The White House is broadcasting its anti-fraud crusade to voters in the leadup to the midterm elections with a “Fraud Ledger” that claims the Trump administration has uncovered hundreds of billions in misused funds.
The Washington Sun’s review of the ledger found that it includes misleading and unsubstantiated claims, and the White House has not provided details about how the administration crunched its fraud numbers. When asked by The Sun, a senior White House official said that the “methodology was produced by fraud experts from within the Task Force and communicated to agencies.”
The absence of details, and the apparent inconsistencies in the numbers, have oversight experts both inside and outside the government questioning the veracity of the White House’s work.
“The fraud ledger appears to be primarily a piece of propaganda that provides very little, if any, meaningful information,” said Linda Miller, president of the government-integrity-focused Program Integrity Alliance who worked at the Government Accountability Office for a decade.
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“No idea how this can be legitimate,” a current senior official with an Office of Inspector General said of the White House’s claim that it has uncovered $250 billion in misused federal funds.
“If they’re not giving their methodology, these are kind of useless numbers,” the official said. “How is this at all serious?”
The Trump administration has made the anti-fraud task force, created in March and led by Vice President JD Vance, a central part of its political messaging. The administration has pointed to fraud as it’s held up billions in Medicaid funding in Minnesota and California — a move that has put California’s at-home care program at risk for cuts, as The Sun has reported previously.
The White House’s ledger, published in August, includes an agency-by-agency list of fraud detected, prevented and clawed back. It does not offer details about how agencies calculated those numbers.
It’s indisputable that some amount of fraud exists in government programs, especially pandemic-era policies that federal agencies rushed to get off the ground to respond to the crisis. But the numbers on the ledger and the administration’s rhetoric around its fraud work overstate what the task force has accomplished.
Vance cited one data point from the website last week at the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention, telling the crowd that “we found $250 billion of fraud just since the president made me the fraud czar.”
The ledger says the administration uncovered $245.7 billion in fraud — but it cites January 2025 as the start date, well before Vance was tapped to lead the work in April of this year. The White House did not clarify which time frame is correct.
Asked about how the White House calculated the number being touted by Vance, the senior White House official told The Sun that “fraud uncovered values are reported from the agencies and are data-driven calculations of misspent funds.” Typically, oversight officials have to investigate anomalies flagged during data analyses to weed out false positives. The White House did not clarify if and how agencies are doing so.
The senior White House official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, pointed to the Small Business Administration’s identification of $22.2 billion in suspected fraudulent loans as an example of fraud the Trump administration has uncovered.
But those loans were tagged as potentially fraudulent during the Biden administration, the SBA itself said in April when it announced it was referring them to the Treasury Department to recoup, an action also listed on the White House website.
The website says the SBA has recovered a total of $22.6 billion.
If the $22.2 billion referral to Treasury is included there, “then nearly all of the headline SBA enforcement number represents debt sent for collection rather than money already recovered,” Miller wrote in a recent blog post detailing her efforts to verify the SBA’s claims on the White House website.
The SBA didn’t respond to request for comment.
The ledger also lists the capture of four fugitives as a “top ten” anti-fraud action by the Trump administration in a blurb touting $5.4 billion in “intended loss charged.” Three were charged before the current administration took office, in 2019 and 2024.
The White House did not clarify if those schemes were included in the $5.4 billion in intended loss charged or why they are included on a page of fraud “identified” since January 2025.
The White House says it is saving $62 million annually in its fight against fraud by decertifying and withholding funding from the main law enforcement entities tasked with rooting out bad actors in Medicaid in Hawaii and New York.
The Trump administration cited poor performance for the Medicaid fraud control unit in Hawaii when it denied its recertification request this summer. It pointed to New York’s strategy to focus on high-impact, complex cases as rational for taking the funding of that office, saying the state was neglecting the other work assigned to the unit, such as patient abuse.
The New York office has recovered over $627 million through fraud investigations since 2019, New York Attorney General Letitia James said at the time, calling the move a “political distraction” that only benefits bad actors.
“I don’t even know what to say,” said Andy Schneider, who was a senior advisor at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the Obama administration, where he focused on Medicaid program integrity.
“It’s illogical,” Schneider, who is now a research professor at Georgetown University, said of defunding law enforcement units.
Bob Westbrooks, who worked for decades in various inspector general offices until 2022, cautioned that “any savings you might enjoy from not spending federal funds on enforcement are going to be offset by losses” from fraudsters.
The same day the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general decertified Hawaii’s unit, the state announced it had tapped a lawyer who defended Trump during 2020 impeachment hearings, Michael Purpura, to lead a new strike force focused on Medicaid fraud.
The White House claims that the Trump administration has stopped $46.2 billion in fraud annually through administrative actions like rule changes. Asked for details about the methodology behind that claim, the White House official told The Sun that its list of “fraud stopped” is “spending averted due to anti-fraud actions.”
The White House’s website includes a “fraud tracker” map for individuals to look up a “map of enforcement actions, suspensions, and recoveries by state and locality,” though the interactive feature only lists agencies in Washington, D.C.
Putting a number on how much fraud has been thwarted by the government is difficult to do accurately, said Mark Greenblatt, a former inspector general at the Interior Department.
“The IG community struggled for years to figure out a metric for determining or quantifying the preventative value of our work,” he told The Sun. “We could never come up with a fair assessment that withstood scrutiny.”
Greenblatt is one of nearly 20 inspectors general Trump has fired since returning to the White House last year and transforming the system the government already had in place to catch waste, fraud and abuse, as The Sun has previously reported.
Experts say the White House’s political approach to the problem risks undermining the administration’s anti-fraud work and eroding the public’s trust.
“Increasing public awareness of fraud and publicizing bona fide enforcement results is in all of our best interests,” Westbrooks said. “These efforts are undermined when the data cannot be verified and enforcement is viewed as selective or politically motivated.”
The current senior OIG official said agency watchdogs should actually consider examining the Trump administration’s claims about fraud.
“Is Congress being bamboozled?” they asked. “Is the public being bamboozled?”
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