The Biden administration spent $5 billion in a single year on one Medicare "demonstration" right before the 2024 election.
Now the government's own accountants have audited the entire Obamacare health care bureau that made it possible.
The verdict is not good – and Elizabeth Warren is already moving to make sure nothing changes.
The Score: 4 Wins Out of 70 Tries
The Government Accountability Office just released its audit of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation – CMMI – the bureau Obama created in 2010 to "test" new ways to deliver health care.
The idea sounded reasonable enough: run small experiments, find what works, scale the winners.
Here's what actually happened.
CMMI launched more than 70 programs over the past decade.
Four of them worked well enough to expand nationally.
Four.
House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington of Texas did the math: "A 5 percent success rate isn't innovation – it's failure."
Any private company running 70 projects with a 94 percent failure rate wouldn't be calling itself an innovation center.
https://twitter.com/TheLunchHourPod/status/2040837155858104440?s=20
It would be calling a bankruptcy attorney.
Your Money, Their Election
The GAO report isn't abstract policy news.
It's a receipt.
CMMI spent nearly $8 billion of taxpayer money on programs it couldn't make work.
It saved $2.6 billion in the process – which sounds useful until you subtract it from the $8 billion it spent getting there.
The net loss lands at more than $5 billion.
And that number doesn't include what Biden did in 2024.
Right before the presidential election, the Biden administration used CMMI's broad authority to launch a Part D drug pricing "demonstration" – and spent $5 billion in its first year alone keeping Medicare premiums artificially low for seniors.
One year. Timed to an election.
The Paragon Health Institute documented it: the program launched in August 2024 – two months before voters went to the polls – and the timing raised direct questions about whether an incumbent administration had used a no-oversight health care bureau to cut seniors' Medicare bills right before they cast ballots.
That's not innovation.
https://twitter.com/TexasTrump2024/status/2049913997139280248?s=20
That's an incumbent party using your money to buy votes.
Warren Has Other Plans
Republicans are moving to shut CMMI down.
Rep. Aaron Bean of Florida introduced legislation to abolish it entirely. "Taxpayers are tired of getting ripped off, and I'm fed up, too," Bean said. "Every dollar stolen from taxpayers is one dollar too many."
Rep. Bob Latta of Ohio has spent years documenting the same failures: too complex, no transparency, no accountability, no results.
Democrats aren't interested in any of that.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have fought the Trump administration at every turn on Medicare, Medicaid, and federal health care authority throughout 2025 and 2026 – defending the sprawling CMS apparatus that CMMI sits inside.
For Warren and Sanders, a bureau with automatic funding, broad rulemaking power, and no congressional oversight isn't a failed experiment.
It's infrastructure.
It's the lever Washington Democrats use to rewrite how doctors get paid and how care gets delivered – without a vote, without approval from the people paying for it.
That's why it was built with mandatory funding from the start.
https://twitter.com/GovWaste/status/2044876408602702114?s=20
Democrats didn't create CMMI to save money.
They created it to control medicine.
The Stakes Are Real
A coalition of more than 40 conservative organizations – including Americans for Tax Reform and the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste – sent Congress a letter in February making the case for elimination.
Their conclusion: "No private enterprise with this record would be allowed to continue operating, let alone expand its authority."
They're right.
This is how the permanent government expands: you don't announce a takeover.
You create a research bureau, fund it automatically so Congress can't touch it, run experiments for 15 years, and when someone audits the results and finds a $5 billion hole, you use the same authority to cut Medicare premiums two months before Election Day.
Republicans control the House.
They have a GAO report, a documented election-year spending blitz, and legislation ready to go.
Bean's bill deserves a vote – and every Republican who campaigns on cutting waste needs to be on record supporting it.
Sources:
- Government Accountability Office, "Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation: Actions Needed to Improve Oversight of Models," GAO-26-107953, April 2026.
- House Budget Committee, "GAO Confirms CMMI Failures; Chairman Arrington Calls for Accountability and Reform Under Trump," Press Release, April 2026.
- Paragon Health Institute, "How to Reform the CMS Innovation Center with a Choice and Competition Approach," October 2025.
- Taxpayers Protection Alliance, "Federal Bill of the Month – April 2026: H.R. 8293 – Abolish the CMMI Act," April 2026.
- Washington Times, "Groups tell lawmakers the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation is wasteful," February 23, 2026.