The federal government’s war on public assistance fraud is racking up some successes across the nation, but not every state seems to want to be successful. The federal government recovered about $2 billion worth of fraud in 2025, but the really big fraud is most likely happening in the states whose governments seem the least interested in treating it seriously.
That $2 billion is “not the fire-breathing number I think many were hoping for,” says author and investigative reporter Peter Schweizer, even though it is 40 percent higher than the during the last year of the Biden administration. Experts know the fraud is many times that magnitude.
Fraud investigators across the states and nationally have found evidence of the kinds of problems uncovered by DOGE and Vice President J.D. Vance’s anti-fraud task force many times before. Schweizer’s organization, the Government Accountability Institute, did a deep investigative report seven years before that exposed fraud problems in the SNAP program. Schweizer’s podcast, The DrillDown, has covered the many ways fraud happens in public assistance ever since.
Finding fraud takes cooperation from the states, who administer federal welfare funds for their residents. Since the effort began, the Trump administration’s state welfare fraud inspectors in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Alabama have far outperformed larger states in finding and prosecuting welfare program fraud. In 2024, the Inspector General recovered $1.4 billion in fraud in Michigan.
“They said they stopped a $6.5 billion fraud ring in Texas with people overbilling,” notes co-host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The DrillDown. “I think it’s up to $10 billion in California… These are numbers just from Medicaid. So, I guess the Trump administration would say, ‘We’re bringing more charges than ever.’”
The governments of California and Minnesota have not been so conscientious. Federal efforts found and removed 1,000 fake hospice claimants from the Medicare program. In Minnesota, as Eggers notes, the now jailed “kingpin” of various fraudulent daycare and food programs has claimed that political leaders including Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) knew and looked the other way because of their need to protect the Somali voting bloc in Minneapolis.
The relative lack of convictions in some states is not due to scarce anti-fraud investigation resources, either. “California employs 270 people to go after Medicaid fraud. That sounds impressive,” Eggers says. “Guess how many indictments they had in 2024?”
“In 2024, they were responsible for just 32 indictments,” he says.
By contrast, Democratic-run Pennsylvania conducted 700 investigations with one-fourth as many staff as California. “They had 113 indictments, almost four times the indictments, with a fourth of the staff.”
“It just shows you that, the fraud is there if you want to look for it. But not every state wants to look,” Eggers adds.
Indiana has only 59 staff, but they had 27 indictments in 2024. “Indiana really gets after it,” Eggers said. “Ohio has 105 people to investigate, but they had 69 indictments — I think third behind Texas and Arizona.”
Fraud will always happen, Schweizer notes. “We’ve interviewed fraud investigators. They believe that anywhere between 15 and 20 percent of transactions are fraudulent. So, that’s kind of accepted in the system,” he says.
“That some of these states are indicting a handful of people when you’ve got millions of people on public assistance shows that they’re not taking this seriously.”
The Trump administration strategy has been to say to states like California, “If you don’t investigate these things, we’re going to withhold money because of our fear that widespread fraud is taking place,” as Schweizer describes it.
“That’s about to cost California serious money.”
The show names many political figures in Minnesota, including the state’s controversial Somali American congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and others who have ties to the largest fraudsters in that state. Omar’s sister, Schweizer notes, incorporated a business at the same Minneapolis address where the daycare fraud’s “kingpin,” Amy Bach, ran her enterprises.
Luke Rosiak of The Daily Wire, who was previously a GAI Visiting Fellow, just reported those details.
“So, Ilhan Omar is literally one degree removed from the person who was at the center of it. She’s also featured in commercials for the Safari restaurant, led by the guy who was like the number one committer of fraud,” Schweizer says.
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