Brett Loper on Using Data Tools to Prevent Improper Payments

On the latest episode of Data for the People!, Brett Loper discusses policy options for using data tools to prevent improper payments in federal benefit programs. The options appear in a new report produced by the Data Foundation and our Fiscal Intelligence Initiative, with support from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. 

Loper is currently the Executive Vice President for Policy at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation after serving in a number of senior roles in the White House and Congress, including as Deputy Chief of Staff to then-House Speaker John Boehner. 

Read a short blog summary of the episode.

Learn more about the Data Foundation's 2026 Advocacy and Policy Agenda, including a priority on evidence-based efficiency that demonstrates an immediate return on investment from the federal evidence infrastructure. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to Data for the People, a new podcast from the Data Foundation that focuses on the invisible data infrastructure that powers daily life for Americans and the changes in Washington that could enhance or limit its use. I'm JB Wogan and we're here with Brett Loper, the Executive Vice President for Policy at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Before joining the Peterson Foundation, Brett was the executive vice president for global government affairs for American Express. He also served in a number of senior roles in the White House and Congress, most notably as Deputy Chief of Staff to House Speaker John Boehner, where he was also the chief legislative strategist. Welcome, Brett.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Thanks for having me, JB. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

I'm excited too, and I'm particularly excited to talk about all things data, program integrity, and politics. But I'd like to start with a current partnership between the Data Foundation and the Peterson Foundation, something called the Fiscal Intelligence Initiative. So what is that? What is the Fiscal Intelligence Initiative and how does it fit within the larger mission of the Peterson Foundation?

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Yeah, maybe I'll start with the second half of that question first. So a little bit about the Peterson Foundation. We've been around for just over 15 years. We're a fully endowed private philanthropy and we fund organizations left, right, and center and do our own, commission our own uh research as well, really focused on trying to address the country's structural fiscal imbalance in hopes that we can stabilize and then reduce our debt and in time, therefore allow for the same type of economic growth that prior generations have experienced to give that gift to future generations as well. So if you're thinking about an organization that has a fiscal policy focus when it comes to an issue like improper payments or waste and federal expenditures, you know, we felt there was a great deal that could be done with respect to making improvements in that in the system. And so, in some ways, you could say the inspiration for this came from the efforts announced in late 2024 around the so-called Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, as Elon Musk coined it. You know, at the time, I think we, you know, like some others, had some both some hope and some skepticism that that effort could be successful. And setting aside whether or not, you know, it was successful or is successful, is continued to do things that could help address some of the waste and fraud and improper payments in the federal government, we wanted to embark upon our own effort to try to uh provide lawmakers with some real options to make some changes to processes, to programs, not to change like benefits that are due to uh certain Americans or to you know to revise their fundamental structure, but instead to say, all right, how are we determining eligibility here? And are we making some mistakes with respect to eligibility that are leading to improper payments or make it easier to obtain fraudulent payments and therefore you know police the government of scarce resources? So we launched this effort with the data foundation with a goal of trying to come up with nonpartisan, actionable changes in law that could help achieve those goals. And so what we have today is, or on the cusp of having is almost a dozen proposals that will be rolled out shortly that um, again, hopefully with some action from Congress, and we think, hope, fingers crossed, that most of these can be achieved in a, I would even call it bipartisan, but a nonpartisan way, we can really begin to take some action on sort of the vision, if you will, of the things that the Doge identified early on when it was initially launched.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Okay, so as you referenced, my colleagues at the Data Foundation have developed a list of evidence-informed options for using data infrastructure to reduce improper payments. For listeners who haven't had a chance to read the brief or the longer, more detailed report that include these options. Would you mind sharing a couple, you know, one or two that you find particularly exciting or that you think really have some legs in Washington today?

