Tucked away in the US Office of Management and Budget is an office that ‘superivses’ over three trillion dollars in loans.  These unregulated and virtually unsupervised federal credit programs are now the fastest-growing chunk of the United States government, ballooning over the past decade from about $1.3 trillion in outstanding loans to nearly $3.2 trillion today

Michael Grunwald writes: The biggest bank in America is not for Anprofit, although it is profitable on paper, and its loans are supposed to help its borrowers rather than its shareholders, better known as taxpayers. Its lending programs sprawl across 30 agencies at a dozen Cabinet departments, with no one responsible for managing its overall portfolio, evaluating its performance or worrying about its risks.

The closest it gets to coordination is an overwhelmed group of four midlevel Office of Management and Budget employees known as “the credit crew.” They’re literally “non-essential” employees—they were sent home during the 2013 government shutdown—and they’re now down to three, because their leader is on loan to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. When I suggested to OMB officials that the crew seemed understaffed to oversee a credit portfolio 25 percent larger than JPMorgan Chase’s, someone pointed out that it’s hiring an intern.   USA as Banker