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THE WAR ON FRAUD

President Trump’s crackdown on the political thieves that are looting America at taxpayer expense
written by Shane Harris, in Volume 20 Issue 4 of the AMAC magazine

During the 2024 campaign, President Donald Trump made combating government waste, fraud, and abuse a cornerstone of his reelection bid.  Just over 18 months into his second term (August 2026), his administration, along with some enterprising investigative journalists, have uncovered a staggering amount of fraud that has shocked even the most pessimistic critics of runaway government spending.  Now the challenge shifts from how to identify fraud to how to stop it.

DOGE SETS THE STAGE

The first major signal that the Trump administration was serious about this fight came with the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE.  It is worth remembering the absolute hysteria that accompanied the creation of DOGE, an entity which was famously led by Tesla founder and X owner Elon Musk.  Democrats and their allies in the corporate media had full-on meltdowns at the idea that someone might finally look under the hood of the federal bureaucracy and ask basic questions about how trillions of taxpayer dollars are spent.  In some cases, the reaction was downright theatrical.  Multiple members of Congress physically went to government agencies and demanded to be let in, apparently determined to personally stop DOGE from examining the books.  It soon became apparent why they were so worried.  The first major flashpoint was the US Agency for International Development (USAID).  Its budget, about $44 billion dollars, is relatively small compared to the overall federal budget.  But what DOGE revealed about how USAID was spending that money shocked the conscience and the wallet.  One NGO received $1.5 million from USAID to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in Serbia’s workplaces.  A group in Ireland received $70,000 to produce a “DEI musical”.  Another $2 million went to promote “gender-affirming care” in Guatemala.  Some $32,000 went toward the production of a “transgender comic book” in Peru, while another $47,000 went to a “transgender opera” in Colombia.  Meanwhile, $46 million went to support Egypt’s tourism industry, and $2.5 million went to Vietnam for electric vehicles.  This was all happening while Americans were struggling to afford gas, groceries, housing, and medical care.  Trump moved to shut down USAID, and Democrats responded by insisting that the effort amounted to a constitutional crisis.  For millions of Americans, the USAID revelations were an inflection point.  Democrats made clear that this was the hill they were willing to die on.  At the same time, the country realized for the first time just how bad the problem had become.

