I’m wondering if there is a collector’s angle to this.

Back in the 70s I knew a woman who worked as a bank teller and she was always scanning for pre-1958 pennies with the wheat sheaves on the back. She did well if she kept them.

Today I’ll bet it’s a good move to buy up rolls of uncirculated pennies.

Point taken.
But waste and fraud and carefully not looking at things that could have been corrected is IMO a feature of all the administrations of both parties since at least WWI if not earlier, even if at a lower level.

Working across the aisle was friendly back then because there was a broad consensus on the direction that the country should take from the time of Pearl Harbor to the time Obama took power in 2009. There were differences between the parties, sure, but the differences were at the margin, not in fundamental direction. Obama changed all that.

A case in point: in the early 1990’s Bill Clinton tried to pass a $20 billion stimulus bill to lift the U. S. economy out of recession. The Republicans shot down the bill by rightfully arguing that $20 billion was far too small to stimulate an economy the size of America’s. Fifteen years later Obama and the Democrats passed a $787 billion “stimulus” bill that contained about $40 billion of actual stimulus. The other three quarters of a trillion dollars was a wishlist of leftist spending.

Through the use of baseline budgeting most of that spending got baked into the annual budget, raising the deficit from about $100 billion in 2007 to about $2 trillion today. The COVID Relief Act and the Inflation Reduction Act served similar purposes.

That’s a difference in scale so large that it’s a difference in kind ($20 billion —> $747 billion & $100 billion —> $2 trillion). The $20 billion is waste, ill advised but affordable, but $747 billion is a ruinous deep-state monster. A $100 billion deficit can be financed through bonds, but a $2 trillion deficit must be monetized, leading to ruinous inflation.

You just can’t compare the waste of the pre-Obama years to the deep-state monster that came after, both in size and in maliciousness. Attacking allies for the molehills of the 1990s makes enemies of people we need to tackle the mountains of today.

But again, hindsight is 20-20. And the fog is being flown away via Trump 2.0 et al.

No, they couldn’t. The only Republican president to hold office since Obama put this fraud in place has been Trump. If you want to blame Republican presidents for this, blame Trump. And only Trump.