WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance gathered Trump administration bigwigs Friday for his first anti-fraud task force meeting — saying the team would reverse a more relaxed approach to verification of social services benefits.
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“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,” said Vance, who chairs the task force, in brief introductory remarks before the meeting was closed to the press for further discussion.
“We think fraud has been a problem for a long time. It became a massive, massive problem under the Biden administration. First of all, we’re going to turn back on anti-fraud protections, so that all of these cabinet officials are looking at what’s going on and focusing on it.”
Vance, as well as Andrew Ferguson, the vice chairman of the task force, and top White House adviser Stephen Miller, all focused on the Minnesota fraud scandal, including phony autism services providers.
The task force officials did not publicly describe what changes are being made, but already paused the distribution of some Medicaid funding to Minnesota over eligibility concerns and paused enrollment in the Medicare durable medical device program over multistate fraud fears.
“This is not just theft of the American people’s money. This is also the theft of critical services that the American people rely on,” Vance said.
“The autism scam that we’ve seen in Somalian parts of Minnesota really illustrates well what’s been going on across whole layers of our government.”
Ferguson, who is also chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, called fraud an “existential” crisis and said “if we fail to address it, the fabric of our nation will swiftly unravel.”
“The American people feel like they are getting ripped off and they’re right,” he said.
Miller described the frustration of a hypothetical Minnesota lineman or construction worker who labors to earn a living.
“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 and who never seems to ever go to work at all because he just went to an office in the state, lied on a piece of paper and got limited free money forever for life,” Miller said.
“That is the system that is being run, that corruption that this task force for the leadership of the Vice President is going to demolish.”
Attendees of the meeting included HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House budget director Russ Vought, HUD secretary Scott Turner, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, SBA administrator Kelly Loeffler, VA secretary Doug Collins, and Department of Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito.
“This is not business as usual. We are going on offense against fraud. We will track it, expose it, and shut it down,” D’Esposito said.
Colin McDonald, the recently confirmed new assistant attorney general for fraud, also attended.
