Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Tuesday that the federal government caught roughly 13,500 payments totaling $175 million that were about to go out to dead people during FY2026. That’s right. Dead people. Getting checks. Paid for by you.
Bessent posted on X that the Treasury Department “continues to transform how the federal government protects taxpayer dollars by using better data, stronger controls, and advanced technology to stop fraud and improper payments before money goes out the door.” He added that Treasury is “moving beyond ‘pay and chase’ and making prevention the federal government’s first line of defense.” A novel concept, apparently.
According to a Treasury Department press release, the agency screened more than 1.1 billion federal payments totaling roughly $3.7 trillion during FY2026 and caught those 13,500 dead-recipient payments before the money walked out the door. More than 2.3 billion records have already been screened through the expanded program. That is a lot of records, and apparently a lot of very optimistic government accountants who never thought to check a pulse first.
The tool doing the heavy lifting here is the Do Not Pay program, which gives federal agencies access to the data they need to verify identity and eligibility before payments go out. Treasury says it expanded Do Not Pay access from just 4 percent of programs to 99 percent over the past year. Somehow it took this long for the government to think verifying that a recipient is alive might be a reasonable step in the payment process.
Bessent said Treasury built and deployed new safeguards that verified more than $3.7 trillion in federal payments, ensuring agencies have what they need to check eligibility upfront. You can find more detail on the Treasury’s fraud prevention crackdown and what the numbers actually mean for taxpayers.
The whole push fulfills President Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Protecting America’s Bank Account Against Fraud, Waste, and Abuse,” which directed Treasury to move fraud detection to the front end of the payment system instead of scrambling to claw money back after the fact. The old approach, “pay and chase,” sounds less like a government policy and more like something your dog does at the park.
Going forward, the expanded Do Not Pay program stays in place, and Treasury will keep screening payments before they go out. Turns out the best way to stop paying dead people is to check whether they’re dead before writing the check. Revolutionary stuff.
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