it.
Fediverse reactions
The Red Tape Roundup — Week of September 13, 2026
A Note from the Editor

Welcome to the first edition of the Red Tape Roundup — a quick look back at the week that was, a peek at what’s coming, and a status check on our ongoing battle with the federal records system.

This is a newsletter for people who believe that the most consequential information the government produces is also, somehow, the hardest to find. We are a team of writers and editors who have made it our mission to dig through the boring parts of the federal apparatus so you don’t have to — and occasionally to have a little fun with it when the government makes that too easy to resist.

This week was a good one. Our most-read piece was an analysis of the Chemical Safety Board’s investigation files from a Shell plant explosion in June 2025. The CSB released the records; we read them and published. That one found a wide audience, including a particularly enthusiastic corner of Reddit. We’ll take it.

The week’s other crowd favorite was entirely unplanned. A Department of Energy newsletter arrived in our inbox — as hundreds do each week — and this one contained no current news whatsoever. Just highlights from July and August. We debated for about thirty seconds whether to let it slide. We did not let it slide. Many of you appreciated the decision.

This is what we do. We follow the paper trail, we ask uncomfortable questions, and occasionally we poke a little fun at a bureaucracy that has earned it. Thanks for being here. If you enjoy the Roundup, forward it to someone who’d appreciate it. We’re growing, and we’d love the company.

This Week’s Most-Read

The numbers are in. Here’s what you were reading this week:
Coming Up Next Week

A look at what’s heading your way next week:
- The $215 Million Quantum Race That Took Washington a Decade to Build — The Department of Energy just launched a major quantum computing competition. Part One of the Quantum Genesis Files traces how Washington got here — and why it took this long.
- Déjà Vu on the Clinch River: TVA’s New Nuclear Bet Looks a Lot Like Its Last One — The Tennessee Valley Authority is making another big nuclear push on the Clinch River. The last time it tried this, it didn’t go especially well.
From the Investigative Desk

The Kennedy Center rabbit hole got considerably deeper this week.

What began as a look at the Kennedy Center’s unusual federal structure has turned into something much larger.

We have been working backward through the Center’s congressional history, including hearings and records from the 1960s and early 1970s, when Washington was still figuring out exactly what it had agreed to build, how much it would cost, and who would ultimately pay for it.

One particularly interesting stop was a July 1969 Senate hearing involving legislation to increase federal appropriations for the project. By then, the authorized federal contribution was being pushed from $15.5 million to $23 million, while borrowing authority associated with the parking facility was proposed to rise from $15.4 million to $20.4 million.

Among the problems confronting the project were increased construction costs, heavier-than-expected structural requirements and the rather inconvenient realization that a national performing arts center located near National Airport would need considerably more protection from jet noise.

There was also another problem familiar to anyone who has watched a government construction project age in real time: leaving the unfinished building sitting there wasn’t free. Contemporary testimony warned that prolonged dormancy itself could cost millions.

We are now consolidating the original congressional records, government documents and historical material into a dedicated investigative archive. Some of those records are wonderfully accessible. Others appear to have been digitized under the assumption that nobody would ever attempt to read them again.

This one has grown beyond the scope of a normal Bureaucracy Times article. We’re going to keep pulling the thread.

What we’re trying to answer: How did the Kennedy Center evolve from a federally authorized cultural project into the peculiar public-private institution that exists today, and what did that evolution actually cost taxpayers?

FOIA Watch

Another week, another round of politely asking the government to show us its homework.

DOI puts the Arctic payroll request on the clock. The Department of the Interior formally acknowledged our request for Interior Business Center payroll and personnel-cost records connected to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. The request, received September 9, is now DOI-2026-009648 and has been placed on the normal processing track. DOI also invoked a 10-workday extension. Translation: the request has successfully entered the federal digestive system.

Virginia Elections came back empty-handed. The Virginia Department of Elections responded to our inquiry into voter-list activity involving the organizations named in our request. ELECT says it found no requests, purchases, subscriptions, or deliveries of its voter-list products involving those parties. That does not end the inquiry. It changes the question. We are now looking at where the voter data used in those outreach campaigns actually came from.

CBP sent answers. Now we get to improve the questions. Responses arrived to our first three requests stemming from the investigation into separated CBP contractors retaining system access. Those responses are being reviewed against the agency’s own FOIA requirements before narrower follow-up requests are drafted. FOIA occasionally works best as reconnaissance for the next FOIA.

CIGIE is getting the press-office treatment first. After our review of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s FY2025 reporting raised questions about how its monetary results were calculated, we submitted a targeted media inquiry. A planned FOIA request is temporarily on hold while we see what CIGIE answers voluntarily. No sense filing a records request asking a question the press office might answer for free. Yet.

Still simmering. Requests involving USARC, NSF, GSA and other pieces of the Arctic Commission investigation remain in various stages of the federal records pipeline. The SEC request connected to the MMTLP investigation also remains active, as does our expedited Legal Services Corporation OIG request.

The bottom line: This was more response week than filing week. One agency acknowledged a request, another found no responsive records, CBP gave us material to sharpen the next round, and CIGIE has been given an opportunity to answer before another FOIA joins the pile.

The filing cabinets remain undefeated.

On Our Radar

A few things that haven’t become stories. Yet.

Defense Regional Clocks. The DoD Inspector General published an audit in which all 10 recommendations are classified. We have been reconstructing what prompted an audit whose public version reveals considerably more about the existence of the audit than the audit itself.

USARC’s “news.” While examining the U.S. Arctic Research Commission’s public output, we noticed that much of what appears on its news page points readers to reporting produced elsewhere. That’s now part of our broader examination of what the small federal commission produces, who does the work and what taxpayers are paying for it.

Government websites versus researchers. OCR failures, inaccessible archival PDFs and anti-bot restrictions keep appearing in our research. We’re beginning to document those barriers systematically rather than merely swearing at them individually.

Until next week —

hannotek, Editor @ Bureaucracy.News
Washington Finally Measured Your Unpaid Labor. It Used Data Older Than Your Car.

