(The Lion) — Vice President J.D. Vance convened the inaugural meeting of an anti-fraud task force on Friday, promising to take on decades of fraud and abuse of social services that he said is running rampant across the country.
“We think fraud has been a problem for a long time. It became a massive, massive problem under the Biden administration,” Vance said in his opening remarks to reporters before proceeding to a closed-door meeting. Many “anti-fraud protections” in the government were shut off in the Biden-era, Vance said, adding that the task force will start by bringing back those protections.
The meeting was attended by a number of Cabinet officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. Vance said a “whole-of-government” approach across the departments is how the administration will “force the bureaucracy to take this seriously.”
President Donald Trump established the anti-fraud task force via executive order earlier in March, noting that taxpayer-funded benefits programs are being widely exploited by criminals, illegal immigrants, and gangs due to state-level loopholes and inadequate fraud controls.
Trump pointed to the “staggering fraud and waste in Minnesota” as a key example, noting that prosecutors estimate that “Medicaid fraud in recent years could total in the billions.”
“Nearly 9 percent of the roughly $866 million spent on food stamps in Minnesota each year is estimated to be spent in error,” the executive order reads. “Hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal childcare funding to Minnesota were stolen by an organized ring of Somali immigrants and others who used the stolen money to purchase cars, property, and luxury travel, and sent the funds overseas.”
Vance highlighted fraud in autism program benefits in Minnesota, noting “what we’ve seen is Somali fraudsters at an industrial scale taking advantage of that program to the tune of millions and millions of dollars.” The fraud not only deceives American taxpayers who think their tax dollars are going to help fellow citizens, he said, but also makes the families who need the services unable to access them.
“Unfortunately, that story, while it’s very concrete and very obvious what we’re seeing in Minneapolis, it is replayed again and again and again across many states and across many different programs,” Vance said. “It has to stop.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has insisted the state is working to combat fraud and said Minnesota has been “singled out and targeted for political retribution at an unparalleled scale” from the Trump administration.
“Under the guise of combating fraud, the federal government has flooded Minnesota with masked, untrained and unaccountable agents who are wreaking havoc in our communities,” he told a congressional committee earlier this month.
Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, speaking before the task force on Friday, said it was important for Americans to understand that in many states, especially blue states, benefits programs don’t have a verification process and are “operated entirely on the honor system.”
Somali refugees in Minnesota can lie about how many children they have, if they are married, their disability status, and their immigration status and “nobody in the state of Minnesota would validate any of these facts before writing you a check,” he said.
“Think about what this does to public trust, social trust, people’s faith in the system,” Miller added. “That is the corruption that this task force, under the leadership of the vice president, is going to demolish.”
