Rebuilding Public Trust by Ensuring Accountability in Government Spending

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Issue Areas

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Weak accountability in public spending has eroded trust in government. Recent fraud cases in Minnesota and early findings from the federal DOGE effort point to a broader pattern of poor controls and weak stewardship at the local, state, and federal levels.

The numbers are staggering. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent estimated that up to 10 percent of the federal budget is lost to fraud, citing a GAO analysis of 2018–2022 data that put annual losses between $233 billion and $521 billion. California has spent $37 billion on homelessness since 2019, yet its homeless population has grown more than 20 percent over the same period. Austin recently proposed increasing its homeless programs to over $100 million, even as homelessness rose 40 percent in the past eight years.

When programs fail, legislators too often respond by increasing funding instead of demanding results and fixing delivery. NGOs and bad actors have learned that emotionally charged issues can attract public dollars when accountability is weak. Even well-meaning programs drift without clear goals or measurable outcomes.

Cicero’s approach is simple: radical transparency so citizens can track dollars and outcomes, paired with spending discipline that sets clear metrics, audits performance, claws back misspent funds, and shifts resources toward what works. There will be resistance from bureaucratic inertia and from interests that benefit when spending cannot be tied to results. That is precisely why this fight is essential to restoring trust and strengthening our civilization.

 Cicero is advancing some of the first laws empowering state auditors and mandating disclosure of NGO spending down to the subrecipient level. These structural reforms are not one-off clean sweeps. They require a long-term vision for complete government spending reform. The goal of these efforts is to institutionalize a disciplining mechanism akin to the profit motive and competition in the private sector to keep agencies and programs delivering high public value at a reasonable cost, while keeping agencies lean and less likely to fund ideologically driven organizations that undermine our society.

Transparency by Default

States should adopt Transparency by Default when taxpayer dollars are appropriated, obligated, or spent. Every recipient and subrecipient of public funds, including vendors, nonprofits, and pass-through entities, should be included in a public, searchable database updated frequently enough to support timely oversight.

This system should provide line-item transparency linking legislative intent to agency spending and tracing funds through each handoff to the point of service. Spending records should also be paired with outcome reporting so citizens, auditors, and policymakers can see not just where money went, but what it produced. That is how states move from after-the-fact audits to near real-time detection of waste, fraud, and administrative bloat.

Transparency should also strengthen legislative oversight by replacing narrative updates with standardized, decision-grade data. Agencies should reconcile appropriations, obligations, and payments; track federal pass-through funds and subgrants; and disclose key contracting details so legislators can see what is working, what is not, and where funding should be redirected.

Pay for Performance

Taxpayers deserve a return on every public dollar. Yet too many government programs still reward process rather than results, allowing funding to continue even when outcomes stagnate. Pay for performance flips that model: public dollars should be earned through demonstrated impact, not sustained through compliance alone.

States should tie funding to outcomes, not inputs. Programs should set clear, measurable goals at authorization and appropriation, define how progress will be assessed, and report standardized data linking appropriations, obligations, payments, and outcomes across grants, subgrants, and contracts.

Removing Fraud with Incentives

Waste, fraud, and abuse persist because government systems are built to spend, not to self-correct. When outside watchdogs regularly catch what formal oversight misses, the system is broken. States should fix oversight incentives. Auditors should be judged not just on process, but on preventing losses and recovering misspent funds. That means expanding risk-based audits, using modern tools to flag anomalies in near real time, and rewarding those who help recover public money.