The Government Accountability Office wants Congress to know that unpaid household work, the cooking, the cleaning, the eldercare, the endless negotiation with a toddler over pants, was worth somewhere between $5.6 and $7.4 trillion in 2024 (GAO-26-107871). That is up to a quarter of gross domestic product, generated by nobody the Bureau of Economic Analysis has bothered to formally price since 2020.

Six years is not a long time in most contexts. It is an eternity in economic statistics, where the whole point is to tell you what is happening now, not what was happening when “Encanto” was still in theaters. GAO’s new report, delivered to the Senate Special Committee on Aging, is framed as a straightforward exercise in economic measurement. Read past the tables and it becomes something else, a case study in two federal statistical agencies quietly deciding that a trillion-dollar blind spot in how America understands its own economy is somebody else’s problem.

The Bureau That Waited to Be Asked

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has known the answer to this question for a while. Its household production satellite account, the official government attempt to price unpaid domestic labor, has been running in some form since the 1960s. As of May 2026, per GAO’s own accounting, BEA’s most recent published estimate covered the years 1965 through 2020. Four years of a rapidly reshaping post-pandemic labor market went unmeasured by the agency built to measure exactly this.

Then, conveniently, something happened. GAO circulated a draft of this report to the Department of Commerce for comment. Commerce’s response, reproduced in the report’s own Agency Comments section, notes that BEA “issued a staff working paper in June 2026 that included updated household production estimates.” June 2026. Three months before GAO’s report went public. The timing invites an uncharitable but not unreasonable reading; an agency that had gone half a decade without updating a core national account found the motivation to do so only once its homework was about to be checked by outside auditors.

To be fair to BEA, updating this account is genuinely hard. It requires linking American Time Use Survey data to Current Population Survey wage data, choosing a valuation method that will be second guessed regardless of which one you pick, and defending the whole exercise to an audience that half suspects the entire project is ideological. None of that explains why the fix showed up on a GAO deadline instead of a public one.

The Bureau That Didn’t Bother

BEA’s lag is embarrassing. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ position is worse, because at least BEA has an account to be late on. Buried in a footnote of GAO’s report is the admission that BLS “has explored developing estimates of the value of unpaid household work but has not yet produced them.” The agency describes this as part of a larger effort to improve its Consumer Expenditure Surveys, the survey that underpins how the government understands what American households actually consume.

As of March 2026, GAO writes, BLS officials “were unsure if the agency will produce a consumption measure that includes valuing unpaid household work due to resource constraints.” Read that sentence twice. This is not a promise of future data with a vague timeline attached, the customary bureaucratic dodge. It is a federal statistical agency telling its own auditor that it might simply never finish work it has already acknowledged would improve its data, because the money isn’t there and nobody has made it a priority.

For an agency whose entire mandate is producing the numbers policymakers use to make decisions, “we might not get to it” is a strange thing to say out loud, even in a footnote. It is stranger still when the number in question, by GAO’s own estimate, represents up to a quarter of GDP. BLS has effectively conceded that a measurement problem of that scale sits below the line on its priority list, indefinitely, and saw no reason to soften that admission for the record.

Why This Isn’t Just an Economist’s Argument

It would be easy to file this under abstract methodology, the kind of dispute that stays contained to journal articles and BEA working papers. It doesn’t stay contained. GAO’s report specifically flags that better data on unpaid caregiving could help set stipend levels for family caregivers of disabled veterans, citing a 2024 study in Social Science & Medicine that found VA caregiver stipends were largely offset by reduced healthcare spending for the veterans in question (Jacobs et al., 2024).

That is not a new insight for GAO. This publication has covered agencies that keep rediscovering their own prior recommendations, and this is another entry in that file. GAO flagged the retirement security angle of unpaid caregiving back in 2019, in a report on parental and spousal caregivers facing financial risk in retirement (GAO-19-382), and flagged VA’s family caregiver program specifically that same year (GAO-19-618). Seven years later, the underlying data those recommendations depended on is still six years stale at one agency and nonexistent at the other. The policy questions did not go away while the measurement infrastructure sat idle; they just kept getting answered with worse information than they deserved.

There is a version of this story where BEA and BLS are simply under resourced agencies doing their best with limited budgets, and there is real truth in that version. But “under resourced” is a description of a condition, not an excuse that dissolves the consequence. Congress asked a fair question about how the economy actually works, and the honest answer required an outside audit, six years of catch up work quietly rushed out ahead of publication, and a footnote confessing that the other half of the problem may never get solved at all.

The Ledger Nobody Kept

GAO’s report closes, as these reports do, with the polite fiction that agency comments were received and considered. The Department of Labor had nothing to say. The Department of Commerce pointed to a working paper that happened to appear right on schedule. Nobody at either agency was asked, on the record, why it took a congressional audit to produce data that should have existed already.

