The White House’s Latest Anti-Fraud Spin Does Not Come Close to Adding Up
This is your TPM evening briefing.
No Easy Fix
During his State of the Union address in February, President Trump made an absurd, fantastical and quickly debunked claim: Once Vice President JD Vance had a chance to root out fraud from (blue states’) social services programs, the federal budget would be balanced and the deficit would disappear.
That claim has been making the rounds again this week after Vance hosted a group of attorneys general from around the country to attend a forum at the White House focused on investigating fraud — a meeting that he conveniently did not invite Democratic attorneys general to until the last minute — and, so, they all declined to come. (While the official reason for their absence had to do with the disrespect of the timing of the invite — they were invited on Friday and asked to RSVP by Saturday — Vance has made it clear that he intends to use this anti-fraud commission as another weapon in the retribution campaign Trump’s waging against blue states by withholding federal funds as a form of punishment for various, nebulous offenses.)
During the meeting with Republican attorneys general on Tuesday, Vance urged state officials to partner with the Trump administration to help investigate and prosecute fraud in federal welfare programs, specifically Medicaid, Republicans’ favorite social safety net program to demonize and gut. He also announced that the Department of Health and Human Services would soon review how states use their Medicaid Fraud Control Units — a drum he’s been beating for a while. Ironically, these Medicaid Fraud Control Units most often prosecute cases of Medicaid provider fraud.
Vance has been tasked with threading these needles after Trump appointed him as his fraud czar. Trump’s fixation with “fraud” only emerged after right-wing online influencers manufactured hysteria about its prevalence in Minnesota — where there have been legitimate investigations into social services fraud stretching back years. He used the online outrage as justification for not just his lethal immigration enforcement operation there, but also a pretext for freezing federal funding to other blue states.
There is bipartisan agreement that there is fraud in federal spending that should be investigated and rooted out. But it is not as wildly rampant (and blue-state specific) as Trump administration officials’ spin would suggest.
During the Tuesday meeting with state AGs, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for policy Stephen Miller elevated Trump’s State of the Union falsehood — that the federal deficit could be eliminated if fraud was rooted out of federal programs.
“Based on what I’ve heard, we could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the Treasury went to individuals who were properly, lawfully, correctly eligible to receive them,” he said Tuesday.
By Wednesday, Trump was publicly repeating the same claim during a Cabinet meeting (plus, some marching orders for Todd Blanche, who is serving as acting attorney general and doing everything he can to make that post permanent).
The federal deficit has remained consistently around $1.8 trillion for the past two years in a row and is projected to reach $2 trillion in fiscal year 2026. The amount of funds saved in rooting out fraud in federal programs would have to be triple what the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan congressional agency that examines federal spending, has estimated for Miller and Trump’s statements to be true.
In the spring of 2024, during the Biden administration, the GAO released a “first-of-its kind, government-wide estimate of federal dollars lost to fraud.” GAO estimated in 2024 that between $233 billion to $521 billion in taxpayer dollars was lost to improper spending and fraud each year, between the years of 2018 and 2022 (a portion of which were abnormal pandemic years). Here’s how it reached this estimate:
GAO collected data from three key sources to develop the estimate: investigative data, such as the number of cases sent for prosecution and the dollar value of closed cases; Office of Inspector General (OIG) semiannual report information; and confirmed fraud data reported to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) by agencies. GAO organized these data around three fraud categories—adjudicated, detected potential, and undetected potential. Model design and validation were also informed by 46 fraud studies. OIG and other knowledgeable officials agreed with these categories and subcategories.
The GAO review found that the annual fraud losses amounted to between 3 percent and 7 percent of what the government spent during those years.
When Trump first started publicly suggesting that eliminating fraud would somehow balance the federal budget after his SOTU speech, even the libertarian and right-leaning Cato Institute put out a report fact checking the president’s assessment:
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the US faces cumulative deficits of $24 trillion over the next decade (FY27—FY36). Most of the growth in the federal deficit is traceable to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest costs. Even if we take GAO’s upper-bound estimate and assume we can eliminate all fraud via traditional fraud prevention, that would optimistically generate $5 trillion in savings—not nearly enough.
While there is much to be done about fraud in federal spending, the easy fix that Trump and Miller are spinning is likely another effort to justify the cuts in federal funding to blue state that they are already actively pursuing as punishment for opposing Trump’s agenda.
Republicans Delete Their Paxton Criticism
After Texas Attorney General defeated Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the primary runoff for Cornyn’s Senate seat, Trump, his allies and Republicans in Congress are banding together to spread lies about the Democratic nominee being trans — and to wipe their past insults of Paxton from God’s internet.
Within hours of Ken Paxton defeating Sen. John Cornyn in Tuesday’s Senate Republican primary runoff in Texas, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm deleted at least nine press releases and digital ads from its website that had attacked Paxton — an erasure of a monthslong opposition campaign that the committee had waged against the man it will now help elect.
Congressional Black Caucus Hit Southern States Where It Hurts
In the face of MAGA Republicans’ no-holds-barred push to eliminate Black electoral power across the Old Confederacy in the wake of SCOTUS’ Callais ruling, the House Congressional Black Caucus is fighting back.
Following the NAACP’s call for Black college athletes to reject admissions at colleges in the South in the wake of the gerrymandering scramble, the Congressional Black Caucus is taking it a step further. Members are blocking a bill in the House that seeks to create a national standard for paying college athletes. The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act (SCORE Act) had bipartisan support until members of the CBC announced they’d be pulling their support, a move that has, for now, killed the legislation.
“What is happening in America right now should be a wake-up call to everyone. The big-time conferences, especially in the South, want our babies’ lungs, but don’t want their voices,” Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-OR) said in a statement to Democracy Docket. “They want the power of their bodies to score a touchdown, but will look away when they ask for their freedom to walk into the voting booth.”
In Case You Missed It
The Associated Press finally called this tight race this morning: Far-Right Candidate Who Wants to Deport 100 Million People Wins GOP Runoff for Texas Oil Regulator
Related reading, from Josh Kovensky, here: Meet the Aspiring Texas Oil Regulator Who Wants to Deport 100 Million People
ICYMI last night: Armed With Trump’s Last Minute Endorsement, Paxton Defeats Cornyn in Texas GOP Runoff Primary
Morning Memo: Trump Targets Seize on Abrego Garcia’s Vindictive Prosecution Win
Kate Riga: In Defiance of Trump, South Carolina Senate Kills Pre-2026 Redistricting Push
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Taking the L … and Trump’s Long Iran Walk Into the Twilight
What We Are Reading
Cornyn’s Defeat Fuels Tensions With President Trump in Senate G.O.P.