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The Federalist Papers We'll be honest, this one is just funny.A beaming government official proudly shows off the room where every problem Washington has ever solved is filed away. Rows of steel shelves. Bright lights. Spotless floors.Not one single file.The guy on the right isn't even mad. He's just doing the math.Now picture the other file room, the one for problems the federal government created. You couldn't get the door open. The boxes would be stacked to the ceiling and spilling out into the parking lot.Start with the money. The Government Accountability Office says federal agencies made about $186 billion in improper payments in fiscal year 2025 alone. That's up $24 billion from the year before. Since 2003, the running total is about $3 trillion.GAO has flagged this problem every single year since 1997. At this point it isn't a glitch. It's a habit.Then there's the rulebook. The Competitive Enterprise Institute puts the yearly cost of federal regulations at more than $2.1 trillion. That's about $15,859 per household, a hidden tax nobody ever voted on.Then there's the research. Sen. Rand Paul's 2025 Festivus waste report flagged over $1 million spent teaching teenage ferrets to binge drink, and $14.6 million to have monkeys play a game modeled on The Price Is Right.You can't make this up.Even the highways got mucked up. Congress set aside $7.5 billion for EV chargers in 2021. By April 2025, GAO counted just 384 charging ports built.And the national debt just blew past $40.3 trillion, up about $2.4 trillion in twelve months.That's on us. We allowed Washington to grow bloated, wasteful and, too often, corrupt, all with money it took from us first. Every new program promises to solve something. Not one has ever made it onto those shelves.The shelves stay empty. The bill keeps growing.