this is generally why so many of these back and forths are silly. And a big piece is that the internet reports factoids without context instead of complete stories; and with a factoid the listeners add whatever context fits their bias. A half-way decent political press should tell you what Patel or Whitmer are doing there overall. I certainly don't care if either of them show up at the games if they manage to do something useful overall on the trip, we don't need to be Puritanical. But we don't get that - or at least never until well after all the hot air and venom has been spewed around.
Like the right's big MN story. There is fraud and abuse in every program. It's just the way it is - in the end it always costs more to get rid of last few percentage points of loss than to just let them go. That's just being practical - the most money in NOT saved by the most buttoned down program because the buttons cost a lot of money too. So the real question is the context - is it worse in one place than another, what is the actual scale compared to the overall spending? Numbers with lots of zeros always sound newsworthy, but the dollar aint what it used to be. 'Billions' in fraud may be less than rounding errors when Trillions are being spent. But we don't get those contexts reported either, because the media machines aren't interested in truth, only in scoring points for their side.