Before the election in 2024, the normally moderate to liberal Washington Post, had its editorial independence eviscerated when its owner, Amazon-billionaire Jeff Bezos, blocked their endorsement of Harris and mandated the editorial policy move towards business and the right. Regular readers might still find hope in the general willingness of the editorial page to make efforts to hold some of the more egregious Trump policies and extremes to account around immigration, foreign policy, and other issues. But, with today’s end of the year editorial mouthing far right anti-poor rhetoric, bashing food stamp programs, and beating the drums for the worst of Trump’s big, bad, budget bill, it’s clear that Bezos hand is getting heavier and any continuing hope for the Post editorial policies to be different than the Wall Street Journal will only find them by degree, not distinction.

            Let’s look at their bias and compare the facts. The Post editorial says:

• “Across the country, Medicaid lost an estimated $31 billion this way [via fraud] in fiscal year 2024.” The source for this comment and others in the piece is an unknown researcher at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
• “America’s welfare state has ballooned to more than 80 major federal programs.” On its face, a highly pejorative blurt out of nowhere, and once again copied word for word from the same AEI author’s piece.
• “Programs like SNAP create ‘a financial incentive for states really not to be as vigilant as they should in preventing fraud abuse,’ according to Matt Weidinger, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.” This is the same guy and same source for a hat trick in what is being represented as a piece from their editorial page, rather than the AEI.
• “The truth is that SNAP doesn’t just help the hungry. It had the fourth highest rate of documented fraud across all federal programs from 2018 to 2022, coming in at $10.5 billion.” There is no substantiation for this assertion by the Post.

In fact, the “truth” is very different according to researchers and the Governmental Accounting Office.  

 Low Percentage Rate: Historically, the USDA has estimated that "trafficking" (exchanging benefits for cash) occurs in about 1.6 percent of benefits.

 Administrative Errors vs. Intentional Fraud: A significant portion of the $10.5 billion to $12 billion in "improper payments" reported by the GAO and USDA includes both fraudulent activity and unintentional administrative errors by state agencies or beneficiaries.

 Small Individual Impact: Economists argue that for an average family of four receiving around $1,000 a month, large-scale, sustained fraud is generally not lucrative enough to attract mass participation. 

The Post doesn’t let up on this ideological anti-poor rant. They list a state by state chart of the “error” rate in order to back the budget’s bills threat to make states pay if their error rate is above 6.5 percent. These errors are mistakes in payments by the states, as the GAO and researchers have established, even though the Post unethically is trying to infer that this is the same as fraud, rather than administrative deficiencies.

It is almost impossible to follow the point of this editorial screed. They castigate Democratic states for not turning over data to USDA, even acknowledging that these states have thus far won in court and enjoined the government from this overreach. The states have asked for assurances that their data won’t be used for immigration enforcement and other purposes. The Post knows this, and in one statement, likely a compromise between warring members of the editorial board says, “It would be a mistake … using waste and fraud as an excuse to play politics with draconian entitlement cuts or to use beneficiary data to fuel a mass deportation crusade.” This sentence is an outlier, since the whole editorial is playing politics with “draconian entitlement cuts” and helping “fuel a mass deportation crusade.”

The Post is clearly a house divided and trying to satisfy its conservative billionaire anti-welfare owner, Jeff Bezos, as well as remembering that its core readership knows better and feels differently, so ends up at times arguing out of both sides of its mouth. The parts that seem more solid and reasonable are at the end of the editorial. That side of the editorial argument must have realized that Bezos wouldn’t bother to read to the end.

Sadly, this still has the Post putting bullets in the guns of Trump and conservatives in their war against the poor.