(A)Political - August 8th

Good morning everyone,

Happy Saturday! Let’s dive in!

V.P. Vance is asking Congress to act on the $230 billion in fraud found since March by the task force he is leading. Abdul El-Sayed beat back the Dem. establishment favorite after getting outspent 8 to 1. The Executive Branch has taken fresh actions against Birthright Citizenship by targeting ‘birth-tourism’ practices.

• Vance Urges Congress To Act On $230 Billion In Fraud Found By Task Force

• Abdul El-Sayed Wins Mich. Dem. Senate Vote In Contentious Primary

• Trump Signs Executive Orders Barring ‘Birth Tourism’

Vance Urges Congress To Act On $230 Billion In Fraud Found By Task Force

_{By: Atlas}

Vice President JD Vance called on Congress Wednesday to write the administration's anti-fraud campaign into law, telling lawmakers at a White House roundtable that the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud has identified $230 billion in suspected fraud and stopped $56 billion in fraudulent payments since President Donald Trump established it in March.

"We have been able to identify $230 billion of fraud just since the Fraud Task Force was set up, and that's frankly by conservatively estimating it," Vance said at the event in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, attended by more than a dozen Republican lawmakers. "We've been able to stop $56 billion in fraudulent payments that would've otherwise gone to fraudsters, rather than to the people who need them."

The administration says it has also secured an estimated $55 billion through indictments, settlements, and civil penalties, and that since April the Justice Department has won convictions against more than 150 defendants in fraud schemes nationwide.

But Vance told the assembled members that executive action alone can only go so far. "This effort will fundamentally always have a limitation unless our colleagues in the House and the Senate are working with us," he said. "In order to make this really work, we need our colleagues in Congress to really codify some of this stuff, to make sure that it becomes law."

He was blunt about the political motivation for permanence. "We don't want the next administration, whoever, you know, God forbid you're gonna have President El-Sayed in three years," Vance said, referring to Michigan Senate Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, a critic of the task force, "we don't want him to undo all the incredible work that we've been doing."

Data Sharing and Stiffer Sentences Top the Ask

Vance laid out three legislative priorities: mandatory data sharing between state and federal governments, tougher criminal penalties, and additional funding for fraud enforcement.

The vice president described a "black box" surrounding state-administered programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, saying the federal government often has no visibility into who ultimately receives benefits it funds. "If the state of California gives those food stamp benefits to an illegal alien — to a violent criminal — the federal government has no visibility, and sometimes the states themselves have no visibility," he said. "We need some legislation that would actually force some data sharing between the state governments and the federal governments. We need to know where your tax dollars are going."

On penalties, Vance said the administration wants to "change those statutes and actually make it harder for people to commit fraud and make sure that when they do commit fraud, they go to jail and they go to jail for a long time."

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, the task force's vice chairman, said fraudsters target federal assistance programs because they are relatively easy to exploit and "the punishments associated with much of the fraud are relatively low." He presented lawmakers with 10 proposals, including verifying eligibility before payments go out, requiring criminal background checks and photo identification for recipients, cross-checking welfare rolls against death and incarceration records monthly, doubling the number of fraud investigators, barring liquor stores and smoke shops from accepting food stamps, and ending automatic reenrollments. "Data is the enemy of fraud," he said. "We want to work with Congress to dramatically increase the sentences associated even with low-level frauds, to make every fraudster think long and hard about whether it's worth facing a long time in jail."

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller pressed for mandatory minimum sentences, arguing that existing statutes were written for a different era. "When Congress was drafting these statutes, they still lived in a high-trust society, and it eclipsed their imagination that there would be systemic, widespread, continual lying, fleecing, and organized crime to rip off hundreds of billions of dollars from the American taxpayer," he said. "There needs to be strict, clear, mandatory minimums."

Vance framed fraud as a "dual victim crime," harming both taxpayers and the intended beneficiaries of assistance programs. "The second victim of fraud are the people who benefit from programs that the American people have set up in their generosity," he said, adding that those programs "don't function as well or don't even have the resources necessary to work because they've been stolen from by fraudsters."

Five Months of Enforcement Actions

Trump signed the executive order creating the task force on March 16, after large-scale fraud in Minnesota's Medicaid and federal assistance programs drew national attention, and named Vance its chairman while establishing a fraud-focused division at the Justice Department. The order cited the Feeding Our Future scheme, in which fraudsters stole nearly $250 million intended to feed needy children by opening fake meal sites and billing for millions of meals never served; the scheme's ringleader was sentenced to more than 40 years in prison, and a fugitive in the case was captured in Somalia in June.

The task force's actions since March include halting nearly $260 million in Medicaid payments to Minnesota, suspending hundreds of high-risk hospice and home health providers in California, uncovering $6.3 billion in suspected fraudulent government contracts, and referring 562,000 fraudulent or delinquent pandemic-era loans totaling $22 billion for collection. On June 8, Vance referred Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison, both Democrats, to the Justice Department's fraud division for investigation over allegations of negligence — a move without precedent in federal-state relations. This week, prosecutors charged 19 defendants in a scheme that allegedly submitted more than $4 million in false home care bills to Pennsylvania's Medicaid program, and the administration announced that 1,076 hospices have been removed from Medicare in California alone.

In an opinion piece published Wednesday, Vance recounted cases the task force has pursued, including a Minneapolis-area man who needed 24-hour care and received none while a fraudster billed Medicaid for more than $1 million in nonexistent services. "The victim was found dead," Vance wrote. "The fraudster had billed for his care right up until the day before." He also cited an alleged $30 million Medicaid ring in Ohio charged with billing for children's behavioral health services never provided, with proceeds spent on a Maserati, a McLaren, and a dozen other luxury cars.

The White House followed the roundtable by launching Fraud.gov on Thursday, a website cataloging 50 task force actions and its running totals. "Under President Trump and Vice President Vance, the era of unchecked fraud is over," the White House said.

A Partisan Room and a Crowded Calendar

Only Republicans attended Wednesday's roundtable, among them Senators Mike Lee, Eric Schmitt, Ashley Moody, Bernie Moreno, Pete Ricketts, Joni Ernst, and Dave McCormick, and Representatives Brandon Gill, Derrick Van Orden, Scott Perry, Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie, and Dan Meuser. Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley, who presented the 10 proposals alongside Ferguson, told the group that "fraud steals taxpayer dollars, but such corruption steals something even more precious: it steals the blessings and benefits of work."

Vance said he hopes Democrats will join the effort, and Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger urged action on the framework his group released to codify the measures. "Now Congress must finish the job," Pfluger said. "There is no excuse for delay."

Timing presents the immediate obstacle. The House has begun its August recess and the Senate departs at week's end, with both chambers returning in September to a calendar already crowded by government funding deliberations and a budget framework that includes supplemental military spending tied to the Iran war. Whether either vehicle will carry anti-fraud provisions remains unclear. The event closed with a private discussion between administration officials and lawmakers on how to move the priorities forward.

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