Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche just dropped a number so big it doesn’t even sound real anymore. One trillion dollars. That’s how much gets siphoned out of our pockets every year by fraud — Medicaid scams, fake ACA enrollments, bogus disability claims, phantom contractors billing the Pentagon for work that never happened. A trillion. With a T.
But sure, tell us again how the problem with America is that we’re not spending enough money on government programs. What a hoot.
Blanche announced the creation of a brand-new National Fraud Enforcement Division inside the DOJ this week, working hand-in-hand with VP Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. And they’re not just talking about it. They’ve already got 8,000 active fraud cases open right now — and Blanche says that’s just “the tip of the iceberg.”
Think about that. Eight thousand cases. And he’s calling it a warm-up.
Here’s where it gets fun. They’ve already nailed some beauties. Down in South Florida, a crew was running a $160 million scheme through the Affordable Care Act — you know, the program Democrats swore would save us all money. These geniuses were enrolling people who didn’t exist, collecting government subsidies for phantom patients, and pocketing the cash. Obamacare doing exactly what we always said it would do: making connected crooks rich on your dime.
Then out in California — because of course it’s California — prosecutors bagged a $270 million Medicaid prescription drug fraud ring. A quarter of a billion dollars in fake prescriptions. That’s not a scam. That’s an entire criminal economy operating inside a government healthcare program.
And these are just the ones they’ve caught so far.
For years, we watched the previous administration treat fraud like background noise. A few billion here, a few billion there — who’s counting? The attitude in Washington was basically: “Well, every big program has some waste.” Some waste! A trillion dollars isn’t waste. It’s a heist. It’s the biggest ongoing robbery in human history, and for decades, the people running the government were either too lazy, too incompetent, or too complicit to do anything about it.
Now, we’re not naive enough to think you can eliminate all fraud from a government this size. There will always be some bottom-feeder trying to game the system. But there’s a massive difference between “we’re aware of the problem and we’re hunting these people down” and “eh, it’s a big country, stuff happens.”
The Trump administration went with Door Number One.
What makes this different from the usual Washington press conference where some bureaucrat announces a new task force and then nothing happens? Scale. They’re not setting up a study group. They built an entire division. They’ve got prosecutors already working cases across the country. And the 8,000 number tells you they’ve been building these cases quietly for months before going public.
This is what draining the swamp actually looks like. Not a slogan on a hat. Not a speech at a rally. A division of federal prosecutors with subpoena power going after every cockroach who’s been gorging on taxpayer money while the rest of us clip coupons and argue about the price of eggs.
The best part? Every dollar they claw back is a dollar that doesn’t need to come out of our paychecks next year. Every fraudster they lock up is one fewer parasite feeding off the system we’re forced to fund.
Blanche put it perfectly: “For too long, the federal government has been the world’s easiest mark.” Not anymore.
Welcome to the find-out phase.