White House claim of finding $250 billion in fraud uses questionable numbers

WASHINGTON — Since the White House formed a task force in March intended to combat fraud, top administration officials have repeatedly heralded its work, pointing to huge amounts of recovered payments and graft stopped in its tracks.

“We found $250 billion of fraud just since the president made me the fraud czar,” Vice President JD Vance, who leads the task force, said in a speech this month at the Republican midterm convention.

Yet some of the numbers Vance and his task force have promoted are overstated or lack specificity, and rely on temporary pauses in funding as well as cases and actions that long predated President Donald Trump’s second term, according to a New York Times analysis of documents released by the administration. The task force also appears to be relying on claims of fraud that could not be verified or leaning on allegations of fraud that are being prematurely included.

In August, the White House published a so-called fraud ledger chronicling its work. It singled out three categories of fraud identified and eliminated since January 2025 — not, as Vance said, since this March, when the task force was established. As of Wednesday afternoon, the task force asserted it had found, or “uncovered,” $245.7 billion in fraud through data analysis, “stopped” $62.9 billion annually through actions like suspending providers and enacting rule changes, and “enforced” $59.1 billion through indictments, settlements, and financial fines.

It is difficult to verify those figures because there is no publicly available breakdown of the total. A senior White House official said the task force chose not to itemize fraud schemes and actions to avoid compromising current law enforcement investigations.

The task force ledger’s chronology and a White House news release from August offer some details about $47 billion of the more than $300 billion the task force asserts it has identified or eliminated. But even that information falls short, leaving unclear how that amount is spread across the three categories.

Undoubtedly, the federal government loses vast amounts of money to fraud: $233 billion to $521 billion annually, equal to about 3% to 7% of federal spending, according to one estimate from the Government Accountability Office, an independent, nonpartisan agency that has scrutinized how the government spends taxpayer funds for more than a century.

Vance and his task force have ferreted out real cases of fraud, and their efforts to draw attention to the problem and recover taxpayer funds are laudable, experts said. But the task force’s unverifiable claims may undermine efforts at transparency and obscure the actual scale of the work it is performing.

“There’s absolutely no question it’s a ramp-up of effort, and there’s absolutely no question that there’s an opportunity to use technology, especially artificial intelligence, in ways that didn’t exist in the past,” said David Walker, who led the Government Accountability Office as the comptroller general in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

But, he said, the figures the task force has cited are “assertions that have not been validated by independent parties.”

Over the years, various inspectors general have struggled to quantify their anti-fraud work in broad strokes, as the task force has done, given the vast differences in how different agencies investigate cases and measure impact, said Mark Greenblatt, a former inspector general for the Interior Department who once led the council of inspectors general.

It is entirely possible that the task force’s figures are accurate, he added.

But given that Trump fired more than a dozen independent inspectors general (including Greenblatt) at the beginning of his second term and installed political allies in their place, “There’s no one that can look at those numbers in detail and share with the American people whether they are valid, transparent and that the methodology is sound,” he said.

The task force’s description of its largest “fraud actions” offers few details about how it arrived at the estimates, making it impossible to verify the reliability of those figures.

About half of what the task force casts as the $245.7 billion in “fraud uncovered” on its ledger can be attributed to the Small Business Administration. But neither the ledger nor the August news release elaborates on what that figure refers to.

When asked, a spokesperson for the agency referred to a 2023 estimate, calculated by its inspector general, of $200 billion in pandemic-era fraud. She said the agency had identified about $122 billion of that figure as potentially fraudulent but did not provide further details.

After repeated requests by the Times for additional documentation, the agency announced Wednesday that it had provided the IRS with tax information associated with pandemic-era loans earlier this year, and that the IRS had identified discrepancies associated with about $100 billion in loans. The announcement did not detail what the discrepancies or suspected tax violations may entail, but said that the tax agency was examining cases.

What the administration has described as other instances of anti-fraud victories appear to refer twice to the same actions or cases. The senior White House official denied that the task force double-counted any figures, saying that it included developments merely as informational updates. But whether the total figures include double-counting — as a ledger of government funding cuts maintained by the Department of Government Efficiency did — cannot be verified given that there is no breakdown.

