(Just The News)—As the federal government faces hundreds of billions of dollars in estimated annual fraud losses, a bipartisan majority of voters want it to use artificial intelligence to help catch waste and abuse, a new poll found.
In the latest The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll, 60% of registered voters said they support using artificial intelligence to help detect fraud, waste or abuse in government programs such as Medicaid. Twenty-seven percent opposed it and 13% were unsure.
The federal government could lose an estimated $233 billion to $521 billion a year to fraud, according to the Government Accountability Office, based on fiscal 2018-2022 data, though the tools meant to catch it have a mixed record.
Support crossed party lines. Nearly three-quarters of Republicans, 74%, backed the use of AI to detect fraud, along with 57% of independents and 48% of Democrats. Even among Democrats, the group most divided on the question, more supported the idea than opposed it.
The question comes as the government expands its use of AI and data matching to flag suspect payments. In fiscal 2025, federal agencies reported an estimated $186 billion in improper payments, about 82% of it from overpayments, concentrated in five programs that include Medicare and Medicaid, the program the poll asked voters about.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services screened 1 billion payments through the Treasury Department’s Do Not Pay system in fiscal 2024 and prevented 363,386 payments worth $2.6 billion.
Of $765.8 billion in overpayments that agencies attributed to data-access problems between fiscal 2021 and 2024, about 73% — or $556.6 billion — stemmed from a failure to access data agencies already possessed, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The scale of outright fraud has been more difficult to measure. The GAO estimate, from 2024, was the first and only government-wide fraud figure of its kind. GAO has said it has no plans to update the spending-side number, having recommended that the Treasury Department develop a method for producing one instead. Treasury had not done so as of July 2026.
Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, said AI can help but is no substitute for controls agencies already have. AI “cannot compensate for weak eligibility verification, incomplete audits, poor data sharing, or a lack of accountability when agencies and contractors make repeated errors,” she told The Center Square.
Boccia said the technology should be judged by whether it “helps administrators prevent improper payments before they go out, produces verifiable savings, and does so without significantly increasing the denial rate of eligible people to receive benefits or necessary care.”
The AI tools are not foolproof. Of the 48 agencies that used the Treasury Department’s Do Not Pay system in fiscal year 2024, 15 reported it was not effective at preventing improper payments for them, according to the Congressional Research Service. The Defense Department reported that “the majority” of the matches the system flagged were false positives, such as a vendor’s tax identification number matching a deceased person’s Social Security number.
In 2024, a federal judge ruled that Tennessee’s automated Medicaid eligibility system had unlawfully terminated coverage for thousands of residents, finding it violated their due-process rights by relying on faulty data and incorrect household determinations.
Federal law limits how far a data match can go on its own. Under the Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act, an agency generally cannot cut off someone’s benefits based solely on a data match. It must independently verify the match and give the person notice and an opportunity to respond. Those protections remain in place.
Using authority Congress granted in 2019, the Treasury Department in 2025 issued a four-year waiver allowing qualifying Do Not Pay matching programs to bypass the formal data-matching agreements and cost-benefit analyses agencies would otherwise have to complete. That came after a Trump executive order directed it to reduce administrative barriers.
The push to streamline that review has drawn objections. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy research group, argued in an Aug. 11 comment to the Department of Health and Human Services that comparing TANF recipients’ personal data against other databases without the required published matching agreements would violate the Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act. The administration has said the change is meant to speed the detection of improper payments.
The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll was conducted by Noble Predictive Insights from Aug. 12-16, surveying 2,533 registered U.S. voters. The sample included 930 Republicans, 930 Democrats, and 673 Independents. Among independent voters, 330 respondents were classified as True Independents, or those who do not lean toward either major party when given the choice. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.0 percentage points.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
