President Donald Trump’s decision to tackle fraud against taxpayers is both good policy and good politics.
A large majority of voters sees a strong link between fraud and the cost of living and believe that cutting government fraud is the most direct path to bringing down prices for every American.
Those are the results of a recent survey conducted for Tea Party Patriots Action by McLaughlin & Associates. The survey of 1,000 general election voters was conducted in mid-May.
Data from the survey may surprise some people.
We began with a premise: there’s no permanent system in place to stop the hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud that government watchdogs document every year. Asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement that “Fraud in government programs is theft from taxpayers. Stopping waste, fraud, and corruption should be a top priority – hardworking Americans shouldn’t be forced to fund criminals,” 81 percent of survey respondents agreed. And that support was bipartisan: broken down by party, 90 percent of Republicans, 78 percent of Independents, and 74 percent of Democrats agreed.
We continued, reminding survey respondents that there’s no permanent structure in place to catch fraud before it occurs. We then asked if they agreed or disagreed that “Congress should require a permanent system to detect and prevent fraud before taxpayer money is spent – not after it’s already gone.” Not surprisingly, 83 percent agreed.
Then we made the connection between government waste and higher prices. We pointed out that many economists say higher government spending is a primary driver of inflation, and we asked if survey respondents agreed or disagreed that “Cutting government fraud is the most direct path to bringing prices down for every American.”
Fully 70 percent of survey respondents agreed.
Taken together, the data from the three questions reveals a path for political leaders looking for a program of action – like, say, President Trump, who in March created by executive order an anti-fraud task force, and Vice President Vance, who was tasked to head that task force and who has taken to the new responsibility with gusto, most recently hosting state attorneys general at the White House to collaborate on his task force’s efforts.
In declaring the establishment of the task force, President Trump made the fraud-higher prices connection directly: the executive order says that “failure to ensure sufficient Federal oversight to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse” has led to increased federal spending, “which has contributed to inflation for health care services, housing, utilities, and groceries.”
Never before has the federal government spent so much money. There’s so much of it sloshing around in so many different places that it can’t help but become an attractive target for criminals. Surely, they must think, the people tasked with keeping all that money safe can’t keep an eye on all of it all the time, can they?
Clearly not. Every year, the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud, according to estimates by the Government Accountability Office.
Those numbers are so big they don’t mean anything to most people. Only when you break them down case by case, fraud by fraud, can they take on meaning.
Viewed on an individual basis, there are certainly enough recent news stories about massive amounts of fraud against the taxpayers to capture the attention and the interest of the electorate – for instance, the Medicaid fraud in Minnesota that led to federal indictments just last week against 15 people charged with stealing $90 million in what prosecutors called the “largest autism fraud scheme ever”; more Medicaid fraud in Minnesota, where the ringleader of the “Feeding Our Future” fraud was recently sentenced to 500 months in prison; a California Medicaid fraud scheme that dishonestly billed $270 million, and for which the principal fraudster has pleaded guilty; and a Nevada swindle, in which the fraudster was sentenced recently to 4.5 years in jail for her role in a $100 million tax fraud scheme.
On another front, investigative journalist Walter Curt, founder of The W.C. Dispatch, analyzed the 227-million-row Medicaid spending data set released by DOGE through the Department of Health and Human Services. His first deep dive, centered on Michigan, discovered that 21 of 600 “home healthcare businesses” sampled were actually dissolved entities – that is, they no longer existed as legal businesses – yet they were still billing Medicaid for $118 million. And no government official had bothered to verify that the businesses were what they said they were or were delivering the services for which they were billing.
Given how many “businesses” are billing Medicaid for such “services” – and given that this is just one government program out of thousands, each of which may be just as vulnerable to fraud – is it any wonder the GAO thinks the total fraud committed against taxpayers could be as much as $500 billion per year?
Replicating Curt’s analysis across all DOGE data sets will likely yield even greater results on the anti-fraud front.
This is theft of taxpayer dollars. It must be stopped.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. There’s much more to be discovered, and, ultimately, more funds to be recovered. President Trump’s decision to fight for taxpayers and take on the problem – and to demonstrate his determination to succeed by empowering Vice President Vance to lead the task force – is an excellent start.
Jenny Beth Martin is chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
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