Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 4.0
JD Vance’s first claim to national attention was when he admitted to making up lies about pet-eating Haitian migrants. Vance justified the lie by saying that he was prepared to lie if that was needed to push Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. With his anti-fraud task force, Vance is continuing his practice of pushing racist lies.
To be clear, there is fraud in government social programs and some of it is done by immigrants from developing countries. But there is no plausible story where this fraud accounts for a large share of the budget, or that immigrants are especially likely to be fraudsters. And there is no remotely plausible story where, as Trump henchman Steven Miller claimed, that eliminating fraud could balance the budget. It is also absurd to imagine that the Biden administration was not pursuing fraud.
In fact, the vast majority of the fraud is not done by the beneficiaries of these programs, but by businesses that profit from them. For example, the Government Accountability Office estimates that in 2023, there was over $100 billion worth of improper payments in the Medicare and Medicaid programs, roughly 7% of total spending.
Most of this was not fraud. It was often overpayments for procedures, or in some cases, simply a failure to properly document a payment request. In any case, this was money being paid to providers, hospitals, nursing homes, and doctors’ offices, not undocumented immigrants from Latin America or Africa.
It doesn’t seem like JD Vance has much interest in going after these people. In fact, Donald Trump has been getting a lot of money from issuing pardons to these fraudsters.
It’s also again worth pointing out that eliminating fraud will not come close to balancing the budget. The government was looking at a deficit of almost $1.9 trillion this year on $7.4 trillion in total spending, and that was before Trump started his war with Iran.
A more vigilant crackdown on fraud would be lucky to get into double-digit billions, reducing the size of the deficit by maybe 1%, and that would be high-end. For folks with bad memories, it was just a year and a half ago that Trump enlisted Elon Musk to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse. He mostly came up empty-handed, although he did fire a number of people at government agencies, who they then had to hire back. He also dismantled USAID, contributing to tens of thousands of deaths due to AIDS, and also leaving the world unprepared to deal with the Ebola outbreak.
The government also has inspector generals (IG) attached to most departments and agencies. Their job is to ferret out fraud and waste. One of Trump’s first acts was to fire most of these IGs, presumably because he didn’t want people calling attention to his own fraud, waste, and abuse.
If Vance seriously wanted to crack down on fraud and reduce the deficit, he could be working with the I.R.S. to collect some of the $600 billion in taxes that go unpaid each year. But this would mean disproportionately going after white people who are Trump’s campaign contributors, not the look Trump wants for the fall elections. Also, Musk disproportionately went after workers at the I.R.S., leaving it less able to crack down on tax cheats.
It should be apparent to all but the hopelessly naïve that the point of Vance’s fraud task force to stir up racist resentment for the fall election. With his war with Iran going badly, his tariffs an economic disaster, and inflation jumping to rates not seen since the worst of the pandemic, Trump desperately needs a distraction.
Racism has been Trump’s strong suit since his earliest political forays, such as calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, Black teenagers who were charged and did prison time for a brutal rape. They were later exonerated. More recently, we were treated to his nuttiness on President Obama’s birth certificate. Trump may not be very good at running a business or the country, but he is a superstar when it comes to exploiting racism, and JD Vance is a willing and able sidekick.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