The caregivers, the cooks, the people quietly propping up a quarter of the American economy in the background of their own lives, were never actually the ones being audited here. The agencies were. They passed, technically, in the way a student passes an exam by cramming the material the night before because they knew it was coming. Whether that counts as understanding the subject is a separate question, and it’s the one Congress should be asking next.
Fediverse reactions
Federal Register Watch: September 18, 2026
The day’s most sweeping action came out of federal procurement policy, where four separate proposed rules published together would rewrite large stretches of the Federal Acquisition Regulation under an executive order aimed at loosening how the government buys goods and services.
- OFPP proposes a four-part rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy, joined by the Defense Department, the General Services Administration, and NASA, published four separate proposed rules that together touch parts 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 27, 28, 35, 36, 38, 44, 47, 51, and 52 of the FAR, implementing Executive Order 14275, “Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement.” Splitting one rewrite into four dockets makes each filing easier to process, but it also means no single comment period covers the full scope of the change. That window closes October 19, just 31 days out, a tight timeline for contractors, watchdog groups, and other agencies to weigh in on a rewrite that reaches into commercial-item buying, indefinite-delivery contracts, construction, and dozens of other procurement mechanics. Read the lead proposal.
- Justice Department settles part of its RealPage rent-pricing case, while the core suit continues. DOJ and ten state attorneys general published a proposed final judgment resolving their claims against Pinnacle Property Management Services, one of several large landlords sued alongside software vendor RealPage over allegations that its pricing tools let competing landlords coordinate rents through shared, competitively sensitive data rather than competing on price. Pinnacle would have to stop licensing that kind of revenue-management software and put antitrust compliance training in place, but the case against RealPage itself, which the complaint says controls roughly 80 percent of the commercial revenue-management software market, is unaffected. Settlements like this one go through the Tunney Act, which gives the public 60 days to comment before a judge decides whether the deal serves the public interest, so renters and tenant groups still have a formal chance to object before it becomes final. Read the filing.
- FTC settles a rare interlocking-directorate case between two rival gunmakers. The FTC published a proposed consent order over Beretta’s right to appoint two directors to the board of competitor Sturm, Ruger & Co., which the agency says violated the Clayton Act’s ban on competitors sharing board members, a rule meant to stop rivals from trading sensitive business information through shared leadership. The order requires any Beretta-appointed director to be financially independent of Beretta, bars Beretta from seeking Ruger’s nonpublic information, and requires 15 days’ notice before any future board appointment. Cases enforcing that particular provision are uncommon, so one naming two of the country’s largest firearms makers stands out on its own. Comments are due October 19. Read the notice.
- State Department eases export controls on underwater drones without the usual advance comment period. State issued an interim final rule removing certain uncrewed underwater vehicles from Category XX(a) of the U.S. Munitions List, loosening export restrictions on a defense-relevant undersea drone technology. Interim final rules take legal effect, October 19 here, on their own schedule rather than waiting for the public input an ordinary proposed rule would collect first; State says it will still take comments on refining the change, but those comments won’t hold up the rule from becoming binding. Reaching for that faster track to loosen, rather than tighten, export controls on militarily relevant hardware is worth flagging on its own. Read the rule.
- A 2022 DOE energy rule was erased by Congress, not by DOE. The Energy Department published a notice stating that its 2022 final rule setting energy-conservation standards for manufactured housing “has no legal effect,” because a new law, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, overrode it. The notice took effect immediately with no comment period, because there was nothing left for DOE to decide: a rule that took years of standard rulemaking to finish was wiped out by lawmakers rather than through the notice-and-comment process agencies normally have to use to repeal their own regulations. Read the notice.
- OPM proposes rewriting who counts as an “excepted service” federal employee. OPM proposed changes to the rules governing the excepted service, the Pathways Programs for students and recent graduates, and how administrative law judges get appointed. Excepted-service positions are filled outside the competitive process that applies to most federal jobs and often carry fewer job protections, so redrawing which jobs fall into that category can shift both how much hiring flexibility agencies have and how much insulation from ordinary civil-service rules. Comments are due November 17. Read the proposal.
This edition draws on the Federal Register’s full docket of 114 documents published on September 18, 2026. Set aside as routine: antidumping and countervailing-duty determinations and orders, a batch of roughly 18 SEC self-regulatory-organization filings tied largely to exchanges’ move toward a 23-hour trading day, FERC combined notices and utility and pipeline filings, routine OMB/PRA information-collection notices and corrections, advisory-committee and agency meeting notices, and other standard administrative filings that didn’t trip an institutional-significance or anomaly signal.
Born in Bailout, Raised in Denial: The Fannie and Freddie Story Washington Still Can’t Finish

A Subsidiary Trying to Forget Its Parent

Every family has one relative nobody wants to bring up at dinner. For Fannie Mae, that relative is the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the New Deal lending machine this series covered two weeks ago, the one that spiraled into a corruption scandal so severe it forced Congress to write the Government Corporation Control Act of 1945 just to contain the damage.

Fannie Mae was not inspired by the RFC. It was chartered on February 10, 1938, as a wholly owned subsidiary of the RFC itself, capitalized with roughly ten million dollars in RFC funds and tasked with buying up FHA insured mortgages so banks would keep lending during the Depression, according to a detailed institutional history of the entity compiled from congressional records. Seventeen years after its parent got shut down for operating as an unaccountable financial power center, Fannie Mae is still around, still backed by an implicit federal promise nobody in Washington will fully admit to, and still, as of this writing, technically a ward of the state. Its sibling, Freddie Mac, has been along for the ride since 1970. Between them they now guarantee or hold something like 7.7 trillion dollars in mortgage debt, more than the debt of every company and government on earth except the United States and Japan, according to researchers at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business.

The Vietnam War Era Accounting Trick That Still Runs the Mortgage Market

Here is where the story gets genuinely absurd. In 1968, the Johnson administration needed to make the federal budget look smaller while paying for the Vietnam War and the Great Society simultaneously. Fannie Mae, still a line item on the government’s books, was an inconvenient liability. So Congress passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, split Fannie Mae into two pieces, spun off the fully government owned mortgage insurance function into a new entity called Ginnie Mae, and turned the rest into a nominally private, shareholder owned corporation. Fannie Mae’s debt vanished from the federal balance sheet essentially overnight, a maneuver policy analysts have bluntly described as a clever accounting solution driven by budget politics rather than any free market conviction that Fannie Mae belonged in private hands.

The new “private” Fannie Mae kept a two billion dollar line of credit with the Treasury, stayed exempt from state and local income taxes, and never had to register its securities with the SEC, the kind of privileges no actual private mortgage company enjoys. Congress created a second entity, Freddie Mac, in 1970 specifically to give Fannie some competition, using the identical hybrid structure. The Competitive Enterprise Institute summarized the resulting arrangement about as bluntly as anyone has: the model privatized the profits to shareholders while socializing the losses onto taxpayers, and it stayed that way for four decades because nobody in either party had much incentive to change it while the mortgages kept performing.

