Government welfare programs are, by their very design, incubators of waste, fraud, and abuse. During the pandemic, the Biden administration created even more favorable conditions for all three to fester and for programs to hemorrhage money.

The government expanded benefits in some of those programs, loosened eligibility rules in others, and suspended basic verification requirements across the federal safety net — all ostensibly to deliver COVID-related relief. Some of those “temporary” changes persist in 2026, and abuses of federal money continue on a pandemic-era scale in many states. But, at last, Washington is taking steps to repair the impaired integrity of its trillion-dollar welfare state.