Congress must end fraud now
by Sen. Eric Schmitt · The Washington TimesOPINION:
New York alone is losing nearly $2 million a day to unemployment fraud and improper payments.
Federal prosecutors recently charged a $19 million scheme that allegedly turned food stamp benefits into cash. In one recent sweep across seven states, the Justice Department announced 17 cases involving more than $350 million in intended losses, including cases involving the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, small-business loans, and housing assistance.
That is why I recently joined Vice President J.D. Vance, other senior administration officials and colleagues from Congress at the White House to help chart the next phase of President Trump’s war on fraud.
I came away with a clear mission: Draft and lead a Senate legislative package to codify the administration’s anti-fraud reforms into law permanently. My message to the fraudsters, scammers and grifters who have treated the American taxpayer like an ATM is simple: Your time is up.
Although the fraud rings in places such as Minneapolis, New York and Los Angeles get much of the attention, fraud is also visible in our nation’s capital. Nearly 40% of the District of Columbia’s population — some 250,000 people — is enrolled in Medicaid managed care, funded with billions in taxpayer dollars each year.
Yet over a recent three-year period, the organizations that administered the program referred a grand total of three cases of provider fraud to the District. The D.C. inspector general found weak encounter data, poor overpayment verification and weak fraud-referral controls — and the District rejected 88% of the recommended fixes.
Whistleblowers tell my office that the electronic visit-verification system — meant to confirm home visits with logged hours and GPS data — can be edited after the fact, turning a four-hour visit into a 40-hour one at taxpayer expense.
As chairman of the Senate Anti-Fraud Task Force, I have sent preservation and production demands to the D.C. government, its inspector general and the organizations and vendors involved. We intend to get answers, and if they are not good enough, the Justice Department will hear from us directly.
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This is not an abstract accounting problem. When fraud metastasizes inside a program such as Medicaid, the biggest victims are the Americans who rely on it. Every dollar siphoned off by a fraudulent provider or a fabricated visit is a dollar that does not go toward a wheelchair ramp for a senior, assistance for a family down on their luck or a prescription for someone with no other option.
Fraud does not steal just from the government; it also steals from the most vulnerable people the government is supposed to serve.
The District’s Medicaid program is just one front in this fight. Immigration fraud is rampant, much of it facilitated by attorneys who know how to game the system.
During the Biden administration, T-visa applications — intended for victims of human trafficking — exploded by more than 800%, while approval rates jumped from around 60% to nearly 80%. Those numbers do not reflect a sudden surge in trafficking; they reflect a system that stopped asking hard questions.
The same rot shows up in voting and welfare programs across the country. Fraud does not respect agency lines. It spreads wherever oversight is weakest and must be rooted out wherever it hides.
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That is why I launched the Senate Anti-Fraud Task Force this year with eight colleagues: to examine fraud, waste and abuse across federal programs and to strengthen government accountability. Our job is to use the tools of congressional oversight — document demands, public hearings and referrals to law enforcement — to shine a light on the worst abuses of taxpayer dollars, agency by agency, program by program.
The fraud crackdown that began at the start of this administration continues under Mr. Vance, whose task force has already identified roughly $230 billion in improper payments and waste and halted some $56 billion in fraudulent payments outright. That is real money returned to the people who earned it.
Congress’ job now is to turn those results into permanent law, and I intend to write that legislation and fight hard to pass it. Rooting out fraud is not a side project for me; it is one of the most important things Congress can do this year.
The District’s Medicaid program is a case study in what happens when nobody is watching. It will not be the last one we expose, but it should serve as a warning to every state agency, organization and federal program administrator that the Senate is watching now, and we are not going away.
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• Eric Schmitt represents Missouri in the U.S. Senate, where he serves on the Senate Judiciary, Commerce, Armed Services and Joint Economic committees.