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Yeah. So I mean, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna jump off the point you just made there at the end about having most legs in Washington. You know, one of the interesting things and the characterization, I this is the last, I'm gonna speak the Doge effort, but one of the, you know, today it's in a different place than when it was first launched. When it was first launched, it actually inspired caucuses to be formed in both the House and the Senate that had bipartisan membership. And there were members practically following all over each other to get their suggestions out there for changes that could, you know, root out some of the mistaken payments and waste that they see in the federal government. And so it's with that same initial excitement that we're coming with these. So maybe for illustrative purposes, I'll give just two. So it's not as if the federal government has not focused on this previously. There had been previous legislative efforts, and you could argue and go all the way back to you know the late 1990s and the reinventing government that then President Clinton had his vice president Al Gore lead. I mean, these come almost episodically, these movements, and some good comes from them each go-round. But, you know, one of the things that we have today is a program that's developed over the last 10 years called the Do Not Pay System at the Treasury Department. Uh, and Treasury has a has many data points to help them determine whether or not a payment before it goes out is potentially improper or going to an account that you know doesn't match the beneficiary that it claims to be connected to, you know, things of that sort. Uh and then there are several databases that different agencies have developed and or use to run their programs and to hopefully limit any improper payments. So examples of those would include the Deathmaster file at the Social Security Administration, which Treasury has access to, the National Directory of New Hires at HHS, uh, which helps determine eligibility for income-related programs, the public assistance and reporting information system, also an HHS. And so one of the things that uh one of the proposals that this effort, this initiative will release is to really make those three data sets interoperable and speaking better to the do not pay system at Treasury. And so the the first of those is really taking information we already have at the federal government level and just you know being smart about putting them together, if I'm giving this in simplest terms. So that's you know, one example. A second one, very much related to that, is under the so-called Paris program, which I just actually referenced the acronym for the public assistance reporting information system at the Department of Health and Human Services, that program has quarterly reporting that's required of it from the states. And you can imagine in a system in which you're quarterly uploading this information for you know what really could be like dozens of programs, there's a lag time and people's situation changes. They get married, they get divorced, they die, they get a job, they leave a job, they move. And so one of the very simple things that we're trying to do is say, or proposing to do, is say, let's move that from a quarterly reporting basis to a monthly reporting basis. And the concept here, if I was trying to you know put it again in simple terms, is you know, move this away from a pay and then chase the fraudulent payment to more of a prevent on the front end the improper payment. So hopefully those give some, uh those two examples give some illustration of the types of ideas that we're toying with.

SPEAKER_01 8:22

Yeah, and I think I I would imagine a lot of listeners will understand the appeal of proposals that are around making sure that the only people who are truly eligible for programs receive them, making sure that the agencies have uh accurate and timely information about your income and whether you're eligible. And yet, some of these ideas haven't happened yet. You know, so I'm curious what's your read of the politics? Why might Washington be more ready to take up these proposals now than they would have been in the past? Is there anything beyond the initial interest spurred by Doge and the conversation about waste fraud and abuse early in 2025?

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yeah, a great question. So I think there is, and it's sort of a, you know, almost a yin and a yang type of equation here, which is to say the magnitude of the problem has gotten so bad in both directions, meaning the magnitude of the problem, going back to my comments about our interest at the Peterson Foundation in this initiative, is because we're running deficits at this stage of almost 7% of GDP. We're about to, within the next couple of days, cross over a$39 trillion in debt total. We'll cross$40 trillion, another milestone, likely by September. So the magnitude of the problem in terms of the deficit and compiled debt is just, you know, at historic or just about to break historic records. On the flip side, the GAO, the General Accounting Office, which supports the Congress, has estimated that there are between roughly 240 and you know$525 billion a year in fraudulent or improper payments. Now, you might you might laugh and go, well, wow, that's a broad estimate. I mean, you know, 250 to 500, that's a very, you know, it's almost double. Like how could it, how could the range be so great? Well, the reality is the lower end of that figure is what is known. The upper end is almost like a guess. That's why the range is so is so large. But what's clear is the magnitude of that problem is significant. And if you can take half of that or two-thirds of that, or three-quarters of the upper uh end estimate and solve it, then you really could make a notable contribution towards the bigger problem, the fact that we're running these ever larger deficits. So that's what gives me some hope that the politics of this might become cool again, like they were, say, in the 90s and the reInvent government era. Or even, I mean, I'm this is a different, but I think analogous point that that some may, you know, some with a little bit of a history of politics might remember. But, you know, there was a point in time where there was this great debate about the tax gap, which ironically is of similar magnitude, hundreds of billions of dollars each year that taxes owed but not paid. And there have been efforts to get at that in the past too. So you kind of take where we're falling short of what we're supposed to be collecting in revenue, forget about like setting, changing any rates or limiting any deductions or credits, but what we're supposed to be collecting in taxes and what we shouldn't be making in payments, and all of a sudden you've got some real money. So my hope is uh politicians will look at that, the Congress will look at this as an opportunity to do the easiest of lifting on the front end.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Got it. So I'm always curious about why seemingly common sense ideas fail to become policy. When it comes to the types of reforms outlined by the Fiscal Intelligence Initiative, are there systemic or structural reasons why you think they haven't been implemented already?

