The White House has launched a new “friendly neighborhood fraud tracker,” featuring President Donald Trump as Spider-Man, to illustrate “all the fraud we’ve webbed up” from wasteful government departments.
The offering is essentially an interactive map of Washington, D.C., showing the locations of eight federal agencies, which, when clicked on, reveals the amount of fraud that particular service has been accused of engaging in (presumably during former president Joe Biden’s tenure in the Oval Office, not Trump’s).
The tracker claims, for instance, that $96.2 billion-worth of misappropriated funds have been uncovered at the Department of Health and Human Services since the Republican’s return to office.
The Department of Agriculture has, meanwhile, only been found at fault to the tune of $6.7 million, a comparatively paltry sum.
The connection to the Marvel Comics web-slinger is tenuous – appearing to have more to do with capitalizing on the massive box office succcess of the new film Spider-Man: Brand New Day, starring Tom Holland and Zendaya, than anything else – but the map does feature a pixelated cartoon of Trump as Spidey, which, disappointingly, turns out not to be a playable character.
The Trump White House has form in casting the president as a superhero to cash in on a popular movie, doing the same last summer when it likened him to Superman just as James Gunn’s new blockbuster arrived in multiplexes (a film that, ironically, was lambasted by Republicans as “super-woke”).
Trump himself is partial to a grandiose comparison, previously likening himself to such famous figures as Al Capone, Elvis Presley and Mother Theresa and, most recently and notoriously, Jesus Christ.
The fraud tracker is the work of the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, established in March under the chairmanship of Vice President JD Vance, who may wonder why he was not cast as Spider-Man.
It claims to have uncovered $229.9 billion in total and “stopped” $56.4 billion, or just under a quarter.
Cutting waste federal expenditure was one of Trump’s key campaign promises and led to the creation of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficient, which set about attempting to save American taxpayers $2 trillion by slashing needless spending and firing some 300,000 workers (tens of thousands of whom later had to be rehired).
Musk’s target was subsequently downsized to $1 trillion and DOGE’s final claim was that it had saved the federal bureaucracy $215 billion, although analysis from the Cato Institute and other think-tanks subsequently found that government spending actually went up under Trump, rather than being successfully reined-in.
A Government Accountability Office study published last week concluded that the short-lived agency’s final tally, as displayed on its online “Wall of Receipts,” had been inflated.
It said of the $110 billion DOGE claimed to have clawed back by culling contracts, grants and leases that “some savings estimates are incorrect or lack supporting evidence.”
The GAO also said Musk’s outfit had not been “transparent regarding methodologies used to calculate savings” and that 108 of the 264 leases it had identified for termination, worth around $15.3 million, were already slated for removal before the agency was even established.
