The recently-launched Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, headed by Vice President JD Vance, is already making a splash with a number of wins over the past week or so.
The task force was launched on March 16, and since then the vice president and the rest of the task force have hit the ground running.
Since March 25, suspected fraud in taxpayer-funded programs has been discovered across multiple government agencies. The task force convened its first roundtable with top cabinet secretaries, underscoring its whole-of-government approach, and key officials to combat fraud have been formally added at the federal level.
“In just the last week, the Vice President’s task force to eliminate fraud has uncovered hundreds of fraudulently-run healthcare and hospice centers and exposed fraudsters who have ripped off American taxpayers to the tune of millions of dollars,” a Vance spokesperson told Breitbart News.
“This is exactly what the Task Force was created to do. We are thankful for all of the agencies’ efforts to enforce our whole-of-government approach to root out fraud and look forward to all the more that we’ll uncover,” the spokesperson added.
On March 25, a source familiar with the matter told Breitbart News that the task force and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services had identified and suspended 70 Los Angeles-based hospice and home health businesses flagged as high-risk of being fraudulent.
“As the task force to root out waste, fraud, and abuse ramps up its work, we expect this number to grow exponentially,” a source told Breitbart News.
Indeed, the number only climbed in recent days, with Fox News reporting on Thursday that the figure had risen to 221 suspensions of hospice and home health providers in California, a 215 percent increase from just a week earlier.
“We expect this number to grow much, much higher in the coming weeks,” said a senior Trump official.
The same day, U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced the execution of arrests and search warrants in connection with suspected hospice and healthcare fraud in Los Angeles.
“Our task force isn’t wasting any time cracking down on fraud,” Vance wrote in a post on X.
“This morning in the LA area, federal law enforcement is taking down fraudsters who stole $50M+ from Americans by defrauding our healthcare and hospice systems,” he added.
Additionally, the Department of Labor announced on April 1 that it is opening an investigation into the California Unemployment Insurance program over suspicions of fraud and improper payments.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer said the department “is holding states accountable for the rampant unemployment fraud that has occurred across the country,” and the vice president and task force are working to “protect” citizens’ tax dollars.
Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner announced Monday that his department has found “$5 billion in potential payment errors,” “illegal aliens receiving taxpayer-funded housing,” and “poor stewardship across the board.”
He added that he looks “forward to rooting out fraud at HUD” alongside Vance.
Last Friday, Vance convened the first task force meeting alongside Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who serves as vice chair of the task force, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and numerous top cabinet officials, like Turner, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, and more.
“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, going on to highlight the whole-of-government approach the task force is taking.
“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.
On top of the alleged fraud findings and the first task force meeting, the federal government’s anti-fraud efforts received reinforcements with Vance swearing in Colin McDonald as assistant attorney general for fraud enforcement on Wednesday.
Additionally, Scott Brady has been appointed as the anti-fraud task force’s executive director. Brady’s resume includes serving as the top prosecutor in the Hunter Biden probe.
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