The Trump administration is estimating that it has identified $230 billion in fraud and stopped $56 billion in fraudulent payments since Vice President JD Vance and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson started co-chairing their anti-fraud task force.
“Andrew and I had a meeting in my office last week, and he said, ‘Do you want to estimate it conservatively or do you want to estimate it aggressively?’” Vance told reporters in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Wednesday. “I said, ‘Well, I kind of want to estimate it aggressively, but then all you people will criticize us, so let’s estimate it conservatively, so that we can give the American people the most rock-solid explanation of how this task force is working to protect their money.’”
Vance said that while the fraud that was rooted out was important, Congress also needed to make changes to the law to prevent future misconduct from restarting as soon as a Democratic administration came into office.
“This effort will fundamentally always have a limitation unless our colleagues in the House and the Senate are working with us,” he said. “We don’t want the next administration, whoever you know, God forbid, you’re going to have President el Sayed in three years. We don’t want him to undo all the incredible work that we’ve been doing when we’ve been taking out the fraudsters and saving the American people money.”
Vance was alluding to Abdul el Sayed, who, moments before the vice president commenced the roundtable in the Indian Treaty Room, won his Democratic primary against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) to compete for Michigan’s battleground Senate seat against former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI).
Vance also underscored the importance for states to share data with the federal government so the administration can identify further fraud, in addition to tougher penalties for those convicted of fraud, though he did not answer reporter questions ranging from Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) to the war in Iran.
White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, who attended the roundtable, similarly amplified Vance’s call for tougher penalties.
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“You can steal hundreds of thousands and all these millions of dollars and not do any significant jail time,” he said. “There needs to be strict, clear, mandatory minimums.”
President Donald Trump announced during his State of the Union in February that Vance would be heading his anti-fraud task force.