There are few things less dependable than government stewardship of taxpayer dollars.
And that’s precisely why the phrase “waste, fraud, and abuse” has become Washington’s version of seasonal allergies. But it’s not limited to DC.
The Federal Communications Commission uncovered a fraud where California collected $3.8 million in federal funds to provide phone and internet service to 94,000 dead people. Bureaucratic sloppiness or something far more deliberate.
According to the FCC’s inspector general, California pulled in $3.8 million between 2020 and 2025 through the federal Lifeline program, which spends nearly $1 billion annually subsidizing phone and internet service for low-income Americans. Of the improper payments identified in opt-out states, more than 80 percent flowed to California alone. At some point, coincidence stops being an excuse and starts looking like a system that works exactly as designed.
In a state where officials routinely warn that voter roll maintenance is too risky, too complicated, too fraught with the possibility of disenfranchising someone’s third cousin twice removed, somehow the machinery hums along well enough to enroll 94,000 people who have already shuffled off the mortal coil. That is not a paperwork glitch. That is a performance.
The FCC’s advisory was shocking.
The report stated that of 116,808 deceased individuals in opt-out states, roughly two-thirds died after enrollment. Worse, 19 percent may have died before enrollment, and 15 percent were confirmed dead prior to being claimed. The FCC described this as “fraudulent conduct” involving enrollments of individuals who had already died. When a regulator uses the phrase “fraudulent conduct,” that is not bureaucratese for “oops.” That is government-speak for “somebody knew.”
FCC Chair Brendan Carr wrote on X that
“Gavin Newsom’s California was by far the worst offender of these opt-out states”
And thankfully, the FCC has revoked the state’s authority to manage verification. To be clear, The Trump administration looked at Sacramento and said, “We will take it from here.” And when the federal government decides your oversight needs oversight, that is not a ribbon for participation.
As with most things started by Leftists, the Lifeline program was created with noble intentions–on paper.
In a modern economy, access to communication is not a luxury, but almost a necessity. The program is designed to help low-income Americans stay connected for work, school, healthcare, and emergency services. That is a conservative value, too. A society functions best when people have the tools to climb.
But the conservative worldview also insists that compassion without accountability becomes a buffet for opportunists. When nearly $1 billion a year is funneled into a subsidy program, the incentive structure becomes a gravity field. If states are allowed to “opt out” of federal verification processes and manage eligibility themselves, the system relies on competence and integrity at the state level. And in California, apparently, the dead were very chatty.
It is almost poetic. A state that resists cleaning voter rolls because accuracy might suppress democracy somehow managed to keep 94,000 deceased residents connected to unlimited talk and text. Perhaps they were calling in to thank the Department of Redundancy Department.
The question few are asking, however, is not simply how this happened.
It is why the political culture that tolerates bloated voter rolls would bristle at the idea of scrubbing them. If your administrative ecosystem is comfortable with outdated data, if verification is considered an inconvenience, if accuracy is framed as oppression, then ghosts become line items. They become budget items. They become revenue.
Currently, there is no allegation in the FCC report that these improper payments were tied to elections. But politics is about patterns. When a state government shrugs at inaccuracies that always seem to flow in one direction, citizens are entitled to wonder whether chaos is a feature rather than a bug.
California accounted for more than 80 percent of the improper payments among the opt-out states. Eighty percent is not statistical noise. That is a headline that should echo from San Diego to Sacramento. And yet, one can almost predict the response: systemic complexity, pandemic disruptions, data lags, legacy systems, the usual parade of passive verbs designed to make accountability disappear like a magician’s assistant.
The dates matter.
The $3.8 million was collected between 2020 and 2025, years that encompass both pandemic emergency spending and the tenure of Governor Gavin Newsom. During that same period, federal spending exploded, oversight loosened, and emergency powers became the Swiss Army knife of governance. In that atmosphere, if you wanted to hide a few million dollars under the rug, you could do it with a leaf blower.
Here is the part that should trouble taxpayers most: this was not a victimless rounding error. Every dollar misallocated to a deceased enrollee is a dollar not reaching a living American who legitimately qualifies. Waste in a social program is not neutral. It displaces, crowds out, and ultimately erodes trust.
And trust, once fractured, does not regenerate with a press release.
The conservative case for voter roll maintenance has always been simple: accurate rolls protect the integrity of elections and the confidence of the electorate. The Left often responds as though asking for a clean list is tantamount to demanding a literacy test. Yet, when 94,000 dead Californians can remain eligible for federally subsidized communications, the argument that databases are too delicate to tidy begins to sound like a bedtime story.
The irony is thick enough to laminate.
Dead people are supposedly too rare or too difficult to identify when it comes to voting records, but they are apparently plentiful and persistent when federal dollars are involved. If one were less charitable, one might say that the system seems allergic to cleaning anything that benefits bureaucratic throughput.
This is not merely about California. It is about governance philosophy. One camp believes government should expand, innovate, subsidize, and intervene, trusting that good intentions will pave over inefficiencies. The other camp believes that human nature being what it is, incentives matter, oversight matters, and guardrails are not insults but necessities.
When the FCC revoked California’s authority to manage verification for Lifeline, it did something that rarely happens in Washington. It acknowledged that decentralization without accountability can morph into dysfunction. Ironically, conservatives have long argued that states should have flexibility. But flexibility is not a synonym for free-for-all. Federalism works when states are laboratories of innovation, not haunted houses of loose bookkeeping.
The broader context cannot be ignored.
The Lifeline program, nearly $1 billion annually, is a reminder that federal spending has grown so vast that millions can evaporate without triggering a political earthquake. In a $6 trillion federal budget, $3.8 million is pocket change. But that mindset is precisely the problem. When “only” a few million is the standard, the culture of stewardship has already eroded.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump, whose political brand has always centered on shaking loose entrenched inefficiencies and challenging bureaucratic complacency, has consistently argued for tighter controls, stronger verification, and more aggressive oversight of federal programs. Critics may mock the style, but the substance has always been about closing the leak before the ship sinks.
And here, unmistakably, is a leak.
The defenders will say that two-thirds of the deceased individuals died after enrollment, which suggests that not every case was premeditated. Fair enough. Death is, regrettably, persistent. But the FCC also found that nearly 15 percent were confirmed dead prior to being claimed, and another 19 percent may have died before enrollment. That is not merely slow updating. That is enrollment of the already departed.
If this were a private company billing a federal program for services to the deceased, there would be subpoenas before sunrise. When it is a state government, however, the conversation becomes nuanced. Nuance is often what happens when accountability would be inconvenient.
California’s political leadership has built a brand around progressive governance, expansive social programs, and administrative compassion. Yet compassion untethered from verification becomes something else entirely. It becomes a conveyor belt where the only thing moving faster than money is the explanation for why nobody noticed.
Voters, whether in California or anywhere, deserve better than ghost accounting.
They deserve systems that respect both the taxpayer and the intended beneficiary. They deserve voter rolls that reflect the living and benefit programs that do the same.
When 94,000 dead residents can remain eligible for federally subsidized phones and internet, the issue is not merely technical. It is cultural. It reflects a governance model that treats data hygiene as optional and oversight as adversarial.
No wonder some politicians recoil at the phrase “scrub the rolls.” If the broader administrative culture is comfortable with lingering inaccuracies, then cleansing the system feels less like reform and more like threat.
The afterlife may be mysterious, but federal bookkeeping should not be. And until accountability becomes fashionable again in places like Sacramento, taxpayers may continue to fund services for people who have already signed off permanently.
In the end, the real séance is not about who the dead were calling. It is about who is answering for the living.
