The Patriot Post® · Vance's Progress Against Fraud

The department of “you would have thought this was a no-brainer and done long ago” announced last week that they were putting in a new federal website to detail how much fraud the Trump administration has stopped. According to “The Fraud Ledger,” the federal government has uncovered nearly $230 billion worth of fraud, stopping an additional $56 billion annually.

“President [Donald] Trump is waging an all-out war on fraud, shutting down billions of dollars in taxpayer theft,” said White House spokesperson Olivia Wales to The Daily Wire, which broke the story. “Democrats have refused to stop this epidemic of fraud,” added Wales. “The Trump Administration is holding these criminals accountable and ensuring key federal programs remain viable for the Americans they were meant to support.”

I’ll grant that $230 billion is a heckuva lot of money. But the federal budget now runs north of $7 trillion, and not everyone is cooperating with the administration’s effort led by Vice President JD Vance.

In a Washington Post op-ed, the vice president warned, “We’ve learned a great deal in four months about where fraud thrives, what tools investigators need, and where the law still falls short.” He then pleaded for congressional action. “Lawmakers can start by passing measures to strengthen oversight and accountability of federal benefits programs through stronger data-sharing requirements,” Vance wrote. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and fraudsters thrive when they’re shielded from oversight by states that refuse to share vital information such as SNAP rolls with federal law enforcement.”

(Hint: most of those states are Democrat-run.)

Quoted further in the Washington Examiner, Vance continued, “We don’t want the next administration, whoever you know, God forbid, you’re going to have President El Sayed in three years. We don’t want him to undo all the incredible work that we’ve been doing when we’ve been taking out the fraudsters and saving the American people money.”

While the website is new, we’ve occasionally been informed of the progress. For example, our Thomas Gallatin wrote back in May about $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments for California withheld due to rampant fraud, with Douglas Andrews chiming in further last month about more payments taken back from California and Minnesota, two of the less-than-cooperative states acting as ground zero for the fraud.

Yet it seems like we’re just getting the low-hanging fruit with this sweep. Consider, for example, all the “rampant fraud and abuse of VA benefits” detailed by our Brian Mark Weber. As he sadly noted, “Some veterans who exploit the system receive benefits for conditions not related to their military service, while those who’ve lost limbs or experience traumatic brain injuries sometimes go without care.” But addressing the issue runs the risk of angering veterans’ groups, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which opposed a recent reform bill by claiming it would “unfairly penalize disabled veterans.” However, we must address the system abuse.

Meanwhile, writing in the Washington Examiner, financial professional Jay Rogers raises questions about the ObamaCare subsidies we fought over during the last government shutdown. Perhaps it’s fortunate they weren’t extended. A health policy research group “estimates that 6.6 million people enrolled in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in 2024 were likely ineligible under federal income rules, at an annual federal cost of $36.9 billion,” Rogers revealed. “On the subsidized exchange side, the group estimates 6.4 million people misreported their income in 2025 to qualify for bigger subsidies, concentrated among those claiming incomes between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty line, the band where subsidies zero out a household’s premium entirely. That misreporting cost taxpayers more than $27 billion last year alone.”

At a roundtable discussion led by Vance last week, Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson made a pertinent observation, perfectly putting many of our current woes in a nutshell.

“All of the programs that the fraud effort has focused on were set up for a high trust society,” said Ferguson. “When Congress was creating these programs, some of them almost 100 years ago, we didn’t expect that these programs were going to be attacked by fraudsters to the tunes of billions and billions of dollars a year. We expected, because that’s the America that we were, that everyone would play by the rules, that the money turned over to help our friends, our families, neighbors would be made available only to the people who really needed it, and that is just not true anymore.”

Somewhere along the line we as Americans ceded tasks once performed by family, churches, and private charity over to the government, perhaps believing bureaucrats could handle the task more fairly and efficiently. As we have found, though, the job has become one of three things: a bottomless pit of dependency for the idle, an opportunity for a free score for the unscrupulous, or job security for the generous, to the point where they send out checks without any oversight.

If we want a viable republic, all three of those things have to change, and fast. This Vance “Fraud Ledger” is a good beginning, but it is only the initial step of a thousand-mile journey. This needs to become a bipartisan effort that won’t end when the Trump administration does.