Government welfare programs are, by their very design, incubators of waste, fraud, and abuse. During the pandemic, the Biden administration created even more favorable conditions for all three to fester and for programs to hemorrhage money.The government expanded benefits in some of those programs, loosened eligibility rules in others, and suspended basic verification requirements across the federal safety net — all ostensibly to deliver COVID-related relief. Some of those “temporary” changes persist in 2026, and abuses of federal money continue on a pandemic-era scale in many states. But, at last, Washington is taking steps to repair the impaired integrity of its trillion-dollar welfare state.Last month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services deferred more than $1 billion in federal Medicaid matching payments — roughly $868 million from California and $199 million from Minnesota — after identifying claims that lacked sufficient documentation. During the pandemic, billions of additional federal dollars flowed to states and localities responsible for administering welfare programs — with few requirements that states ensure elementary safeguards and administrative support to prevent the money from flowing into fraudsters’ pockets. States may have grown accustomed to receiving open-ended federal reimbursements with too little scrutiny; yet subjecting their claims to federal review should not be controversial because federal taxpayers finance nearly two-thirds of Medicaid benefit spending nationwide.