Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had some good news for American taxpayers Tuesday: federal government efforts to stamp out fraud and protect taxpayer dollars are yielding impressive results.
Bessent took to X to proclaim that the Treasury Department "continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door."
They do that, wrote the secretary, by "buil[ding] and deploy[ing] new safeguards that verified more than $3.7 trillion in federal payments and increased Do Not Pay access from 4 percent of programs to 99 percent, ensuring agencies have access to the data they need."
.@USTreasury continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door. In the past year alone, Treasury built and deployed new safeguards that verified more than $3.7 trillion in federal payments and increased Do Not Pay access from 4 percent of programs to 99 percent, ensuring agencies have access to the data they need. We are moving beyond ‘pay and chase’s and making prevention the federal government’s first line of defense. https://t.co/GRH6omyWTv
— Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (@SecScottBessent) October 6, 2026
.@USTreasury continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door.
In the past year alone, Treasury built and deployed new safeguards that verified more than $3.7 trillion in federal payments and increased Do Not Pay access from 4 percent of programs to 99 percent, ensuring agencies have access to the data they need. We are moving beyond ‘pay and chase’s and making prevention the federal government’s first line of defense.
And those safeguards are apparently paying off in a big way.
According to a Treasury Department press release, the agency screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totaling roughly $3.7 trillion during FY2026 and, in the process, identified and returned approximately 13,500 payments totaling $175 million that would have gone to dead people.
You read the right. Not only do dead people vote (and always for Democrats), they also apparently get big bucks sent to them, taken from your paycheck and transmitted via the federal government.
No more, says Bessent, due to the massive expansion of the Do Not Pay program. The program gives federal agencies access to the data they need to verify identity and eligibility before government payments go out. More than 2.3 billion records have already been screened.
This effort by the Treasury helps to fulfill the requirements of President Trump's March 2025 executive order, “Protecting America's Bank Account Against Fraud, Waste, and Abuse,” which instructed the agency to move fraud detection to the front end of the federal payment system instead of trying to recover bad payments later.