They stopped performing in 2007. By the time the subprime crisis hit full force, Fannie and Freddie together held or guaranteed 5.3 trillion dollars in mortgage backed securities and debt, an amount roughly equal to the entire publicly held debt of the United States government at the time, according to congressional testimony from then FHFA Director James Lockhart. On September 6, 2008, with both companies unable to raise capital and staring down eighty nine billion dollars in debt coming due within months, their own boards agreed to hand control to the newly created Federal Housing Finance Agency under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, according to FHFA’s own history of the conservatorships. The federal government had spent forty years pretending Fannie Mae was not its problem. It became the government’s problem again in a single weekend, and Treasury ultimately pumped in 191.5 billion dollars to keep both entities solvent.

The Entities Built to Dodge the Law Written to Catch Them

This is the part that should genuinely bother anyone who followed the Fourth Branch piece in this series. Congress wrote the 1945 Government Corporation Control Act specifically to make sure entities like the RFC could never again grow into unaccountable, off books financial power centers without mandatory budgets, GAO audits, and borrowing limits. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sidestepped that entire accountability regime by design, not by accident. Because the 1968 restructuring made them nominally private, shareholder owned companies, they were never classified as government corporations under Title 31 at all. They are government sponsored enterprises, a separate legal category invented specifically to capture the benefits of a federal charter, the implicit backstop, the tax breaks, the cheap funding, while dodging the exact oversight machinery Congress built after the RFC scandal.

In other words, Washington did not just fail to learn the lesson of the RFC. It engineered a structure explicitly designed to route around that lesson, and the result was an entity that grew larger and more systemically dangerous than the RFC ever was, precisely because nobody was legally required to watch it the way the 1945 Act required watching TVA or the FDIC. The GSE model is the RFC’s most consequential offspring not because it repeated the RFC’s mistakes, but because it corrected for the wrong ones.

Eighteen Years of “Temporary”

Conservatorship was supposed to be a stabilization measure. As of this writing it has run eighteen years, longer than the RFC itself lasted from birth to liquidation. Fannie and Freddie returned to profitability by 2012 and have since paid the government back many times over in dividends, which has only intensified the political fight over what to do with them next. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in 2025 that ending the conservatorships was an explicit administration goal, and FHFA Director Bill Pulte has spent 2026 signaling that the arrangement should not continue indefinitely. In late June, Representative Scott Fitzgerald introduced the Sustainable Homeownership Act, a bill aimed at establishing statutory guardrails for a formal release, according to National Mortgage Professional’s coverage of the legislation. Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has been buying the common stock of both companies for years on the bet that release is coming, and named it his best investment idea heading into 2026.

Nobody involved seems eager to just let the conservatorship expire on its own terms, because nobody can agree on what happens to the implicit government guarantee once it does. Release Fannie and Freddie without an explicit backstop from Congress and investors may demand higher returns to compensate for the added risk, which likely means higher mortgage rates for every homebuyer in the country, a concern serious enough that both Bessent and Pulte have said publicly they will not move forward if the data shows rates going up.

That is the real inheritance the RFC left behind. Not a single scandal or a single bailout, but a durable federal habit of building financial entities that look market disciplined on paper while carrying government risk in practice, then discovering decades later that unwinding the arrangement is far harder than creating it ever was. The RFC took twenty five years from founding to liquidation. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have already outlasted that timeline twice over, and the exit ramp is still being drafted in real time, in Congress, this year, while the rest of us wait to see who actually ends up holding the risk when the paperwork finally clears.

This is Part 3 of our series on U.S. government corporations. Read Part 2: The Slush Fund That Ate Washington: How the RFC Invented the Modern Government Bailout.

Next in the series: the entities that never broke this way, TVA and the FDIC, and what it actually takes for a government corporation to do the one thing it was designed to do without becoming somebody’s eighteen year headache.
Energy Department Confirms July and August Successfully Occurred

At 4:05 p.m. on September 16, an email arrived from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response bearing important news.

July and August happened.

The subject line, “CESER News & Updates – July & August 2026,” was refreshingly honest about the situation. There would be no September news in this September 16 news email. Instead, CESER had assembled a collection of developments stretching all the way back to July 2, presumably after allowing sufficient time for the news to mature.

This might be unremarkable coming from an office devoted to historical preservation. CESER, however, is responsible for cybersecurity, energy security and emergency response, fields in which the phrase “we’ll get back to you next month” generally lacks a certain operational appeal.

The newsletter opened with a collection of grid reliability actions. DOE issued an emergency order for the Carolinas on July 2 amid hot weather. Another followed for the Southwest Power Pool on July 21. There was another on July 26 covering 17 states, followed by August actions involving Guam, Puerto Rico, the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic.

These are not trivial subjects. Grid emergencies, blackout risks and extreme weather are exactly the sort of matters the public might reasonably associate with timely information.

The cybersecurity section was similarly urgent in subject matter. CESER highlighted Stormbreaker, a testbed developed with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to evaluate large language models and agentic artificial intelligence in power systems and operational technology environments. It also pointed readers toward cybersecurity threat guidance, operational technology security, software bills of materials and reports of cyber incidents affecting water and wastewater systems.

All useful material. All arriving in an email on September 16.

The newest dated CESER event in the email was an August 27 appearance by Principal Deputy Director Emily Burdick at a National Governors Association summer meeting. That means even the freshest item in the “News & Updates” package had enjoyed nearly three weeks to contemplate its journey to our inbox.

The newsletter even contains a particularly delightful sentence from an August 5 event at the National Lab of the Rockies. CESER Director Andrew McClure emphasized the office’s guiding principle of providing “timely and actional information to the energy sector.”

We assume “timely” is being used here in the federal sense.

To be fair, there is nothing inherently wrong with a periodic retrospective newsletter. Agencies routinely compile activity over weeks or months, and CESER did not disguise what it was sending. The words “July & August 2026” were right there in the subject line. Nobody promised breaking news.

That may actually make it funnier.

Somewhere in the machinery of the federal government, an office dedicated to responding to rapidly developing threats compiled its July and August news, shepherded it through whatever process was required, and successfully delivered it halfway through September.

