WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump declared Vice President JD Vance his “FRAUD CZAR” on Friday while announcing that most of his work in the role will focus on states with Democrats in charge.
Less than three weeks after tapping the vice president to lead a task force on the issue, Trump wrote in a Truth Social Post that while Vance’s fraud crackdown would touch “EVERYWHERE,” in the U.S., he would primarily hone in on “those Blue States where CROOKED DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS … have had a ‘free for all’ in the unprecedented theft of Taxpayer Money.”
Trump specifically mentioned California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine and New York.
In his post, the president also stated that “Raids have already started” in Los Angeles.
Federal officials Thursday announced the arrest of eight people in the Los Angeles area, including three nurses, a chiropractor and a psychologist, on fraud charges. In a press release, the Justice Department said the arrests are related to a $50 million health care scheme in which the defendants are accused of “running sham hospice care facilities that bilked Medicare by using people without terminal illnesses as beneficiaries.” In the release, the Justice Department specifically noted that the action was carried out “in coordination with the Vice President’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.”
Vance on Thursday responded to a post on the arrests from Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, by writing that federal law enforcement took down “fraudsters who stole $50M+ from Americans by defrauding our healthcare and hospice systems.”
“Our task force isn’t wasting any time cracking down on fraud,” Vance added in his post.
In a direct response to Vance on X, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, suggested the programs involved in this week’s action in Los Angeles are managed by the federal government rather than the state.
“Glad to see the Feds finally taking seriously the fraud in the programs they themselves manage…only 15 months after Trump took office,” Newsom wrote in a post in which he also called the Trump administration “the biggest fraudsters on Earth.”
Newsom also responded to a post from the White House’s rapid response X account promoting that Vance’s task force has suspended 221 hospice and health care providers in California thus far.
“State has been taking action for years, including suspending 280+ licenses & banning new licenses since 2022,” Newsom wrote in response.
Trump, who has sought to make eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” in government social programs a major focus of his second term, launched the federal task force with Vance as its head in mid-March after initially tapping the vice president to lead efforts to look into fraud in Minnesota specifically.
Minnesota, led by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, has been in the spotlight this year amid the administration’s focus on a child nutrition and child care fraud scandal in the state and its immigration crackdown there that included two residents being killed by federal agents.
The post from the president also came one week after Vance held his first meeting of the new anti-fraud task force.