SPEAKER_00 12:15

That's a great question. Probably worthy of a political science course, maybe even at the graduate level. Look, there there are. I would say there's within the Congress, there's structural problems within the government that make it difficult. And, you know, there may even be some problems in the you know policy influencer area, let's call it. So, so kind of taking each of those three in parts. If you think about the Congress, Congress is it manages its workflow by having committees. And this goes back to the beginning. I mean, the first committee created, you know, in the Congress was the Ways and Means Committee back in the 1780s. Uh, they today have jurisdiction over taxes, trade law, the Medicare program, the Social Security program, unemployment insurance, frankly, some programs that are very relevant to this discussion. But there are almost up 20 other committees floating around the House of Representatives, not to mention, you know, slightly less, but almost equal number in the Senate. And they have jurisdiction where they're supposed to develop expertise. So while one committee may have jurisdiction over veterans' benefits, another one has it over unemployment insurance, and a third may have it over the temporary assistance to needy families program. And so you take these programs and the knowledge and the work around these programs really becomes around, okay, how do we get benefits to people? In the case of many of the programs we're talking about here, with a little bit less focus on, okay, how do we make sure that the systems that are put in place to deliver those benefits are the most efficient, have the checks and balances on them. And so over time, programs have developed and they have completely different delivery systems. Some are done at the federal level, some are done at the state level, some are even done that go below the state level down to the local level. And even at the local level, they may be, you know, they may be partnered with nonprofit entities who are delivering the actual benefit. That would be the case of many of the housing programs. And so you've got different committees focusing on different programs and kind of looking at it just vertically within those. And one committee that steps back and says, and each of the House and Senate says, all right, we have this like government-wide view of how systems operate, but they don't necessarily have the authority to go in and say, okay, let's look at the data that the IRS has and let's see if we can use data from the IRS to help us deal with fraudulent or improper payments in a program elsewhere in the government. And so that is not a, I don't want to call it a flaw in Congress, but it is a it's a downstream consequence of having the jurisdictional system that exists for Congress and has existed for literally hundreds of years. Now take that to the executive branch level. So the department that's actually cutting the check, sending the money out the door, the Treasury Department has a role to play here. And they do have a do-not pay system where they have not the authority to stop a payment, but they have the authority, which perhaps they should, but they have the ability to go back to the government agency who's saying make this payment, Treasury, and they can say, hey, we think this payment may not make sense given the recipients you're trying to send it to and the bank account information that we have. But the agency on the, you know, that's responsible for the program doesn't really, doesn't necessarily have the incentive nor the tools to say, okay, let's go in and focus on how to clean this up. And so you have, if you look across the federal government, 18 programs covering probably 90 plus percent of the fraudulent and improper payments that again were estimated in that GAO uh study. And they too, at the executive branch level, looking very vertical. I'm just looking at my program. I'm not looking at how I can use other data sets from across the federal government to leverage in order to make sure that I'm making the right payment to the intended beneficiary without making any mistake, up, down, or eligibility in total. So that's the sort of the executive branch failure. Then I would say, you know, our democracy functions for better or for worse, in part based upon the influence of interested parties. And when I say interested parties, that could be it could be a professional society like the American Medical Association. You know, it's not often that a single doctor goes before the federal government and says, hey, I think the payment system for physicians under Medicare should be changed in this, that, or the other way. Instead, they pool together their perspective and they go through a professional society and they take research and data and information and perspective to the Congress and say, hey, would you please consider changing the physician payment system so that it looks more like this, for example? And I could go on and on with interests, whether it's sort of ideological interest or issue-oriented interest, like, say, the Natural Resources Defense Council, or interests like businesses who are regulated, whether it's you know the banking industry or the insurance industry or the telecom industry. But the point is, these interests come together and present their point of view to lawmakers in Congress. And there isn't really an interest for, except for the broad, broad public, hey, get these, get these programs to share their data, to share their information, to leverage their know-how so that we can reduce this$250 to$500 billion of improper payments that are occurring each year. There's no vested interest for that point of view. And so without that interest level, it falls to you know some organizations like the Data Foundation to come up with these suggestions or some, you know, a small number of foundations who have funded efforts in these areas over the years. So again, graduate level course, as I said at the outset. So hopefully that long-winded answer didn't lose too many attention spans.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