The White House news release includes as “key actions and victories” the June captures of two fugitives accused of orchestrating Medicare fraud schemes that totaled $4.9 billion. But another key action encompasses charges against 455 defendants — including those two fugitives — accused of orchestrating healthcare fraud schemes totaling more than $6.5 billion.

Another key action details the April suspension of payments to 447 hospice providers in Los Angeles “with estimated fraud exceeding $600 million.” But a later action lists separately the May suspension of some 800 hospices, including the initial 447 providers. A news release from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services notes that it suspended $70 million in Medicare payments to 800 hospices in Los Angeles that billed Medicare $1.4 billion last year.

Fraud cases often span years as investigators gather evidence, prosecutors bring charges, juries deliver convictions, and judges issue sentences across different administrations. Many figures the task force has reported take credit for work conducted under previous administrations and local governments.

“They deserve credit for taking them through the finish line,” Greenblatt said. “I don’t want to denigrate it, but to make it sound like all of the effort, you know, occurred during the lifespan of the task force is a sleight of hand, in my view.”

The White House declared that the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, which was established in April, “took enforcement action in schemes totaling over $340 million in its first week alone.”

But according to the department’s own announcement, the bulk of that amount — nearly $280 million — represented people sentenced in fraud cases uncovered and tried months before the establishment of the fraud task force or even the second Trump administration itself.

For example, the biggest single action cited was the sentencing of a Minneapolis man for his role in a $250 million scheme by a local nonprofit during the pandemic to siphon off food assistance funding. That scheme was hardly unknown: The Times covered the department’s investigation in March 2022 and the man was charged in September 2022, under the Biden administration.

Several of the largest numbers the task force reported in its ledger describe actions that have not borne tangible results, but are merely the first steps in building cases or seeking repayment. Other examples refer to so far temporary withholding of federal funding.

More than a third of the total amount of “fraud enforced” can be attributed to $22.6 billion from the Small Business Administration, which appears to figure prominently in two of the three categories in the ledger. The vast majority of that figure refers to the agency’s announcement in April that it would send 562,000 delinquent pandemic-era loans for debt collection. The loans were previously identified by the Biden administration as potentially fraudulent and totaled $22.2 billion.

Just how much of that amount has been recovered is not known. In March 2024, under the Biden administration, the Small Business Administration referred about $20 billion in pandemic-era loans for debt collection, according to news reports and agency data. It recovered just over $1 billion in the 2024 fiscal year.

Topping the White House website’s list of “highest-impact anti-fraud actions” is the administration’s assertion of having recouped “$2.5 billion in Medicaid fraud deferrals,” referring to pauses in federal reimbursements to California and Minnesota.

But it is possible that the funds, or a portion of them, will be released in the future. The Department of Health and Human Services’ website notes that these are “not permanent funding cuts.” Moreover, top department officials said at a news conference that “federal funds move forward” once the states provide adequate documentation of eligibility.

When Minnesota sued the federal government for withholding funds, a judge declined to issue a preliminary injunction, ruling that the deferral was “not final,” and assumed “possible future harm.”

Some have also disputed the notion that a broad freeze on payments can reasonably be counted as fraud that has been prevented. Two officials who managed the Medicaid programs in North Carolina and Indiana recently wrote that withholding funding came with plenty of caveats.

It “does not identify a fraudulent provider,” they said. “It does not prove a false claim. It does not strengthen service documentation, improve provider screening, modernize data systems to better detect fraud, or help investigators build cases. It simply disrupts the flow of dollars that pay for healthcare and that pay to prevent fraud.”

Greenblatt said the deferral most likely did stop some fraud — “probably an uncomfortably high amount of fraud” — but assuming all $2.5 billion is fraudulent overstates the amount of fraud prevention.

Greenblatt added the potential discrepancy captured his prevailing concern over the task force’s accounting: “Are these figures grounded in any sort of standards?”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.