WASHINGTON—Vice President JD Vance hosted the first Task Force to Eliminate Fraud roundtable on Friday in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) alongside top cabinet officials, underscoring the whole-of-government approach the task force is taking to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.
Vance, the chairman of the task force, was flanked by Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson, who serves as the body’s vice chair, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. He said that for the past three or four decades, presidents have not taken fraud seriously, especially the Biden administration, which he said enabled fraud by neglecting “anti-fraud protections.”
“A lot of the anti-fraud protections that existed in our government for a very long time were actually turned off by the Biden administration. So we think fraud has been a problem for a long time,” Vance said. “It became a massive, massive problem under the Biden administration.”
“We’re gonna do a number of things. First of all, we’re gonna turn back on those anti-fraud protections, so that all these cabinet officials are looking at what’s going on and focusing on it,” he added.
Vance stressed that secretaries will work in coordination with the task force as part of the whole-of-government approach.
“The second thing is that we’re going to take a whole government approach. So much of what’s going to make the anti-fraud task force work is we’re communicating across different departments,” he said.
“So when Bobby Kennedy is talking to Scott Bessent about things that he’s seeing in Medicare and Medicaid, when Scott is seeing things at Treasury, when Brooke [Rollins] is seeing things at agriculture, when Scott [Turner] is seeing things at Housing and Urban Development, what we’re going to actually do is force the bureaucracy to take this seriously and work together as political principals to make sure that we stop allowing fraudsters to steal the American people’s money,” Vance continued.
“This is not just theft of the American people’s money. This is also a theft of critical services that the American people rely on,” he stressed, pointing to fraud of autism services in Minnesota as an example.
The task force, which was established less than two weeks ago, is already making headway. The task force and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) identified and suspended 70 hospice and home health providers in Los Angeles that were flagged as high-risk fraudulent providers, a source familiar with the matter told Breitbart News on Friday.
Miller said there are no verification processes for receipts of federal benefits, particularly in Democrat-run states.
“I think that most citizens would probably assume that there’s some verification process that takes place for the receipt of most federal benefits. The reality is that there is not,” Miller said.
“This is particularly true in blue states, willfully true in blue states in which all of these programs are operating entirely on the honor system. No verification takes place before individuals are enrolled in or receive these benefits,” he added.
He noted that Minnesota has fought the federal government in court to avoid handing over identities of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients, and he asked those listening to “think about what this does to public trust, social trust, people’s faith in the system.”
“Imagine in a community, a working class community in the Twin Cities, say a native Minnesotan who works as a lineman or works as a construction worker, works in any job that requires hard work, dedication, focus, who’s worried about his ability to support for, provide his family,” he continued. “And then imagine he has a neighbor who’s a Somali refugee who arrived two years ago and has a Mercedes and no financial stress, no worries at all in the entire world, has never seemed to ever go to work at all, because he just went to an office to the state, lied on a piece of paper, and got unlimited free money forever for life. That is the system that is being run. That is the corruption that this task force, under the leadership of the vice president, is going to demolish.”
Ferguson also stressed that fraud erodes public trust.
“For decades, Americans have turned over trillions of their tax dollars to social welfare programs to help their neighbors and fellow citizens through hard times. They’ve done so on the basis of social trust: the belief that their government, state and federal, will do the right things with their dollars, and that their fellow citizens will honestly participate in these programs,” he said.
“Fraud shreds the social trust on which these programs and our entire nation depend. This fraud crisis is thus existential. If we fail to address it, the fabric of our nation will swiftly unravel, and the American people feel like they are getting ripped off, and they’re right,” he added.
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