This estimate doesn’t come from us or DOGE, but the U.S. government’s OWN auditors.

Bravo to – of all places – 60 Minutes for their interview with Linda Miller, formerly a chief investigator at the Government Accountability Office, who has tracked how taxpayer money is misspent. GAO’s official assessment is that taxpayers are victims of $520 billion a year in fraudulent and “erroneous” payments.

But here is Miller’s assessment as featured on 60 Minutes:

“I believe the government is losing between $550 billion and about $750 billion a year. We’re coming up close to the $1 trillion amount– is lost, every year, to fraud.”

Let’s say she is off by 50%. That’s still close to $5 trillion in fraud over 10 years, and that’s at least three times as much as the savings in the GOP budget.