Congress, DOGE Can Stop Feds Healthcare Payments Boondoggle

With each passing day, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) finds — and cancels — federal spending that was so egregiously wasteful, it almost sounds like a joke.

Thanks to DOGE, taxpayers will no longer have to fund research on transgender mice or Sesame Street programming in Iraq.

But the truth is, these line-item cuts — while absolutely necessary — aren't enough.

They save a few hundred thousand dollars here and a few million there at a time when we need to save billions.

To truly slash spending, Congress must work with DOGE to cut entire federal agencies.

One target stands out above the rest.

In 2010, Obamacare created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), an agency tasked with developing and testing experimental payment models to lower costs in Medicare and Medicaid.

In theory, an agency that streamlines the federal government's two largest healthcare entitlements sounds useful. But in practice, it has been captured by the Washington swamp.

Instead of saving money, CMMI has given a blank check to contractors and unelected bureaucrats. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the agency — which was initially projected to save taxpayers nearly $3 billion between 2011 and 2020 — ended up costing taxpayers more than $5 billion.

About 90% of CMMI's supposedly brilliant alternative payment models offered no statistically significant savings.

While the models haven't benefited patients or taxpayers, they've been enormously lucrative for Washington insiders.

Consider some of these "flights of bureaucratic fancy," as the National Taxpayers Union dubbed the failed models. CMMI's Comprehensive Primary Care Plus Model paid $400 million to contractors and incurred total losses of $2.4 billion.

CMMI's Oncology Care Model racked up $639 million in net losses while failing to improve cancer patients' outcomes.

The Medicare Advantage Value-Based Insurance Design (VBID) Model squandered an astounding $4.5 billion — a sum so large that even the Biden administration felt compelled to scrap the program, describing the loss as "unprecedented."

CMMI isn't merely wasteful, however. It also directly threatens the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

When Congress authorized CMMI, lawmakers intended the agency to roll out models on a small scale, genuinely testing out potential reforms without making wholesale changes to Medicare and Medicaid.

But CMMI, like so many other federal agencies, seized more and more power for itself at every opportunity.

Instead of piloting small-scale tests, CMMI proposed sweeping nationwide "demonstrations" that cover nearly all doctors and hospitals, effectively rewriting Medicare payment policies without congressional approval.

The agency has also extended and rebranded failing models without conducting proper evaluations, ensuring bureaucratic continuity at the expense of both patients and taxpayers.

By aggressively expanding its reach through functionally mandatory, nationwide "demonstrations," CMMI has veered dangerously away from its original mission. It's pursuing centralized government control over genuine innovation in health care delivery.

The gravy train must stop.

Congress, in concert with DOGE, could save billions of dollars and stop centralized planners' power grab by axing CMMI altogether.

Drew Johnson is one of America's leading taxpayer advocates and government watchdogs. He was recently the Donald Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for Congress in Nevada's 3^rd congressional district. Previously, Johnson exposed wasteful government spending as a budget policy scholar at think tanks, including the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, the National Taxpayers Union, and the National Center for Public Policy Research. Read More of His Reports — Here.