Vance says Biden admin 'turned off' anti-fraud protections, debuts new task force with focus on Somali schemes
Vice President JD Vance on Friday hosted the first anti-fraud task force meeting, where he delivered opening remarks saying the Biden administration "turned off" anti-fraud protections that "existed in our government for a very long time."
Vance was joined by Cabinet and administration officials, including White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. The vice president, Ferguson and Miller delivered brief opening remarks before the meeting was closed to the press to further privately discuss their planned actions to combat fraud nationwide.
"We think fraud has been a problem for a long time," Vance explained. "It became a massive, massive problem under the Biden administration. We're going to do a number of things. First of all, we're going to turn back on those anti-fraud protections so that all of these Cabinet officials are looking at what's going on and focusing on it."
President Donald Trump established the task force through an executive order last week, naming Vance to lead the team that will be focused on identifying and recovering Medicare, Medicaid and other areas of fraudulent usage of federal funds across the U.S.
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Trump indicated that fraud is "usually in blue states," which was reiterated by Miller during Friday’s opening meeting.
"I think that most citizens probably assume that there's some verification process that takes place for the receipt of most federal benefits," Miller said. "The reality is that there is not. This is particularly true in blue states, willfully true in blue states, in which all of these programs are operated entirely on the honor system."
Minnesota has been the leading focus of the Trump administration after a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme involving child daycare and autism centers was exposed, leaving dozens indicted and many convicted.
Many of those implicated in the fraud scheme come from the Somali community in Minnesota.
"I think that the autism scam that we've seen in the Somalian parts of Minnesota really illustrates well what's been going on across whole layers of our government," Vance explained Friday.
"What we've seen is Somali fraudsters at an industrial scale, taking advantage of that program to the tune of millions and millions of dollars," Vance added. "And there are two separate tragedies there. The first tragedy is that you have people who pay into the federal government, who pay into the IRS, who pay their taxes, expecting that those taxes will go to help their fellow citizens."
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Ferguson noted that the misuse of funds goes as far as to create public mistrust in Americans paying taxes that go toward welfare.
"Americans have turned over trillions of their tax dollars to social welfare programs to help their neighbors and fellow citizens through hard times," Ferguson said. "They've done so on the basis of social trust, the belief that their governments, state and federal, will do the right things with their dollars and that their fellow citizens will honestly participate in these programs."
Friday’s task force meeting is the first of what is expected to be many meetings following the Trump administration’s push to root out fraud in the U.S.
Prior to the meeting, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services identified and suspended 70 hospice and home health providers in Los Angeles last month. The hospice and home health providers were flagged as high-risk fraudulent providers.
The 70 hospice and home health providers had their funding paused in just one week after being identified by the task force and CMS, Fox News Digital learned.
"You have families who need these services who are unable to get them because people are getting rich off of fraud schemes," Vance said during Friday’s meeting. "Instead of making sure that autistic children and their families get access to these resources."