The Trump administration is cracking down on fraud

It’s been almost two months since President Trump took the bold step of officially forming the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.

Since then, we have already uncovered tens of billions of dollars in defrauded taxpayer money, prosecuted dozens of fraudsters, and stopped billions in suspicious payments.

And we’re just getting started.

If you are defrauding the American taxpayer, we will find you and take you to court.

Our success raises an obvious question: Why has it taken the federal government until now to finally tackle fraud? Because Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson and I are taking a new approach.

Until President Trump’s inauguration, federal anti-fraud efforts have been defined by a “pay-and-chase” approach: Federal agencies like the Health and Human Services issue payments and then only take steps to identify fraud on the back end. The federal government might prosecute the alleged fraudsters — but only if the fraud is big enough.

It’s a flawed approach that has been predictably exploited. Every year, the United States loses about $250 billion to fraud but recovers only about $10 billion. Put plainly, “pay and chase” does nothing to actually stop fraud.

Our new approach starts with close coordination. We are orchestrating all federal agencies’ anti-fraud efforts from the White House. Rather than haphazard fraud mitigation, the task force is focusing agencies’ efforts on target programs where spending is high but anti-fraud protections are low. Using this approach, we are already uncovering major fraud scandals across a range of federal programs.

Kelly Loeffler at the Small Business Administration has referred $22 billion in fraudulent loans for collection. At the Department of Education, Linda McMahon has identified $1 billion in fraudulent student loans from “ghost students.” Brooke Rollins at the Department of Agriculture has identified 14,000 luxury-car owners receiving SNAP benefits in just one state.

We aren’t just identifying these fraudsters. We are ramping up federal prosecutions against them as well — not just because American taxpayers deserve justice, but because active enforcement holds fraudsters accountable and deters fraud in the first place.

Our message is simple: No fraud is too big or too small to prosecute. If you are defrauding the American taxpayer, we will find you and take you to court.

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Aaron Schwartz/Sipa/Bloomberg/Getty Images

To do so, we established a new Fraud Division at the Department of Justice led by Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald.

In just the last two months, the division has executed 22 search warrants against fraudulent day-care centers in Minnesota, including the Quality Learing Center. It has also launched a major crackdown in Los Angeles against Medicare fraudsters who stole over $50 million and secured multiyear prison sentences against fraudsters in a $522 million health care scheme.

All across the country, fraudsters have been put on notice.

We are also ordering states to hold up their end of the bargain and prosecute fraudsters in the federal programs they oversee. We have sent letters to the governors in all 50 states instructing them to use their existing resources to identify and prosecute fraudsters in the Medicaid program.

Alongside aggressive prosecution, the task force is preventing fraud before taxpayer money leaves the federal government. Agencies will now release funds only when they are confident that a payment is legitimate and lawful.

As a result, Trump administration agencies are now establishing fraud indicators and analyzing data to detect patterns of fraud — things like unreasonable growth, impossible services, and other hallmarks of fraud. When an unacceptable risk of fraud is identified, the money stops.

We’re seeing this approach pay dividends already in one of the biggest federal programs: Medicare.

Dr. Mehmet Oz has identified nearly 800 suspected fraudulent providers of hospice and home health care services and withheld payment for their questionable services. So far, we have saved $1.4 billion in potentially fraudulent payments and have paused enrollment of additional providers.

This is an approach that works and will be scaled to other federal programs. The days of “pay and chase” are over. It’s time to prevent and prosecute.

Editor’s note: This op-ed was adapted from an X post by Vice President JD Vance.