That’s always the hard part of these “government fraud” narratives. It’s the insidious shit, the ineptitude, incompetence. Not something you can walk into the FDA and find a filing cabinet labeled “deliberate and known waste contracts”.

I work in aerospace and the worst engineers I’ve had the displeasure of working with were on cost+ contracts (the money keeps rolling in until the job is “done”).

The only real way to track down abuses like that is to stick an oversight committee on each and every contract, watch them like a hawk. But who watches the watchers? You run the risk at every stage, eventually you either need to trust or gamble