Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says a new computer matching process being used for the first time ever exposed “more than 4,900 federal payments worth approximately $99 million that were associated with deceased payees” and stopped payment on them.

“Treasury has delivered on a key promise of President [Donald] Trump’s mandate to stop improper payments and fraud before money leaves the Treasury, and strengthen the integrity of the federal payment system,” Bessent said in a statement. “Together with Vice President Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, this new safeguard addresses a longstanding vulnerability and helps ensure every dollar the federal government spends reaches its intended recipient. Treasury will continue efforts to modernize the federal payment system, strengthen safeguards against fraud and improper payments, and protect taxpayer dollars.”

To identify those payments to dead people before the checks were issued, Treasury used the new process to screen more than 885 million outlays totaling in excess of $2.77 trillion. The process involves comparing the designated recipient of a proposed payment of federal tax dollars with names in the Death Master File (DMF) maintained by the Social Security Administration (SSA).

What made this new process possible was the passage of the Ending Improper Payments to Deceased People Act in February of this year. That measure was introduced by Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) and signed into law by President Trump.

In addition, early in his second administration in the White House, Trump signed an executive order directing Treasury and other executive branch agencies to implement multiple new measures designed to stop improper and fraudulent payments of tax dollars across the entire federal government.

Bessent described this particular computer-matching process as “new,” and in one key respect it is, but there is more to the story, and it goes all the way back to 1981 and the opening months of President Ronald Reagan’s first term. Reagan had promised during his 1980 campaign to appoint new Inspectors General (IGs) who would be “meaner than junkyard dogs.” A 1978 law signed by Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, created the IGs as independent watchdogs to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in federal spending, but the program was slow in getting up to speed.

Reagan’s junkyard dog IG for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was Richard Kusserow, a former Marine Captain, CIA intelligence officer, and renowned FBI white collar crime sleuth. One of Kusserow’s first acts was something that had not previously been tried at HHS, namely, matching proposed payments through benefit programs like Medicaid against SSA’s master death list.

The results of Kusserow’s then-new computer-matching quickly became evident, as he told Congress in December 1981, according to The Washington Post, “the opportunities for fraud, waste and abuse are staggering.” As an example, he pointed to the initial results of the matching process that found “Social Security claims averaging $13,000 a year [that] were being sent to 8,500 deceased people.”

In addition to looking at the death files, Kusserow’s computer-matching process also reviewed prison records, provider files, duplicate-payment files, licensing databases, and other datasets. As a result, in the years following, Kusserow transformed the HHS operation into the model for all 72 IGs across the executive branch, according to the Journal of Public Inquiry: “During the 1980s, the [HHS] OIG realized a high rate of return on operating expenses, generated high-quality annual and semiannual reports, and testified frequently before Congress. By 1990, the OIG testified before Congress 24 times in 1 year, thereby solidifying its reputation as an effective overseer of HHS operations and expenditures.”

But Kusserow’s efforts were limited to examining federal expenditures by HHS programs and offices. Hundreds of millions of payments issued by dozens of other federal departments and agencies were going out unexamined every year. The Ending Improper Payments to Deceased People Act expanded the ability of the Treasury Department to compare all federal payments prior to their issuance with names on the DMF.

Related to this problem was the fact discovered early in the second Trump administration by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk that at least $4.7 trillion in Treasury payments in previous years were issued without a required classification symbol indicating under which congressional appropriation or act it was authorized. Trump and Bessent, acting on a DOGE recommendation, quickly made inclusion of the Treasury Account Symbol (TAS) mandatory on all federal payments.

Why then did it take 45 years for the common-sense practice of making sure a federal payment isn’t going to a dead person to become a standard procedure for all federal spending? One major factor is that in Kusserow’s era, computer technology relied on magnetic tape, batch processing, and lengthy access to mainframe computers that were slower and less efficient than today’s typical laptop. Today, running millions of proposed Treasury expenditures through a DMF match is vastly easier and faster, but it still requires significant processing resources.

Another factor was the historic reliance of federal anti-fraud efforts on a “pay-and-chase” approach in which the verification process began only after questions were raised by someone within or without the government on a specific payment or series of payments. Also, individual departments and independent agencies were held responsible for coming up with their own anti-waste and fraud efforts and the results were not infrequently half-hearted or little more than symbolic.

Perhaps the most crucial factor, however, was the fact that Congress could have made the change decades ago, but the political will to do so just wasn’t there until February 2025. One reason why that will was nonexistent was due to concerns that opening up the DMF could pose privacy concerns. Also, politicians in both major political parties tended either to dismiss waste, fraud, and corruption as not a significant problem or one that Congress had already addressed by creating the IG system.

Finally, none of the presidents between Reagan and Trump — including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden — pushed the proposal. Now, however, with DOGE, creation of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, signing into law the Ending Improper Payments to Deceased People Act, and the Treasury Secretary’s action, huge progress can now happen to ensure every federal dollar goes to the right recipient.