If current trends continue, the Biden-Harris administration will have made more than $1 trillion in improper payments by the time President Joe Biden leaves office, according to a report released Thursday by the watchdog group Open the Books.

An improper payment is when “the government spends money on the wrong people, in the wrong amounts, or for the wrong reasons.” Per The Biden-Harris administration will oversee $801.4 billion in such payments, adjusted for inflation, between 2021 and 2023, according to the report, which follows federal guidelines.

The amount of improper payments made by the administration in 2024 won't be revealed until after the November election, but Open the Books found that the Biden administration has made well over $200 billion in erroneous payments each year since taking office. (Related article: Biden administration's staff is the largest since Nixon's, costing taxpayers $225 million)

The watchdog group said the Biden-Harris administration would cross the $1 trillion threshold “barring unprecedented events.”

“President Biden and his successor must take action, not just words, to address the epidemic of improper payments,” Christopher Neafus, communications director for Open the Books, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The sheer scale of this waste of taxpayer dollars is hard to comprehend. To put it in perspective, the most recent defense budget is $883 billion. That means the Biden administration will be wasting more than a year's worth of the defense budget.”

While wasteful spending is nothing new for the federal government, the Biden-Harris administration has taken it to the next level. For example, former President Donald Trump's administration uncovered $814 billion in improper payments adjusted for inflation over his four years in office, slightly more than the Biden-Harris administration has misspent in just three years.

Open the Book calculates that improper spending by the Biden-Harris administration amounts to about $7,500 per second: 7.16% of federal spending was improper in 2021, falling to 5.4% in 2023.

The Government Accountability Office is likely underestimating the number of improper payments reported by the federal government. Point out Congress has not given all federal programs the authority to estimate erroneous payments, and perhaps Fraudulent Scheme One that goes undetected by federal authorities.

The bulk of the Biden-Harris administration's misspending in 2023 came from Medicaid and Medicare, which made $101.5 billion in improper payments that year, according to the report. Ongoing COVID-19 response programs also made tens of billions of dollars in improper payments.

LexisNexis Risk Management estimates COVID-19 related aid fraud has reached $1 trillion, National Desk ReportedAdditionally, according to Open The Books, the Office of Personnel Management paid hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits to dead and prisoners, while the Internal Revenue Service erroneously awarded $25 billion worth of tax credits.

The money the government paid out in error isn't necessarily lost forever, even though much of it has been lost: The Biden-Harris administration was able to recover about $51 billion of the $235.7 billion it misspent in 2023, according to the report.

Lawmakers in both parties recognize the enormous amount of waste and are trying to fix it. Bipartisan Group Member of the House of Representatives Unauthorized Payments Transparency ActA bill introduced in May would require the president's budget request to identify common payment errors and develop ways to address them.

Government waste has contributed to the growing U.S. national debt, which topped $35 trillion for the first time in July. Biden said I boasted. But while he talked about reducing the deficit, a Congressional Budget Office report in June found that his foreign aid and student loan policies have actually increased the US budget deficit.

The White House did not respond to DCNF's request for comment.

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