MINNESOTA BECOMES THE FIRST DOMINO TO FALL
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In late 2025, reporting from City Journal‘s Christopher Rufo and independent journalist Nick Shirley put Minnesota at the center of the national fraud  conversation and touched off a series of massive scandals involving welfare fraud.  First, Rufo reported that Somali migrants had stolen millions of dollars in welfare funds, with some of that money allegedly funneled to the terrorist group Al-Shabaab.  As one source told Rufo, “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”  Then Shirley released a devastating video exposing massive fraud tied to Somali daycare centers.  The scale of the allegations was breathtaking, but just as disturbing was the apparent lack of urgency from state officials before journalists began forcing the issue into public view.  The fallout from the scandal was so severe that it even forced Governor Tim Walz to end his reelection bid.  Walz faced serious scrutiny because it appeared that his government had retaliated against whistleblowers who tried to expose the fraud rather than aggressively prosecuting the theft of taxpayer dollars.  That may be the most enraging past of this entire story.  It is bad enough that fraudsters were stealing money meant for the needy but it is even worse that government officials appeared more interested in protecting the liars, cheats, and thieves than protecting the taxpayers.
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THE SCANDAL DEEPENS
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Shirley was soon at it again in California, this time investigating serious evidence of hospice fraud.  The numbers were staggering.  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) found that an astonishing one-third of the nation’s registered hospice providers were based in Los Angeles, despite the area having only 2.5 percent of the nation’s elder population.  CMS ultimately shut down 800 hospices that were charging taxpayers $1.4 billion per year.  In one particularly absurd example, there were 500 hospice centers registered in just a three-block radius of the city, and many of those addresses were completely empty offices.  Once again, the fraud was so egregious that even California’s Democrat governor, Gavin Newson, scrambled to make it look like he cared about cleaning it up.  The obvious question remained: how does a fraud scheme of that scale grow so large before the people paid to oversee these programs notice?  The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak then blew the lid off another major fraud scandal in Ohio, this time involving the Medicaid program that pays people to care for the elderly.  Medicaid was spending $1 billion dollars annually in the Buckeye State alone on “in-home” care, with absolutely no verification that the services listed for those funds were actually being provided.  The Ohio scandal points too the damning thread that runs through this entire story.  Yes, the fraud is bad, but equally bad is the fact that government officials should have known and apparently did not, or they did know and chose to do nothing about it.  For years, conservatives have warned that the welfare state and the sprawling federal bureaucracy were vulnerable to fraud.  Democrats called those warnings cruel, conspiratorial, or bigoted.  Now, the receipts are piling up.  The Trump administration has also begun looking into fraud in Medicaid’s program for autism.  In North Carolina alone, autism therapy payments surged from $6 million in 2021 to a jaw-dropping $660 million in 2025 — a staggering increase of 11,000 percent.  The administration has also identified enormous levels of fraud in immigration programs, including more that 10,000 cases in student work programs.  Look hard enough at any government program, it seems, and there is sure to be an astonishing amount of fraud.  Again and again, the pattern is obvious.  Rd flags are everywhere.   Yet somehow, it seems the Trump administration is the first to bother asking basic questions..
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PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT
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For years, politicians in both parties have talked about reducing waste, fraud, and abuse.  It has become one of the great cliches of American politics.  Every candidate says it.  Few do anything meaningful about it, but Trump is different.  He has tasked Vice President J. D. Vance with overseeing efforts to identify and stop fraud.  Working in coordination with him, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has already secured dozens of guilty pleas and in prosecuting more than 8,000 active fraud cases.  The DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, which Trump created earlier this year, took enforcement action in fraud schemes totaling $340 million in just the first week of its creation.  In March, the administration also launched a new program to protect fraud whistleblowers, a critical step given how many of these scandals were exposed only because people on the inside were willing to speak up.  Trump’s readiness to name names and shut off the spigot of federal money is precisely why democrats are so angry about his anti-fraud efforts.  Fraud is not just a financial problem for them but also a political problem.  The modern left’s entire operational model depends on telling Americans that the government needs more money, more power, more programs, and more bureaucrats.  Every fraud scandal exposes the rot at the center of that argument.
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SAFEGUARDING THE FUTURE
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What the Trump Administration has exposed is no small thing.  This is not petty waste or harmless bureaucratic inefficiency but a massive, industrial-scale fraud operation to the tune of billions of dollars per year, stolen from American taxpayers and diverted away from the people these programs were created to help.  Exposing this matters for the truth, but also matters for restoring Americans’ faith that their government is capable of serving rather than exploiting them.  Fraud corrodes public trust, makes working Americans feel like suckers for paying taxes, and makes honest beneficiaries feel like they are trapped inside broken systems.  It make people resent programs that, when properly run, really do serve people in need.  Stopping fraud is not an attack on these programs.  It is how we save them.  The question now is whether Washington will institutionalize these changes.  Will the next President simply allow things to go back to the way they were?  Will bureaucrats wait out the Trump administration and quietly reopen the flood gates for he fraudsters?  Or will Congress finally step up and pass reforms that make this kind of theft far more difficult to commit?  Americans work too hard to have their tax dollars stolen.  The era of blank checks, empty offices, fake providers, and bureaucratic indifference must end.  Trump has started that fight.  Now the rest of the country’s leaders must prevent any backsliding, and American voters must hold them accountable.
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THE WHITE HOUSE TASK FORCE TO ELIMINATE FRAUD — Key actions and victories to date, August 2026
  • February 25th: the Trump Administration halted nearly $260 million in Medicaid payments to Minnesota over rampant fraud allegations, demanding full cooperation with federal investigators.
  • March 19th: Federal prosecutors charged 11 individuals in a major real estate and loan fraud ring, preying on elderly Americans in California.
  • March 25th: The Trump Administration suspended dozens of high-risk hospice and home health providers in the Los Angeles area.
  • March 30th: The Trump Administration launched a new national fraud whistleblower program to empower Americans to expose waste and abuse.
  • April 2nd: The Trump Administration suspended hundreds of additional high-risk hospice and home health providers across California.
  • April 3rd: Federal prosecutors charged more than a dozen individuals in a $50 million hospice fraud scheme.
  • April 7th: The Department of Justice secured a guilty plea from a California fraudster accused of submitting $270 million in false reimbursement claims.
  • April 8th: The Department of Justice confirmed it has 8,000 active, ongoing fraud cases.  The Task Force uncovered $6.3 billion in suspected fraudulent government contracts and immediately launched a sweeping investigation.
  • April 15th: The Trump Administration suspended 447 hospices and 23 home health agencies in Los Angeles, estimated fraud exceeding $600 million.
  • April 16: The Trump Administration served criminal warrants and administrative charges on 20 Minnesota businesses suspected of SNAP fraud.
  • April 17th: The Department of Justice announced that its newly established national Fraud Enforcement Division took enforcement action in schemes totaling over $340 million in its first week alone.
  • April 24th: The Small Business Administration referred 562,000 fraudulent or delinquent pandemic era loans (totaling $22 billion) for aggressive collection.
  • April 28th: The Department of Justice conducted targeted enforcement operations at nearly two dozen Minnesota child care centers suspected of systemic fraud.
  • April 30: The Department of Justice launched a West Coast Strike Force team targeting healthcare fraud across Arizona, Nevada, and northern California.  The Trump Administration deferre an additional $91 million in federal Medicaid funds from non-cooperating Minnesota businesses.
  • May 12: The Trump Administration identified over 10,000 suspected fraud cases in immigration student work programs.
  • May 13: The Trump Administration suspended $1.4 billion in home health and hospice funding nationwide, deferred $1.3 billion in federal Medicaid reimbursements for California, halted all new Medicare enrollments for hospice providers nationwide until the fraud crisis is brought under control, launched audits of Medicaid Fraud Control units in all 50 states, and blocked $60 million in fraudulent student loan applications in just the first month since deploying enhanced screening.
  • May 20th: The Department of Justice charged a Minneapolis daycare owner featured in Nick Shirley’s viral video.
  • May 21st: The Department of Justice expanded its Health Care Fraud Strike Force program, adding additional prosecutors to combat Medicaid fraud nationwide and charged 15 individuals in a wide-ranging Minnesota healthcare fraud scheme.  This included the highest loss amount ever charged in a Medicaid case in the state and the largest autism fraud scheme ever prosecuted.

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