This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 30th, 2021.

I'm Keelbrough.

Add together broken federal agencies with poor track records of spending money wisely and a trillion dollar

spending spree from the feds and you get massive waste and fraud.

Cato's Will Yeatman details the waste we can identify so far that unprecedented spending tied to COVID-19.

All told how much did the feds spend on COVID relief, helping states, helping individuals, that sort of thing.

So across five major stimulus bills, Congress has authorized 5.9 trillion in spending. So not all that's been spent.

Not a 4.4 of which has actually been spent or committed.

Okay, so this is a gargantuan outflow of cash even for this government.

How are they trying to track it?

Oh, there's actually no centralized tracking

oversight mechanism.

Alas. oversight mechanism, alas.

So it's more of an agency by agency performance that is judged.

Okay, so at this point, in the life cycle of a massive spending plan from the federal government,

is there enough in the rearview mirror for us to say we did a good job or we did a terrible job spending this money.

For a large chunk of it it was evidently. The moment Congress did it. And here I'm talking about

$500 billion worth of state bailouts. So the impetus for this spending was an expected implosion of

state budgets. It was we were supposed to see consumption declines due to the

lockdowns which in turns were going to deprive states of tax

revenue. Now that 500 billion dollars in bailouts actually occurred in two phases. The first was in the CARES Act about

150 billion and then at that point in time this was March of 2020 there was genuine uncertainty as to how our economy was going to play out

...