Vice President JD Vance kicked off the inaugural meeting of the White House’s new Task Force to Eliminate Fraud on Friday, March 27. Before he gave the press the boot, VP Vance called the rampant fraud in childcare and healthcare in Minnesota both theft of the American people’s money and theft of the critical services they rely on. But the fraud goes back much further than late 2025 and early 2026 – and it is spread much wider than just the North Star State. While the bulk of the meeting was behind closed doors and no specific actions were revealed to the public, Vance did promise to turn back on the old safeguards that had been removed under previous administrations.
Finding the Fraud
According to an investigation actually first launched during the Biden administration, as much as half of the $18 billion in federal funds earmarked for 14 different Minnesota programs since 2018 could have been stolen. Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson, the vice chair of this new task force under Vance, said the massive fraud “shreds the social trust on which these programs and our entire nation depend.”
“This fraud crisis is thus existential,” he added. “If we fail to address it, the fabric of our nation will swiftly unravel.”
But how did this happen? According to VP Vance, the federal government hadn’t taken the situation seriously for decades, and many states simply hand in a bill for federal funding, whether it’s for SNAP, Medicaid, or some other benefits, without ever revealing who the recipients are. In fact, he said Minnesota specifically has spent millions of dollars in court fighting to keep the federal government from being able to get those records.
Enter the task force. Established by President Donald Trump via executive order back on March 16, the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud is led by Vance and Ferguson and consists of – as Vance put it in his opening remarks on Friday – about half the Cabinet.
In his executive order, President Trump wrote:
“Fraud and mismanagement in these programs constitutes theft of the hard-earned tax dollars from Americans paying into these programs, and of the benefits owed to Americans who need them. The failure to ensure sufficient Federal oversight to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse has allowed irresponsible State politicians to increase Federal spending in their own States, which has contributed to inflation for health care services, housing, utilities, and groceries.”
While the full scope of the task force’s plan so far has not been revealed, one of the first steps laid out to the press on Friday will be requiring states to provide the kind of information many are currently withholding. This makes sense; disclosure keeps folks honest, generally speaking. It’s hard to commit fraud when you have to account for the dollars you take.
A Campaign of Retribution
Not everyone is on board, of course. Democrats, generally speaking, spin the task force as a way for Trump and Republicans to target blue states. Disgraced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, specifically, called the task force a “campaign of retribution,” and accused the Trump administration of “weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states like Minnesota.”
Walz further spoke on the issue of fraud during a Friday interview on At Issue With Tom Hauser. “All fraud is too much,” the governor said. “One dollar is too much. I don’t really believe the vice president is interested in helping us with this. If he was, he’d get us more US attorneys. If he was, he’d have more FBI agents out here focused on this rather than harassing people in the streets. But what I would tell Minnesotans on this is they know it’s unacceptable. We’re on the path to having the most secure programs in the country. I take full responsibility for making sure that’s fixed.”
While he claimed to take responsibility and to welcome help in ending the fraud, he also tried to deflect from the immigration issue, saying “there are plenty of white men committing fraud too.” As well, the state is still engaged in a legal battle to prevent the US government from getting access to lists of SNAP recipients or forcing the state to recertify beneficiaries in person.
It was on his watch that perhaps as much as $9 billion in fraud took place across multiple state-run programs – and of the nearly 100 people charged in these cases, the vast majority were of Somali descent. It’s no secret – that’s why back in January, Walz announced he wouldn’t be running for a third term this year. To Walz – and many Democrats like him, both in Minnesota and elsewhere, who allowed such fraud to occur on their watch – this likely does seem like a campaign of retribution. In a sense, it could be argued that it is. Another way of putting it, however, might be bringing Minnesotans and their fellow Americans across the nation justice.
