Major win
A real war on fraud
President Trump put Vice President Vance in charge of a government-wide fraud task force and opened a public ledger at Fraud.gov, and the charges, suspensions and canceled enrollments are adding up.
Fraud takes money from taxpayers and from people who need help, and for years Washington treated it as the cost of doing business.
Guarding the pantry: how the Trump administration went after federal fraud
The Justice Department charged 455 people in a $6.5 billion health care fraud takedown in June, and CMS is canceling 315,000 unauthorized Obamacare enrollments covering more than 760,000 people. Nonpartisan auditors put federal fraud losses at $233 billion to $521 billion a year.
Why you should care
Medicare, Medicaid, food aid and disability checks exist to help people who cannot help themselves. When a fake clinic bills Medicaid for therapy that never happened, it drains the money meant for real children and real patients. When someone enrolls you in an insurance plan without your permission, your name and your tax dollars both get used. Every stolen dollar is one more dollar taken from your paycheck or one less for someone in real need.
Medicaid claims for one Minnesota autism program came to just over $600,000 in 2018. By 2025 they topped $400 million. In May, federal prosecutors charged 15 people in Minnesota with about $90 million in fraud.
A church food pantry faces a smaller version of the same problem. A few people come through the line twice in different coats, and by Thursday the shelves are bare for the widow who comes last. Nobody wants to stop feeding people. Someone just has to watch the line.
The federal line is much longer and much harder to watch. The Government Accountability Office, Congress's nonpartisan auditor, estimates that Washington loses $233 billion to $521 billion every year to fraud.
Someone watching the line
In January, President Trump ordered a new Justice Department division for national fraud enforcement. In March he created the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud and made the Vice President its chair. In August the White House opened Fraud.gov, a public ledger of the task force's work.
The results are concrete. In June, the Justice Department charged 455 people in 45 states and territories with more than $6.5 billion in alleged health care fraud, including 295 Medicaid fraud defendants, a Justice Department record. In a four-week sweep ending September 18, it charged 17 more people with stealing Social Security benefits.
In September, CMS announced it is canceling about 315,000 unauthorized Obamacare enrollments covering more than 760,000 people, which it expects to return roughly $2.2 billion in taxpayer subsidies. CMS says agents and brokers new for the 2026 plan year account for a disproportionate share of them.
Two cautions belong here. The task force says it has uncovered about $260 billion in fraud since January 2025, but its own website labels that figure an estimate, built from data and statistical methods, not money recovered. And everyone charged is presumed innocent. Still, the GAO's range shows the problem is real and enormous, and the indictments, suspended providers and canceled enrollments are not estimates.
The charges and the canceled enrollments are solid; they come straight from DOJ and CMS. How much of the estimated total will ever come back to taxpayers, I can't yet say.
A pantry that watches the line is a pantry that stays open, and the widow who comes last on Thursday still finds food on the shelves. You can follow the task force's work at Fraud.gov.
Sources and footnotes
- White House: Fraud.gov: Track the Trump administration's relentless war on fraud (Aug. 6, 2026)
- Daily Wire: White House launches fraud website to highlight successes of task force (Aug. 6, 2026)
- CMS: CMS cracks down on fraud, waste, and abuse in the Federal Health Insurance Marketplace (Sept. 22, 2026)
- Department of Justice: National health care fraud takedown results in 455 defendants charged in connection with over $6.5 billion in alleged fraud (June 23, 2026)
- Department of Justice: DOJ's Fraud Division uncovers $1.34M in stolen Social Security benefits in one-month takedown (Sept. 29, 2026)
- GAO: Fraud risk management: 2018-2022 data show federal government loses an estimated $233 billion to $521 billion annually to fraud (April 16, 2024)