The grid remained standing. The email arrived. And Bureaucracy Times can now independently confirm that July and August 2026 successfully occurred.
Fediverse reactions
The Third Inspection: Krome Fails the Same Test Again, and Nobody Is Held Back a Grade

Some institutions learn from their mistakes. Others simply learn to write better memos about them. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General has now inspected the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami three times since 2023, and each time the findings read like a photocopy of the last, just with the dates changed and a few new appendices explaining why nothing much has improved. The latest report, OIG-26-29, documents an unannounced inspection conducted May 28 to 29, 2025, and covers overcrowding, food safety, use of force, medical neglect, and a facility that appears to be inventing new places to warehouse people faster than it can process the ones it already has. Notably, the report was not released until September 11, 2026, nearly sixteen months after the inspection itself, a delay the OIG attributes to three separate government shutdowns that ate up 123 days of the fiscal year. Apparently the government can furlough its watchdogs even while it keeps running the kennel.

Building 9 and the Art of Improvisational Incarceration

The headline number is simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: on the first day of the inspection, Krome held 1,102 detainees against a maximum capacity of 882, a full 25 percent over. Six of fourteen intake hold rooms were over their posted limits, one by 56 percent, and inspectors found detainees standing or lying on the floor because there was nowhere else to put them. Krome had also converted two visitation rooms into overflow intake space, which is one way to solve a capacity problem, provided you don’t mind that it violates the standard meant to prevent exactly that.

More striking is the twelve-hour rule. Detention standards cap how long someone can be held in an intake hold room before being processed and moved, precisely because hold rooms are not designed for extended stays. OIG inspectors found intake processing sheets, taped to the outside of hold rooms on May 28, dated May 26. An intake officer confirmed the obvious: people were being held well past the limit, in some cases for days, with a single opportunity to shower or brush their teeth regardless of how long they stayed. Krome’s explanation involved medical screening bottlenecks (no full-time X-ray technician, evidently a luxury) and general staffing shortfalls, which is a candid enough admission that the problem is structural rather than incidental.

Then there is Building 9, a tent-like structure erected after the prior inspection cycle to serve as overflow housing during the intake crunch. Inspectors found detainees classified at different risk levels (low, medium-low, and high, denoted by wristband color) commingled inside it, which is precisely the scenario the classification system exists to prevent. Some classification forms were incomplete or missing supervisory sign-off entirely. Krome’s given reason, again, was volume: too many people coming and going for staff to finish the paperwork. It is worth noting that a companion report released the same day, OIG-26-22, found even more severe conditions at Florida’s now-shuttered “Alligator Alcatraz” facility, including detainees held in four-by-four-foot outdoor metal enclosures. Whatever is driving Florida’s detention system to improvise structures and shortcuts, it is not confined to one address. See The Calming Area and Whose Facility Is It Anyway for our full coverage of the Alligator Alcatraz inspection.

Chicken, Grievances, and Fifteen Vacancies

If the housing findings suggest a facility straining under volume, the food service findings suggest one that has simply stopped paying attention. Inspectors observed raw chicken thawing in three large vats, one with water running continuously over the sides and onto the floor, the other two with chicken submerged, uncovered, and out of its original packaging, sitting in standing water with no temperature control whatsoever. Two freezer gauges read 20 degrees Fahrenheit over the required maximum. A pallet of food marked “Keep Frozen” sat outside in direct sunlight for more than two hours while ambient temperatures ran between 82 and 90 degrees. None of this requires an advanced food safety credential to recognize as a problem; it requires someone walking through the kitchen occasionally.

The medical findings follow a similar shape: real improvement in one narrow area, framed by neglect everywhere else. Sick call wait times dropped from five to seven days down to two or three, thanks to a new sign-up system, which OIG credits fairly. But medical grievances were not being logged or filed, a problem the OIG first flagged back in its 2023 inspection and which persists unchanged. There has been no Continuous Quality Improvement program since the position responsible for running one went unstaffed in April 2024. And the facility’s medical staff had fifteen vacancies at the time of inspection, including a Health Services Administrator position empty since February 2025 (its Assistant has been serving in an “acting” capacity ever since), one dental assistant for the entire detainee population, and eight recently departed nurses. A facility can build all the temporary tents it wants; it cannot conjure medical staff from an org chart with strikethroughs on it.

Use of force fares no better on inspection. Of a five-incident sample drawn from 44 reported incidents over six months, two were flatly non-compliant: pepper spray deployed against a detainee described in Krome’s own after-action review as “offering no resistance,” with no follow-up medical evaluation and incomplete documentation of who was even involved; and a choke hold used during a cell search under circumstances that did not remotely meet the threshold requiring deadly force. Both incidents, notably, were caught and described honestly by Krome’s own internal review process, which raises an uncomfortable question the OIG report does not quite ask directly: if the facility’s own paperwork identifies the violation, why does the violation keep recurring?

Grading Its Own Homework

Appendix B of the report is where the real theater happens. ICE concurred with all nine recommendations, as agencies reliably do, and the OIG’s own scorekeeping tells the real story. Three recommendations (hold room capacity, classification commingling, and SMU recreation equipment) were closed based on evidence ICE supplied, largely photographs and inspection checklists. Six remain open, including the food safety and use-of-force recommendations, because ICE’s paperwork showed intentions and new procedures but not yet the sustained compliance the OIG wants to see documented over time. To its credit, the OIG is not simply rubber-stamping ICE’s self-assessment; it is explicitly withholding closure on the more serious findings pending better proof. That is more scrutiny than many oversight relationships manage. It is also, worth remembering, the third time this particular dance has been performed at this particular address, following near-identical findings in 2023 and again in OIG-24-21 in April 2024, both of which also ended in “concur” and a list of process fixes.

None of this happens in a vacuum, either. Staff-detainee communication showed nearly a quarter of requests to ICE going unanswered past the three-day window, and 17 percent of facility responses marked “complete” contained no actual response at all, a bureaucratic sleight of hand that deserves its own category of dishonesty. Special Management Unit detainees, meanwhile, got an empty fenced lot with no recreational equipment while the general population played basketball and volleyball nearby, a distinction that says a good deal about what “special management” actually means in practice.

