Saving Can-Do: Reclaiming Judgment in Washington’s Improper Payment Bureaucracy
In Saving Can-Do: How to Revive the Spirit of America, Philip K. Howard delivers a blistering diagnosis of the American administrative state: that human judgment has been replaced with rules and moral responsibility with process. What began as a well-intentioned effort to ensure fairness and accountability has metastasized into a paralyzing culture of compliance, which has resulted in a government more adept at filling out forms than solving problems. That diagnosis could have been written directly about the federal government’s approach to program integrity and improper payments.
For more than two decades, Washington has treated improper payments as a statistical exercise, a ritual of estimation, reporting, and box-checking that gives the appearance of diligence while failing to reduce actual fraud, waste or abuse. In 2024, the Office of Management and Budget proudly announced that the government-wide improper payment rate had fallen to 3.97 percent, the lowest in a decade. But as any serious analyst knows, those figures are less a reflection of real improvement than of methodological manipulation and changing baselines. The rate went down largely because spending went up. More than half of the programs reporting data saw their improper-payment amounts increase even as their “rates” decreased. This is not progress. It is optics disguised as outcomes.
Howard’s critique helps explain why. Bureaucratic systems built around process rather than results produce exactly this kind of hollow victory. The improper payments framework, while well-intentioned, has become an exercise in procedural fidelity—a sprawling set of compliance obligations that reward agencies for demonstrating effort, not impact.
Program officials devote immense resources to producing statistically compliant estimates, meticulously following the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act’s audit steps, and meeting the Payment Integrity Information Act’s reporting timelines. But almost none of that effort equips agencies to actually prevent improper payments before they happen. It is the epitome of what Howard calls “the red-tape state,” that is, a government that measures activity rather than achievement.
Consider Medicaid. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services touted a forty-percent drop in the program’s improper-payment rate from almost 9 percent to 5 percent in 2024. Yet, as the Government Accountability Office noted, those numbers are distorted by a three-year rolling-average methodology and pandemic-era eligibility policies. In other words, the rate improved because of the way it was calculated, not because of better oversight or fraud prevention. The agency followed the rules. It just didn’t fix the problem.
Howard would describe this as a symptom of a deeper institutional pathology. When people in government are rewarded for compliance, when their success depends on demonstrating adherence to procedure rather than exercising judgment, they stop taking responsibility for results. Bureaucrats are not incentivized to solve problems creatively, they are incentivized to avoid blame.
Over time, this risk-averse mentality erodes initiative and drives away talent. The people left behind become masters of process, fluent in acronyms and checklists but disconnected from outcomes. “Can-do” becomes “can’t-do-without-a-waiver.”
The improper payments regime offers a textbook example. Every agency with program outlays exceeding $10 million must conduct detailed compliance reviews, even when the risk of improper payments is negligible. The result is thousands of staff hours spent filling out templates, validating samples, and preparing for Inspector General audits. This work satisfies statutory requirements but does nothing to prevent or recover lost dollars. In the process, agencies drown in data of questionable quality, much of it derived from small or outdated samples. As Howard would say, rules designed to ensure integrity have produced a system that values paperwork over prudence.
Reform, therefore, requires more than incremental tweaks. It demands the restoration of judgment and responsibility, the very qualities Howard insists are essential to a functioning government. Instead of compliance through checklists, agencies need accountability through outcomes. Instead of uniform mandates, they need discretion tailored to the unique context of their agency or program. And instead of measuring success by how well they follow the law’s letter, they should be measured by how effectively they achieve its purpose.
Congress could begin by rewriting the rules of the game. The Payment Integrity Information Act and its predecessors assume that measurement equals management—that if you can estimate improper payments, you can control them. But this assumption has never been borne out in practice. The law should instead require agencies to identify and close data gaps, integrate predictive analytics, and leverage shared datasets such as Treasury’s Office of Payment Integrity’s suite of data sets. These steps will help move from a culture of reporting to a culture of proactive prevention. In Howard’s words, this would lead to a restoration of human agency, giving officials the authority and tools to act, not just the duty to document.
Second, the government should centralize expertise in an independent, data-driven entity capable of interpreting improper payments information in context. Howard emphasizes that complex systems require clear lines of authority, arguing that fragmented responsibility breeds confusion and inaction. A single office with analytic capacity and cross-agency reach could provide that coherence. It could standardize data use, promote evidence-based interventions, and distinguish between true performance improvement and statistical sleight of hand. An expanded Treasury Payment Integrity Office could serve this function.
Third, Congress should relieve low-risk programs of their reporting burdens and redirect those resources toward high-risk programs where fraud and error are concentrated. In Saving Can Do, Howard’s entire philosophy rests on the idea that not every situation requires the same rules. Uniform compliance regimes are both wasteful and counterproductive; they punish the competent and distract from the genuinely dangerous. By scaling oversight to risk, government could reintroduce the principle of proportionality, a hallmark of judgment lost to proceduralism.
Systems designed to eliminate discretion end up eliminating responsibility. Washington’s program integrity machinery has become so obsessed with proving it is doing something about fraud that it has forgotten how to actually do something about fraud. The obsession with checklists, reporting rates, and audit compliance has created what Howard calls “a government without can-do.” It is not that public servants lack competence or commitment, its that the structure in which they operate punishes initiative and rewards box-checking.
Restoring a can-do culture in program integrity would mean trusting professionals again. It would mean giving data scientists and program managers the freedom to innovate, to experiment with anomaly detection models, cross-match beneficiary records, and test pre-payment controls, without fear that a missed signature will trigger an audit finding. It would mean valuing discernment over documentation, results over rituals.
The stakes are high. Improper payments now total over $200 billion each year, and fraud is estimated to cost up to $520 billion annually. This is real money that could fund childcare, infrastructure, or debt reduction. Yet the bigger loss may be intangible: the erosion of public trust that government can competently manage taxpayer funds. When agencies congratulate themselves over misleading metrics, the public loses faith in the institution of government. And when oversight mechanisms become performative, cynicism follows close behind.
Howard’s Saving Can-Do offers a hopeful antidote. He insists that America’s dysfunction is not inevitable, it is a choice. The same spirit that built bridges, landed on the moon, and eradicated polio can also reform government, if only we allow judgment to replace bureaucracy. The path forward in program integrity lies in that same revival: a government that measures less but learns more, one that prizes integrity not as a compliance artifact but as a living commitment to stewardship.
To save “can-do” in Washington’s fight against fraud is to rediscover what Howard calls “the moral core of governance,” which is the belief that people, given authority and held accountable, will act responsibly. The federal government can double down on the compliance regime that has yielded few real results, it can keep pretending that falling improper payment rates mean progress, or it can reclaim its agency and actually achieve it. The choice, as Howard might say, is whether we continue managing by checklists, or start governing again.
Article first posted on GovIntegrity.