Last month, Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) introduced a resolution of inquiry objecting to the Trump administration’s development of a “centralized database” that “compiles American citizens’ personal information across federal agencies and departments.” The resolution states that personal information includes “confidential taxpayer, identity, wage, child support, bank account, student loan, health, medical, financial, or other information.” Left unsaid is that such information is often critical to accurately paying government benefits by first confirming an individual’s identity, earnings, assets, and more. The partisan resolution is cosponsored by all Democratic members of the Ways and Means Committee. But committee Republicans could deploy a powerful response: inadequate information sharing contributed to massive taxpayer losses to fraud and improper payments during the pandemic—which only continue to mount.
Congressional rules promote prompt action on such resolutions. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service notes that a committee has 14 legislative days after introduction to act on it, or else “a privileged and non-debatable motion to discharge the committee of further consideration of the resolution” becomes available on the House floor. As a result, the majority party almost always acts quickly in committee, stifling more prominent House floor action. For the Doggett resolution, the legislative calendar suggests Ways and Means will act sometime during the coming two weeks.
How might committee Republicans respond?
First, they could note that taxpayers just experienced massive losses to fraud and abuse during the pandemic, driven significantly by insufficient data sharing across government agencies.
State and federal unemployment benefits proved especially vulnerable. As I noted earlier this year,
Those programs experienced massive losses to fraud during the pandemic….According to GAO, fraud involving unemployment benefits during the pandemic “was likely between $100 billion and $135 billion.” The DOL inspector general estimated that the “low end” of improper payments (which goes beyond fraud) was $191 billion, while private experts see a high end of $400 billion. The Biden administration admitted that one of the most widely abused pandemic programs had a 36 percent improper payment rate.
Many of those losses resulted from failed information sharing at both the state and federal levels. For example, California officials decided to stop matching unemployment benefit claims—which were initially augmented by $600-per-week federal supplements—against prison rosters. The results were sadly predictable:
District attorneys across California described staggering fraud in state prisons, which they termed “the most significant fraud on taxpayer funds in California history.” They identified 20,000 inmates in Golden State jails paid over $140 million in unemployment benefits between just March and August 2020….A January 2021 audit raised California’s losses associated with incarcerated individuals to $810 million because the state “has not had a system to regularly cross‑match … claims with information from state and local correctional facilities.”
A June 4, 2025 fraud prevention alert from the Pandemic Response Advisory Committee (PRAC) considered abuse of pandemic unemployment checks along with Economic Injury Disaster Loans and Paycheck Protection Program benefits. It estimated that “these pandemic programs disbursed approximately $79 billion in potential fraudulent payments due to the use by applicants of over 1.4 million potentially stolen or invalid” Social Security numbers. PRAC termed this fraud “readily preventable” through “pre-award vetting using data analytics.”
Second, they can stress that taxpayer losses due to inadequate data sharing continue to mount.
The table below is from the March 2025 testimony of Kristen Kociolek, Managing Director for Financial Management and Assurance at the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO). It indicates that federal agencies regularly report the number one cause of improper payments—across all programs—is their “failure to access the appropriate information…even though such information exists and is accessible to the agency or entity making the payment.” That accounted for an estimated $590 billion in improper payments in the past four years—including over $250 billion in the past two years alone.
In March, President Trump issued an executive order whose stated purpose is to remove impediments to “the inter- or intra-agency sharing of unclassified information.” Democrats may object to that agenda. They may lament public officials or contractors who facilitate it. And naturally there are many complexities to navigate along the way, including protecting Americans’ privacy. But they will have a hard time defending the status quo, which resulted in massive taxpayer losses to fraud during the pandemic—that only continue to mount.