Krome did get credit where it was due (the law library, legal materials, and attorney visitation rooms were all found compliant, an improvement from the prior cycle) so it is not as though the facility fails every category. But a facility that can fix its law library and still cannot keep chicken below room temperature, log a medical grievance, or finish a classification form on time is not suffering from a resource problem so much as a priorities problem. The paperwork trail from 2023 through 2026 tells a consistent story: identify the failure, promise the fix, provide a photograph of a checklist, and wait for the next unannounced visit to do it all again.
The Pentagon Spent Four Years Losing Track of $141 Million Meant to Arm Iraq Against ISIS

There is a certain genius to a bureaucracy that can build an entire apparatus, complete with memoranda, standard operating procedures, and a coordination group that meets twice annually (on paper), and still lose track of $141 million. The Department of War’s Inspector General released a report on September 10 documenting exactly that: a program built to equip vetted Iraqi forces against ISIS that spent years shuffling paperwork between rotating officers who had, on average, ten days of handoff briefing before assuming responsibility for a multi-year, nine-figure equipment pipeline.

The program is called the Counter-ISIS Train and Equip Fund for Iraq, or CTEF-I, and Congress has appropriated $414.7 million for its equipment component since fiscal year 2022. The findings, delivered with the OIG’s trademark flat affect, describe an institution that built the paperwork and then forgot to watch what happened to it.

Endorsement at the Speed of Bureaucracy

The USCENTCOM Syria-Iraq Train and Equip Cell’s own standard operating procedure, dated May 2020, allows 30 days to endorse an equipment request package once it clears initial submission; officials told auditors the real target, absent complications, is seven days. From October 2021 through May 2025, USCENTCOM missed that window on 53 of 80 packages, or 66 percent of everything submitted, worth $473 million. The average endorsement for those 53 took 131 days. One package, worth $8 million, took 592 days: nearly a year and a half spent bouncing a request back and forth over a missing mission statement and an unidentified vetted officer, a delay that survived two full personnel rotations before anyone resolved it.

The report’s timeline reconstructions read like a workplace comedy with body armor at stake. A package submitted in April 2022 sat untouched for a year because nobody on either side followed up, during which the CJTF-OIR staff assigned to it rotated out twice. When someone finally looked again, the fix required months of back-and-forth over a single missing detail: an officer’s job title.

None of this is because the underlying paperwork was bad. Auditors reviewed all 80 justification letters submitted over the audit period and found every one contained the required justification and capability gap analysis. The problem was never the writing; it was what happened to the writing after it was submitted.

An Institutional Memory That Rotates Out Every Six Months

The report’s central diagnosis is almost sympathetic, in the way autopsies are sympathetic: CJTF-OIR’s Directorate of Military Assistance, the unit actually responsible for tracking equipment through a process that can run more than four years, is staffed entirely by individually deployed service members on six to twelve month rotations. Do the math and a single equipment request can pass through the hands of eight different people before it reaches an Iraqi unit. The handoff between each of them, per the Directorate’s own Director, consisted of ten days of briefing from the outgoing officer.

USCENTCOM’s civilian contractor staff, by contrast, do not rotate and could in theory provide the institutional continuity the military side lacks. Except the OIG found that USCENTCOM’s own SITEC office quietly stopped performing duties its 2020 SOP explicitly assigns it, including maintaining a tracker of procurement status and liaising with procurement commands, and let those responsibilities drift onto the rotating military personnel it was supposed to be backstopping. The one CTEF-I-specific training event that did exist, an annual conference, was not scheduled around rotation dates and was designed to build the next budget request rather than teach anyone how to track equipment already in the pipeline.

The result is a program tracked across at least four separate, non-interoperable systems (a USCENTCOM tracker, the Security Cooperation Information Portal, a Defense Security Cooperation Agency tracker, and a CJTF-OIR demand tracker), each using its own case numbers, with no end-to-end view of where any given shipment actually stands. CJTF-OIR personnel told auditors they did not even have system access to see what equipment was scheduled to arrive in Kuwait; they found out when it showed up.

Where the $141 Million Went

The consequences arrived in three flavors. First, $64 million in equipment sat in Kuwaiti warehouses as of May 2025 awaiting reallocation because the original requirement had lapsed, including body armor and Soviet-style machine guns that have been in storage since 2017. CJTF-OIR trimmed that pile to $19 million by February 2026, an improvement the OIG credits while noting the remainder still needs a plan: reassign it, return it, or dispose of it.

Second, $25 million in fiscal year 2024 equipment funds simply expired on September 30, 2025, unobligated, because the endorsement backlog ate the clock. CJTF-OIR had to raid fiscal year 2025 money to cover the requirements the expired funds were supposed to fund, a shell game the OIG classifies, without euphemism, as waste.

Third, and worst, $52 million worth of equipment across 128 line items was still sitting somewhere in the procurement pipeline as of August 2025, never having shipped to Kuwait, with nobody able to say whether the original requirements were still valid. Eighteen of those line items were endorsed and funded at least five years ago and still have not reached a Partner Force unit. The tracker that surfaced this figure was compiled manually by a separate Army command and had not been updated in six months when investigators found it; it also only goes back to 2019, meaning the true backlog could be larger and simply invisible.

Layered on top of the equipment mess is Finding B, which is almost a separate scandal wearing the same report’s clothes: the policy office responsible for aligning CTEF-I with strategic goals convened zero coordination-group meetings in all of 2025, despite a 2022 memo requiring two per year, and the operational command responsible for quarterly campaign assessments completed exactly two of them between fiscal year 2022 and the third quarter of fiscal year 2025. Both processes were, in the OIG’s careful phrasing, “initiated, but later suspended.” Nobody documented the decision to stop.

