Trump administration officials announced a sprawling probe into benefits fraud across California on Friday, citing what they called a massive, coordinated effort by “foreign actors” to fleece government healthcare to the tune of billions of dollars.
The crackdown appeared to center on bogus hospice providers first exposed by The Times in 2020 and later investigated by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta.
“Eighteen percent of the whole country’s home healthcare billing is coming out of Los Angeles County — how is that possible?” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “It’s about $3.5 billion just in L.A. County for hospice and home healthcare.”
The move comes just days after Washington froze $10 billion in federal funding for child care in California, New York, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota over “serious concerns about widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars.”
“What’s happening in Minnesota pales in comparison to the level of fraud that we believe is occurring in California,” said Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, referring to the benefits scandal that erupted out of that state’s Somali community late last year.
In a lawsuit filed Friday, the states’ attorneys general called the child-care fund freeze nakedly political, saying the administration has weaponized allegations of fraud to blame immigrants for holes in the safety net and tar political rivals as corrupt.
At the briefing Friday, Oz and Essayli told reporters “foreign influences” were draining government healthcare programs, making care inaccessible to Americans while California leaders turned a blind eye.
“These are Russian, Armenian gangs, mafia that are leading a lot of these efforts,” Oz said. “This president will not tolerate having Americans defrauded by foreign influences.”
Essayli laid the blame on Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“He has reigned over more fraud than I think we’ve ever seen in American history,” Essayli said. “Just look at the amount of fraud that’s been perpetrated in the kingdom of California. He is the fraud king.”
The governor hit back at the Trump administration’s rhetoric about lawlessness in his State of the State speech Thursday, with Newsom saying the country faces “an assault on our values unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime,” and citing statistics that show violent crime is at historic lows.