We'll have to maybe maybe there's a master class or an online course to be developed in the future. I do think that that point about the tension between polling suggests American voters support cuts to waste fraud and abuse in government programs. And then you've got the issue of not really an industry group or interest group that is pressuring Congress to act on that issue. So the Data Foundation was a co-convener at an event on government efficiency this month in March, hosted by the Shared Services Leadership Coalition. And one of the speakers from the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee was talking a lot about the need for a strong focus on first prevention and second on prevention of improper payments. And he was talking about that in contrast to recovery and fraud. But he also acknowledged that the politics can be easier with recovery and fraud. That you can you can have, I've seen these press releases announcing how much money has been recouped from fraudsters. The quote that I wrote down from that event was it's hard to measure what doesn't happen. So I was just wondering, what do you think can be done to help realize those wins that are hard to see and to incentivize more investment in prevention?

SPEAKER_00 19:52

Yeah, it's a great question. And um I guess the way I would think about it is it goes back to the comment I was making earlier. The magnitude of the problem is so large in terms of the year over year over year of the government, you know, making these improper or fraudulent payments. And at the same time, the magnitude of the problem of the structural fiscal imbalance is so great that I think the politics hopefully begin to align so that people say, you know what, there's really no reason why we should be doing this. We can do much better. And even if we do much better, we're not gonna do it's not gonna reach 100% perfection. And so I suspect they're still gonna be able to, we'll still have a chase the mistake on the back end as opposed to uh preventing the mistake on the front end. You know, the other comment that I would make is, and this, you know, sort of gets to your question, but I'm gonna take a slightly uh a little bit of a turn here, and that is it is hard to do this in the sense that some of these programs that have the greater percentage of the or the greater contributor to the problem, they have constituencies. And your your comment about the pandemic relief kind of brought that to the fore for me. We knew when those programs, or the government knew, Congress knew, the Treasury Department knew when they were creating those programs to address the COVID situation, to really get money out the door to support the economy, right? The economy was taking this huge, huge dip, like falling off a cliff because like life that was, you know, just everything, everybody's like interactions, commerce, like everything shut down and we're shut in. And so the desire was to get money out the door as fast as possible. In order to get that money out the door as fast as possible, information that would be typically collected or verified before making a payment to a small business or a payment to individuals. That was just thrown out the door. And it was very limited, almost self-verification from the applicant to the government. I'm exaggerating a bit for a fact, but almost self-verification to the government, and then you're due. You get your money, and we'll just validate this on the back end and claw back whatever is inappropriate. But it was done on purpose. We're not like that in regular times, or we shouldn't be like that in regular times. That was, you know, an existential risk to the not just the US economy, but the global economy that we're facing. But nonetheless, there are advocates, particularly for programs that are about supporting the most needy in our society. And if there is any risk that any change in the way that we verify eligibility or prove continuous, you know, continually check that eligibility, if there's any risk that one benefit payment's not going to be made, there are organizations and advocacy perspectives that say we shouldn't make that change because it's too, it's too great a risk. And, you know, while it is unfortunate, certainly, to delay a benefit payment to any individual that it that is due, there's got to be some balance here when you're losing, you know, again, like$250 to$500 billion a year through improper fraudulent um uh payments. So that's you know one area that that is a challenge. And the other that's that that kind of presents a challenge to addressing these issues is the data that's involved, right? So, you know, at core, you're talking about taking information, sometimes sensitive information, social security data, employment data, IRS tax data, and you're talking about using these for a greater number of purposes instead of just a narrow singular purpose. I would argue this is wise, and I would argue you know that systems can be built, maintained, and utilized that protect that that data. But there are concerns of you know privacy and misuse that enter the debate as well. And so those are a couple of the things that can make this a challenge to navigate and reach you know a good policy outcome.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

As I was preparing for this interview, I think I was doing some keyword searches for the war on fraud. And I think that was obviously something that President Trump announced in his State of the Union address. And I saw there was a hill up-ed that was titled, The War on Fraud is really a war on the poor, or something along those lines. So there certainly are people who are taking that framing. I wanted to go back to the idea of prevention being hard to measure and things that are hard to measure, but they're still worth doing. One thing that my colleague Amanda Cash has been talking to me about, Amanda leads our Center for Data Policy, and I believe this is actually something that she's talked to you about too, the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, and the way that it scores and how that can make it harder to know or to estimate what kind of savings you would get from some of these program integrity efforts or more broadly, data infrastructure and IT modernization efforts. Is that something that is an obstacle? And is that also something that could turn into a way of incentivizing? Like if the CVO did score differently, might that be something else that would help with the conversation with lawmakers about this being worth doing?