Six Recommendations, Two of Which USCENTCOM Would Rather Not Discuss

The OIG issued six recommendations. Four landed as “resolved”: the policy office agreed to restart its coordination group, and CJTF-OIR agreed to sort out the reallocation backlog and the stalled shipments, with an internal deadline of September 30, 2026. The other two, both aimed at USCENTCOM and asking for a comprehensive tracking mechanism and a real standard operating procedure, were met with responses the OIG describes as neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and which “did not address the specifics of the recommendation.” USCENTCOM’s counteroffer was a promise to stop accepting incomplete packages by October 1, 2026, which the OIG points out does nothing about the four years of packages already lost in the machinery. Both recommendations remain open and unresolved, and the OIG has given USCENTCOM 30 days from the report’s release to try again.

At least $71 million of the money involved is, in the OIG’s own accounting language, funds that could still be put to better use. Whether it gets there depends on an institution that has already demonstrated it can build a tracking system, forget to use it, and still call the paperwork complete.
Five Billion Dollars for the Bureau of Prisons, and a Watchdog on a Diet

Every so often Congress does something almost touching in its honesty. Buried in the reconciliation act it passed last July, the same 800-plus page monument to legislative multitasking that reshaped Medicaid, tax brackets, and the national debt ceiling in a single afternoon, lawmakers also found room to hand the Federal Bureau of Prisons five billion dollars. They then, in the very next breath, ordered their own watchdog to make sure the Bureau did not blow it.

That watchdog, the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General, announced in April that it was standing up a new oversight effort to track how BOP spends the money. Its first product is a public dashboard, the kind of thing that looks reassuring right up until you notice how much of the actual accounting still has to be taken on faith. The rest of the story lives in the fine print: a Senate committee report that reads less like appropriations boilerplate and more like a parent handing a teenager the car keys along with a very specific list of rules about curfew.

The Fine Print of a Windfall

Section 100056 of Public Law 119-21 is admirably specific for a document buried in a bill mostly concerned with tax brackets and Medicaid work requirements. It appropriates five billion dollars to BOP, available through fiscal year 2029, and it splits the money with the precision of a divorce settlement: not less than three billion for hiring and training new employees, not more than two billion for maintenance and repairs. Congress, in other words, built its own priorities into the statute rather than trusting the Bureau to sort it out.

That specificity is not decoration. It is a tacit admission of where BOP has been failing for years. The correctional officer shortage has been a fixture of oversight reporting since before the pandemic, and the Senate Appropriations Committee’s own report accompanying the bill spends paragraphs on “augmentation,” the practice of pulling teachers, psychologists, and other non-custodial staff into cellblocks to cover shifts. The Committee has been complaining about this since 2017. Nine years is a long time to keep writing the same sentence into a report and expecting a different result.

The maintenance side is no less telling. BOP’s own facilities director told a Senate Judiciary hearing in 2024 that the repair backlog had grown to roughly three billion dollars, a figure driven by roofs that, in her memorable phrasing, keep crumbling. Two billion dollars against a three billion dollar backlog is progress, arguably, though it is also an admission that the hole is deeper than the shovel.

A Base Budget That Refuses to Move

Here is the detail that ought to embarrass everyone involved. While Congress was carving out five billion dollars in emergency supplemental funding, it also passed BOP’s ordinary fiscal year 2026 budget in that same Senate report, and that budget did not move an inch. Salaries and Expenses: $8,392,588,000, identical to the year before. Buildings and Facilities: $179,762,000, also identical. The entire burst of new money for staffing and repairs is arriving through a one time, off cycle appropriation that expires in 2029, while the underlying, permanent budget line for facility maintenance remains smaller than a single semiconductor plant’s monthly grocery bill.

This is not how a healthy institution gets funded. It is how you patch a hole in the hull without ever addressing why the ship keeps taking on water. When the five billion dollars runs out, whatever the Bureau has built or hired will need to be sustained on a base budget that, as of this writing, Congress has shown no interest in growing. The supplemental is not a fix. It is a loan against a problem nobody has committed to solving permanently.

The Watchdog Gets a List of Chores, Not a Raise

The Committee did not simply hand BOP the money and walk away, to its credit. Section 100056 comes with an explicit oversight mandate: BOP must deliver a spend plan to the Inspector General and the relevant committees within 120 days of enactment, broken out by fiscal year, and the OIG must then assess whether the money is going where it is supposed to, flag risks, and report back, in one document or several, as it sees fit. That deadline landed around the first of November. Whether BOP hit it is, as of this writing, an open question, and one worth a formal records request rather than a press release.

What makes the arrangement almost darkly comic is the OIG’s own budget. The same report that ordered this new layer of scrutiny also notes that the Inspector General’s office has fielded more than 27,000 complaints about BOP misconduct over the past three years, that roughly 57 percent of all OIG investigations already concern the Bureau, and that the office’s total appropriation for the coming year is a flat $139,000,000, not one dollar more than last year. Congress has, in effect, assigned its watchdog a second job and declined to adjust the salary. The gap between what oversight is tasked to do and what it is resourced to accomplish runs through federal oversight broadly — see The Inspectors General Say They Returned $17 for Every $1 Spent, our examination of what the federal IG community’s headline return-on-investment figure actually measures. If the review is thin, if it takes longer than anyone would like, the reason will not be a mystery.

A Track Record That Argues for Skepticism

None of this occurs in a vacuum, and BOP has not exactly earned the benefit of the doubt. A GAO report from last year found the Bureau had implemented only 33 of 87 recommendations from restrictive housing reviews conducted back in 2014 and 2016, a full decade of foot dragging on its own watchdog’s advice. A separate GAO report, issued just weeks before this piece went to press, is already circling the same five billion dollar appropriation, which suggests the Government Accountability Office does not share the confidence implied by a shiny new dashboard either.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure money is not flowing into an oversight vacuum so much as a politically charged one. BOP’s own fiscal year 2027 budget documents request another $152,000,000 to plan the reactivation of USP Alcatraz as a working prison, a proposal that generates headlines far more easily than it generates cell capacity, while simultaneously rescinding $400,000,000 in prior year construction balances, most of it from the long contested Letcher County, Kentucky project. Money is being pulled from one embattled site and pushed toward a defunct national landmark, all while the base maintenance budget sits frozen and the emergency supplemental is supposed to cover the difference.

