The Trump administration just told Congress to put anti-fraud measures into law or keep letting scammers bleed taxpayers for hundreds of billions — and the vice president made clear he doesn't trust the next administration to keep the pressure on.
Vice President JD Vance, who heads the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force, told a roundtable of Republican lawmakers Wednesday that the task force has already identified roughly $230 billion in suspected fraud across federal programs and stopped another $56 billion from walking out the door. But he said executive action alone won't close the spigot. "This effort will fundamentally always have a limitation unless our colleagues in the House and the Senate are working with us," Vance said.
The administration is asking Congress for three things: mandatory data sharing between states and the federal government for programs like Medicaid and SNAP, stiffer criminal penalties for fraudsters, and more funding for investigations that Vance says pays for itself at a five-to-tenfold return.
The data-sharing demand targets a black box that lets states hand out federal benefit dollars with virtually no federal oversight. Vance said he was "shocked" to learn that Washington has no visibility into who ultimately receives SNAP benefits distributed by states. "If the state of California gives those food stamp benefits to an illegal alien — to a violent criminal — the federal government has no visibility, and sometimes the states themselves have no visibility," he said. At least five states — California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine, and Washington — currently extend some SNAP eligibility to non-citizens, according to the National Immigration Law Center.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said technology could solve "95 percent of this problem" if every enrollee was verified against a shared database. "That single step alone will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars," Miller said.
On penalties, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said fraudsters need to fear real consequences: "Every single person who considers raiding one of our agencies and taking money out of our pockets needs to think long and hard about what might happen to them if they are caught." Vance noted that in some cases, fraudsters who stole millions served no jail time at all — a contrast with the ringleader of the Feeding Our Future COVID relief scam, who was sentenced to more than 40 years for bilking $250 million meant to feed needy children.
Vance also injected a blunt political warning: the task force's work can be erased by the next president. "We don't want the next administration, whoever, you know, God forbid you're gonna have President El-Sayed in three years, we don't want him to undo all the incredible work that we've been doing," he said. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed has publicly dismissed concerns about taxpayer funds being wasted or defrauded.
The Justice Department this week announced charges against 19 defendants in Pennsylvania for Medicare and Medicaid home health care fraud schemes totaling more than $4 million, and is expanding its Health Care Fraud Strike Force into Philadelphia. That strike force has now charged over 6,200 defendants nationwide accused of submitting more than $45 billion in fraudulent claims.
Not a single Democrat showed up to the White House roundtable. The administration says it wants bipartisan support, but the legislative effort is currently being led entirely by Republicans. Both chambers of Congress are heading into August recess and won't return until September, when they'll have to wrestle with a government funding bill.
The question is whether Congress will actually codify these measures into law — or whether $230 billion in identified fraud stays a talking point while the grift continues uninterrupted.
