Barack Obama once self-importantly hailed his nomination as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal.” While Donald Trump is prone to exaggeration, he’s never said anything nearly so preposterous. Still, honest historians — work with me here — might one day point to his second term as the moment when our nation finally began to tighten down on its wide-open fraud spigots.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration fired a couple of shots across the bows of the bad ships California and Minnesota, announcing the freezing of around $1 billion in federal Medicaid funds due to suspected fraud. As Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put it in a press release:

Medicaid exists to serve vulnerable Americans — not to bankroll unsupported claims. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are restoring accountability across our public programs and protecting taxpayer dollars. … States that receive federal Medicaid funding must demonstrate that every dollar meets federal requirements. When they cannot, we will not release federal funds until they do.

In case that wasn’t clear, Kennedy spelled it out during a Tuesday presser: “If Governor Gavin Newsom or Governor Tim Walz wants this funding released, all they have to do is provide basic documentation showing that these services are legitimate and not fraudulent. And that’s common sense.”

Hopefully, the bloated bureaucracies in California and Minnesota will “lear” a lesson about failing to ferret out the rampant fraud in their midst. But here, it’s worth remembering who we’re talking about — namely, government employees. There’s an old saying: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” To this truism I would add: Those who can neither do nor teach end up with gubmint jobs.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz pointed out that California’s “spending on in-home supportive services increased 24% over the past two federal fiscal years — roughly double the national average.” To this I can only say that I’m shocked — shocked — to learn that the Biden administration kicked the fraud can down the road and even dialed back its fraud-fighting efforts as this ransacking of the taxpayer fisc went into overdrive.

We’ve spilled a lot of bytes on the rampant Somali fraud in Minnesota, but California? Yikes. Given the sevenfold population of the Golden State compared to the Mosquito State, and given the one-party Democrat rule, and given the willful blindness of its oleaginous governor, the potential for fraud is mind-boggling.

Why should you care if you don’t live in Minnesota or California? Well, because Medicare and Medicaid are jointly funded by the states and the federal government. So it’s your money that these crooks are stealing.

Yes, withholding $1 billion from California and Minnesota is a good start because, as the late Senator Everett Dirksen once snarked, pretty soon you’re talking about real money. But before anyone pumps a fist about finally dropping the gloves against all these fraudsters, let’s consider the enormity of the problem. The FBI recently captured a crook named Khalid Ahmed Satary, who’d been an international fugitive for three years and was rightly on the bureau’s list of Most Wanted Fraudsters. According to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Satary “allegedly orchestrated a massive fraud scheme that preyed on thousands of elderly patients, deceiving them into undergoing expensive, medically unnecessary tests and fraudulently billing the government for more than half a billion dollars.”

Folks, that’s $547,000,000. From a single Irish — or is he Scandinavian? — fraudster. And fraud — whether of the Medicare/Medicaid variety or of the voting variety — is like a cockroach. For every stray fraudster you nab, there are dozens of others scurrying around behind the baseboard.

Here, we might also consider that our national debt is racing toward $40 trillion, which is forty-thousand billion, or around $115,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

It’s hard to know just how much of this debt is the result of fraudulent Social Security payments or fraudulent billings under Medicaid and Medicare, but we can be sure it ain’t a rounding error.