The law established the PRAC, a convening body for federal inspectors general tasked with coordinating oversight and publishing data about emergency pandemic spending. Horowitz, the leader of the PRAC, said the difficulty keeping track of all the spending stemmed in part from Washington’s “pay-and-chase” approach at the outset of the pandemic: Push out money quickly amid an emergency, and save oversight for later, creating an “extraordinarily challenging” burden on the stewards of federal funds.Ĭongress adopted its first, large stimulus package in March 2020, responding to historic joblessness and a plummeting stock market with the roughly $2 trillion package known as the Cares Act. And some private companies treated it as a moneymaker: Funds to help needy Americans afford the internet, for example, opened the door for AT&T, T-Mobile and other telecom giants to foist price hikes and service cuts on their customers. Some state and local governments that received federal aid put it toward unrelated uses: a golf course in Florida, a border crackdown in Texas and tax cuts in other Republican-leaning states, The Post uncovered, later sparking federal scrutiny. Other criminals set their sights on the government’s $800 billion small-business loan program, extracting funds illegitimately while the companies reviewing their applications allegedly overlooked warning signs - and profited in the process. In a yearlong investigation, The Washington Post is following the covid money trail to figure out what happened to all that cash.įraudsters targeted generous unemployment insurance benefits, contributing to an estimated $163 billion in waste while disrupting weekly checks for out-of-work Americans. economy from ruin and put vaccines into millions of arms, but it also invited unprecedented levels of fraud, abuse and opportunism. history: Two years, six laws and more than $5 trillion intended to break the deadly grip of the coronavirus pandemic. It was the largest burst of emergency spending in U.S.
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