Vance: Federal Government Has Identified $230 Billion In Fraud Since March

Authored by Emel Akan via The Epoch Times,

Vice President JD Vance said on Aug. 5 that the Trump administration has identified $230 billion in fraud and prevented $56 billion in fraudulent payments since the president’s Fraud Task Force was established in March.

Vance discussed the task force’s initiatives at a roundtable in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building attended by more than a dozen Republican lawmakers. He said the work by the task force so far is starting to show results.

“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.

He urged Congress to codify certain anti-fraud actions taken by the administration to ensure that they remain in effect under future administrations.

“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.”

The vice president said one of the first steps Congress can take is to force data sharing between state and federal governments to crack down on fraud.

He said that if a state gives food stamp benefits to an illegal immigrant or a violent criminal, the federal government often cannot detect who is receiving those benefits.

The vice president also called on Congress to make fraud harder to commit and to ensure that convicted fraudsters receive longer prison sentences that better reflect the seriousness of their crimes.

On March 16, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a task force after large-scale fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid and federal assistance programs drew national attention late last year. He then appointed Vance to lead the new task force while also creating a fraud-focused division in the Justice Department.

Speaking at the event, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who co-chairs the task force, said that fraudsters target federal assistance programs because they are relatively easy to exploit. He said one reason is that “the punishments associated with much of the fraud are relatively low.”

Hence, the administration wants to work with Congress to significantly increase sentences for all levels of fraud, he said, to deter potential fraudsters from targeting these programs.

On Aug. 4, authorities announced that 19 people have been charged with Medicaid fraud for allegedly submitting more than $4 million in false home care bills. The investigation was a joint effort by several federal and state law enforcement agencies.

The White House on Aug. 6 announced that it has launched a new website to track the administration’s moves to eliminate alleged fraud, waste, and abuse in government agencies.

“Each partner agency reported three figures” to the task force led by Vance, the site states, noting that the “fraud uncovered” section on the site “represents total estimated fraud identified through data analysis” while the “fraud stopped” portion “counts the dollars saved annually through administrative actions such as provider suspensions and rule changes.”

Vance said in a recent interview with Fox News:

“I don’t care where you came from, I don’t care what your name is. If you are committing fraud against the American people, all of us in public leadership should ... try to throw you in prison for enriching yourself off the American taxpayer.”

A similar initiative was established under the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was associated with Tesla CEO Elon Musk and which was wound down by July 2026. DOGE’s website also included contracts, leases, and other items that were targeted for elimination by the Trump administration.