The vice president said the administration has already blocked $56 billion in improper payments and urged Congress to make its anti-fraud reforms permanent through legislation.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday that a federal task force created by President Donald Trump has identified an estimated $230 billion in fraud and stopped $56 billion in improper payments since beginning its work in March.
Vance presented the figures during a roundtable at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building attended by more than a dozen Republican members of Congress. He said the administration’s investigations and payment controls were producing measurable results, though he described the $230 billion estimate as conservative.
“We have been able to identify $230 billion of fraud just since the Fraud Task Force was set up, and that’s frankly by conservatively estimating it,” Vance said.
The vice president argued that executive action alone would not be enough to preserve those gains. He called on lawmakers to place key fraud-prevention measures into federal law so a future administration could not simply reverse them.
“This effort will fundamentally always have a limitation unless our colleagues in the House and the Senate are working with us,” Vance said.
“We don’t want the next administration … to undo all the incredible work that we’ve been doing.”
Among the changes Vance requested was mandatory information sharing between state and federal agencies. He said gaps in government databases can prevent federal officials from determining who is receiving benefits financed with taxpayer money.
As an example, Vance said the federal government may be unable to detect when a state provides food assistance to an illegal immigrant or a violent criminal because the relevant state and federal systems do not automatically exchange recipient information.
Greater access to data, he said, would allow agencies to identify ineligible recipients, compare records across programs and stop suspicious payments before the money leaves the government.
Vance also urged Congress to make federal benefit programs more difficult to exploit and increase criminal penalties for people convicted of stealing from them. He said sentences should better reflect the financial damage caused by organized fraud schemes.
Trump created the task force through a March 16 executive order after extensive fraud involving Minnesota Medicaid and federal assistance programs attracted national attention late last year.
The president appointed Vance to lead the initiative and also established a Justice Department division dedicated to investigating and prosecuting fraud.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who serves as a co-chairman of the task force, said criminals often target government aid programs because the systems are comparatively easy to manipulate and the consequences can be limited.
One reason federal programs remain attractive to criminals is that “the punishments associated with much of the fraud are relatively low,” Ferguson said.
The administration therefore wants lawmakers to increase sentences across different categories and levels of fraud, he said. Officials believe stronger penalties would discourage individuals and organized groups from treating government benefit programs as low-risk sources of money.
The task force’s request for additional enforcement authority came one day after authorities announced Medicaid fraud charges against 19 people.
The defendants are accused of submitting more than $4 million in false claims for home care services. Federal and state law enforcement agencies worked jointly on the investigation announced Aug. 4.
The case illustrated the type of cross-agency cooperation the administration wants to expand nationally. Vance said better coordination, stronger payment controls and tougher criminal consequences could prevent billions of dollars from being diverted from taxpayers and legitimate beneficiaries.
The administration is now asking Congress to turn those policies into lasting statutory requirements rather than leave them dependent on executive orders and agency directives that could be withdrawn by a later president.
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