Vice President JD Vance, who Donald Trump tabbed as his “fraud czar” in March and who chairs the White House’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, held a roundtable on the subject Wednesday with lawmakers. He also released a powerful op-ed in the Washington Post earlier in the day explaining how the massive scale of grift on programs funded by “the generosity of [our] fellow citizens” hurts every single American.
In his opinion piece, he tied the issue to his own sometimes difficult past:
Countless Americans will depend on programs funded by the generosity of their fellow citizens at some point in their lives. In my own family, while I was growing up, my mother relied on food assistance more than once.
But when the government puts its head in the sand and ignores those programs getting ripped off, he continued, it’s more than a crime; it’s a tragedy.
That trust is impossible to sustain when a government turns a blind eye to fraud. Every dollar stolen by a criminal is a dollar that fails to reach the Americans who need it. Our children lose services, and senior citizens go without care. Honest businesses miss critical opportunities to hire up and serve their communities. In some cases, states have had to go so far as to essentially end benefit programs for expecting mothers and the homeless because fraudsters have plundered them so extensively.
When Trump took office again in 2025, Vance wrote, he immediately saw the problem and said, “enough is enough.” The president and his team set off to work:
Since Inauguration Day, our administration has taken a sledgehammer to fraud. We’ve uncovered an estimated $230 billion in fraud across Medicare, Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the pandemic-era loan measures such as the Paycheck Protection Program, and other federal benefits. On an annualized basis, our internal analyses indicate that we’ve already halted $56 billion in fraudulent spending from going out the door. And thanks to the efforts of our federal, state and local partners, we’ve secured an additional estimated $55 billion in indictments, settlements and civil penalties.
His takeaway? “Our message is unmistakable: If you steal from the American people, we will find you, we will stop you, and we will put you in prison for a very long time.”
That may be a novel concept for the governors of fraud capitals like Minnesota and California, where Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom, respectively, have been MIA as billions of dollars have been plundered by sophisticated syndicates.
RELATED: Trump Team Pauses $1 Billion in Medicaid Funds to CA and MN, Demands Proof Claims Are Legitimate
Fraudsters Beware! DOJ Files Away Family Who Stole PPP Loans, As Fraud Division Efforts Expand
Meanwhile, the vice president told the roundtable that the victim of all this fraud is you:
.@VP hosts members of Congress for a @WHFraudTF roundtable: "I'd remind all of you and remind the American people... that fraud is really a dual victim crime. The most obvious victim, of course, is the American taxpayer, who has their hard-earned tax dollars stolen from them to… pic.twitter.com/XhAgOPBdfb
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 5, 2026
@VP hosts members of Congress for a @WHFraudTF roundtable: "I'd remind all of you and remind the American people... that fraud is really a dual victim crime. The most obvious victim, of course, is the American taxpayer, who has their hard-earned tax dollars stolen from them to enrich people who are violating our laws and taking advantage of our country. But I think more profoundly, and more sadly, the second victim of fraud are the people who benefit from programs that the American people have set up in their generosity and in their kindness of spirit, and those programs don't function as well or don't even have the resources necessary to work because they've been stolen from by fraudsters."
The panel also discussed ways to combat the scourge, including harsher sentences for those convicted of stealing our taxpayer dollars.
Making fraud illegal again — what a concept!
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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