After more than two years, six laws and more than $5 trillion were intended to break the deadly grip of the coronavirus pandemic. The money spared the U.S. economy from ruin and put vaccines into millions of arms, but it also invited unprecedented levels of fraud, abuse and opportunism. In a year-long investigation, the Washington Post attempted to follow the COVID money trail to figure out what happened to all that cash. The federal government cannot fully track this historic distribution of federal aid. The investigation found that billions were misspent or stolen, but officials aren’t sure exactly how much. Even where wrongdoing is apparent, experts say that the cash may never be recovered. While the economy was in free-fall early in the pandemic, lawmakers and many agencies opted for haste over precision, opening the door for waste, fraud and abuse. For example, the Small Business Administration rescued hundreds of thousands of firms from collapse, but it also sent billions of dollars to firms that probably shouldn’t have obtained the money. Congress at one point sent about $500 billion directly to cities, counties and states to shore up their budgets. But the money often came with few rules. The vast sums of cash that spared some families from financial ruin also attracted sophisticated criminal networks. For example, criminals stole the identities of thousands of innocent Americans and obtained unemployment checks in their names — making the funds hard to access when people legitimately needed help.