The Inspector General’s dashboard is a start. It is not, on its own, an answer to the question Congress ought to be asking itself: why does an agency with a documented decade of ignored recommendations, a stagnant base budget, and a watchdog running on last year’s allowance keep getting bailed out with emergency cash instead of a permanent fix. Five billion dollars buys a great deal of goodwill. It does not, on the evidence so far, buy a plan.

See also Forty Reports, Zero Referrals — on a six-month OIG period that produced 40 investigative reports on theft and fraud at federal grantees and zero criminal referrals to DOJ — and The Auditors Said Fine. The Administration Said Gone. Congress Said Neither. — on the Legal Services Corporation’s clean FY2025 audit conducted while the White House was trying to eliminate the agency.

This is the first in an ongoing series tracking BOP’s implementation of Public Law 119-21. A records request regarding the Bureau’s spend plan submission is pending; a follow up will run when it is resolved.
The $664 Million SSA Chose Not to Collect

A federal agency losing money to fraud is a story as old as the ledger. A federal agency losing money because it declined, for years at a stretch, to open its own mail is something rarer, and considerably more damning. That is the finding buried inside the Social Security Administration Office of the Inspector General’s latest audit, “Supplemental Security Income Earnings Alerts” (Report 022310, September 2026), a document that manages to be both bone dry and quietly incendiary.

The Alert Nobody Answered

SSI recipients are supposed to report their income every month, since the program exists for people with limited means and the payment shrinks as earnings rise. When the IRS or a state agency reports wages that don’t match what SSA has on file, the system throws an earnings alert. An employee is then required to contact the recipient, verify the discrepancy, and adjust the record accordingly. This is not an exotic obligation; it is described in plain terms in SSA’s own Program Operations Manual System (POMS SI 02310.005, SI 02310.062).

OIG pulled a random sample of 100 SSI recipients out of a population of 417,291 who had at least one earnings alert pending as of September 2024. The results were not flattering. Employees fully resolved alerts for 20 of the 100. For 63 recipients, reviews were either never started or never finished, and as of April 2025 those alerts had been sitting for an average of 733 days, roughly two years of an unopened envelope. Nine of them had been pending for more than five years. For another 17 recipients, staff cleared the alert but failed to record all the earnings that should have changed the payment, which is less “resolved” and more “closed and mislabeled.”

The Fine Print That Makes Delay Profitable

Here is where the report stops being merely embarrassing and becomes structurally interesting. SSA operates under an administrative finality rule, and absent a finding of fraud, the agency generally cannot reopen and revise eligibility determinations more than 24 months old. If an employee reviews an alert within six months of its creation, that counts as diligent pursuit, and SSA can reach back a full 24 months from the original alert date to recover an overpayment. If the employee does not meet that standard, the 24 month window instead runs from whenever the review finally happens, however late. Every month of institutional foot dragging is a month of debt quietly aging out of collectability.

OIG’s own example makes the mechanism vivid. A father’s 2017 earnings discrepancy triggered an alert in July 2018. An SSA employee scheduled two appointments in 2019, the father missed both, and the file simply sat there. By 2026, the alert had gone unresolved for over seven years, and the agency estimated it had paid the child recipient roughly $36,000 that hinged on the father’s unreported income. Because nobody picked the file back up until 2026, SSA could only recover approximately $19,000 of it. The other $19,000 became, in the agency’s own language, correct, a status it acquired not through verification but through neglect.

A Billion Dollars, Filed Under Never Mind

Projected across the full population, OIG estimates SSA paid about 333,800 recipients roughly $1 billion they were not eligible to receive, because employees did not complete, or did not correctly complete, the earnings reviews required to catch it. Of that billion, the administrative finality clock has already rendered approximately $664 million permanently uncollectable, absent a fraud determination the agency has shown no particular urge to pursue. The remaining $344 million is, for now, still theoretically recoverable, assuming anyone gets around to it.

It is worth sitting with that arithmetic for a moment. Two thirds of the overpayment total identified in this single sample projection is not merely uncollected; it is uncollectable by design, a feature of the agency’s own finality doctrine rather than a bug in enforcement. SSA did not lose this money to a sophisticated fraud ring. It lost it to a filing cabinet.

Nobody Home

Perhaps the most telling line in the entire report is the one OIG offers almost in passing, that auditors “could not determine why employees did not initiate or complete reviews of earnings alerts in accordance with Agency policies, and Agency subject-matter experts could not provide an explanation.” Not a bad explanation. No explanation. The people whose job it is to know why their own agency’s controls failed had nothing to offer.

This is also not SSA’s first rodeo with this exact problem. A 2012 OIG review found the agency was not timely developing earnings alerts and estimated roughly $110 million in preventable or recoverable SSI overpayments. SSA responded then with the standard bureaucratic liturgy, reminders issued, guidance reissued, a promise to do better. Fourteen years later, the same failure mode reappears at nearly ten times the estimated cost. SSA has once again agreed to implement OIG’s three recommendations, namely clean up the 63 unresolved cases and the 17 incomplete ones, figure out why staff aren’t pursuing alerts, and implement corrective action. The agency’s official comment, from Chief Risk Officer Chad Poist, characterizes some of the flagged cases as simply not yet due for redetermination under existing timelines, and notes that corrective action has already been completed on a portion of the cited cases, a caveat OIG’s own report does not credit.

Whether this round of promises fares any better than the last is not a question this audit answers, and it is not one the agency seems especially eager to answer either. What the report does establish, in the agency’s own numbers, is that the cost of that uncertainty is not abstract. It has a dollar figure, it has a 24 month expiration date, and as of the report’s own projections, most of it will be gone before anyone in Baltimore gets around to reading the file.

Source: SSA Office of the Inspector General, “Supplemental Security Income Earnings Alerts,” Report 022310 (September 2026).

For related coverage, see The Actuary's Gift — on how SSA's chief actuary pre-scored a $316 billion SSI expansion for Speaker Emerita Pelosi's office the same week this audit landed, including a provision that would quintuple the resource limit SSA already cannot reliably verify.
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