SPEAKER_00 25:36

Yeah, great question. And we're gonna be deep, deep in the weeds here. So um I'm gonna do my best to make sure we we stay at a uh a level that's just shy of like a well, to use our academic analogies, a PhD thesis. So let's you know, start with some definitions here. So CBO, the Congressional Budget Office is the uh independent, nonpartisan uh budget scorekeeper for the Congress. So when Congress is debating, like, hey, we want to make this change in tax law, you know, they'll be the ones, well, along technically with what's known as the joint committee on taxation, that will determine like, all right, here's how much revenue the Treasury Department's gonna lose if you make that change. You make this change in a program, this is how much it's going to increase spending by. And so they guide Congress through that and they try to call just balls and strikes, and they're estimating, they're estimating what a change will mean for future government expenditures or government revenues. So they're not always precise. But for those who you know have been in this area, have are familiar with the CBO, they might be familiar with this concept of scorekeeping rules. So CBO was created back in the early 70s as part of the budget act of 1974, and they have certain statutory requirements for how they go about their methodology and doing estimating. They also have what are known as scorekeeping conventions. So things that, in effect, the two budget committees, the House and the Senate budget committee who oversee the CBO, will say, All right, we need to get together and figure out, you know, some modifications to how these you know estimates are done, make sure that they are as accurate as possible. So a couple of decades ago, there was some, let's call it gamesmanship that was being done by the appropriations committees in the House and the Senate as they would work on their annual appropriations bills. And the appropriations bills today cover all those, you know, agencies from the Defense Department to the National Park Service that are funded on an annual basis. So this is not the Social Security program, it's not the Medicare program, and it's kind of almost everything else. And what they were doing was they would say, okay, we're gonna put$100 towards new IT systems, and we're gonna estimate that if we put$100 towards new IT systems, we're gonna get$1,000 back in savings because the the program's gonna run that much more efficiently. And so this was kind of getting out of hand because they would say, I'm gonna spend$100 there, I'm gonna get another$900 that I can go spend elsewhere in my in my bill. And so some conventions on house CBO estimates investments that really get at the core of what we're talking about with fraud and improper payments. They wanted to stop the appropriations committees, in effect, from spending phantom dollars. Okay. And so I think the the challenge that Amanda was getting at is there's probably some room in between the gamesmanship that some of the appropriators were were finding back in the 90s and trying to address like true system reform and true upgrades to data sets, data sharing, data information, integrity of data, et cetera, which takes investment. And there's probably some accurate landing place between the two. And so our hope is that we can in the near term have some better modeling that we can take to the CBO that says, look, we can with confidence estimate that if you invest in this system and you let these two systems or three systems, and the illustration I gave at the top of the show, if we let these three systems better communicate with each other, or we change the law to require this information to be collected more quickly, those things will make a difference in the way these programs are run and the amount of fraud or improper payments that we're preventing. And we can estimate those savings with a higher level of confidence than we could before. And so I think the burden is going to be on those of us who are trying to make these changes to show, hey, we can model for this and we can prove to the CBO that these efforts can really reduce, again, those improper and fraudulent payments.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Let me wrap up by asking about something that has been a little bit of a running theme on our podcast so far, which is public trust. Do you see a connection between this topic of program integrity reforms and restoring public trust in government?

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Oh, I think that the public's trust in the federal government to run efficient systems with no mistakes is low. Perhaps lower than the than the government even deserves. And that's because it is easy to castigate, criticize, you know, make fun of silly mistakes in spending. There has been a long period of time that that the public has been doubtful of the federal government's ability to do this well. So could we, can you change that? Could you make that more of a rallying cry? Perhaps, and perhaps it's worth contemplating, because I think the skepticism that the government does it well is there for good reason. And hope that it could do better, I suspect, is a cause almost every American could believe in.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

Okay, I think that's a great place to end it. Brett, thank you so much for your time today. And hopefully we can talk again in the future about where these proposals end up. Hopefully, there's a conversation to be had about after they've been implemented, the progress they're making in actually reducing waste fraud abuse and improper payments.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

Indeed. We should come back for a uh success story episode of this, perhaps a year from now. Okay, that sounds good.