Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Mehmet Oz speaks during a maternal healthcare with President Donald Trump at the White House on May 11. The Trump administration is withholding Medicaid funding from blue states over fraud accusations.
Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images
In President Donald Trump’s America, there are two camps: One is comprised of the states where his supporters live, the other is the Blue States of America, where Democrats dominate. The former are treated with favor; the latter are the objects of his fury.
Just ask the people of Minnesota.
In addition to putting immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis in February, the Trump administration halted Medicaid funding “to ensure,” as Vice President JD Vance said at the time, “that the state of Minnesota takes its obligation seriously to be good stewards of the American people’s tax money.” Vance went out of his way to explain that the providers of Medicaid services who had already been paid could keep that money, but the Democrat-led state government would not be getting the federal money owed to it to reimburse those payments.
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Now it is California’s turn.
Last week, the Golden State was put in the crosshairs when Vance announced that the federal government would be freezing $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to the state.
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“There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously, but also you have people who have been prescribed medications that they don’t even need,” Vance said at a press conference announcing the Trump administration’s decision, adding, “fraudsters have actually encouraged false prescriptions and false administration of medications.”
In his typically obsequious way, Vance also thanked Trump for taking the problem of fraud seriously and telling his colleagues to “turn off the money” that is “going to fraudsters.” California’s guilt is assumed, not proven, in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion, “sentence first, verdict afterwards.”
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In response, California Attorney General Rob Bonta is looking into the possibility of adding the Medicaid theatrics to a growing list of lawsuits filed against the Trump administration.
“Once again, California appears to be targeted solely for political reasons,” Bonta said in a statement posted to Facebook. “The Trump administration is planning to defer over $1 billion in Medicaid funding for vital programs that help seniors and people with disabilities remain safely in their homes.”
Just like the people of Minnesota, who came together to stand up to the Trump administration’s bullying tactics, California residents must mobilize. They should begin by insisting that politicians on both sides of the aisle push back and try to protect the people who will be hurt by the administration’s actions in this state.
After all, it’s not just Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic allies who will pay the price for this vendetta, but roughly 900,000 senior citizens and disabled people in California. That’s because the cuts will target the in-home care that allows them to live outside of institutions.
“Clearly, the most vulnerable citizens in California need this program,” Doug Moore, executive director of United Domestic Workers, which represents caregivers, told CalMatters. “There are people who are elderly, there are children, there are people with disabilities. Don’t put innocent people in the middle of this.”
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There is nothing subtle about what the Trump administration is doing or about its political valence. In April, when Trump designated Vance as his fraud czar, the president said on social media that Vance would focus “everywhere but primarily in those blue states where crooked Democrat politicians … have had a ‘free for all’ in the unprecedented theft of taxpayer money.” Trump specified California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine and New York, all blue states, and he “alleged fraud was ‘so large that, if successful, we would literally be able to balance our American budget.’”
When he first targeted Minnesota, Trump also took a swipe at California. Without offering any evidence, he asserted on social media that “There is more FRAUD in California than there is in Minnesota, if that is even possible.” Then, unable to resist the temptation to vent his grievances against states that did not support him in 2024, he added, “When you add in Election Fraud, then they are tied for first. Two Crooked Governors, two Crooked States!”
And if that were not enough, we can get a sense of how Trump’s vision of two Americas drives his campaign against fraud by pointing out that Texas, not California or Minnesota, has a larger documented Medicaid fraud problem. One indication is that the federal government recovered more money in criminal and civil proceedings from people who commit fraud in the Lone Star State, a third as much as from Californians in 2025.
In addition, in 2025, California spent three times as much money investigating Medicaid fraud as Texas, more than twice as much as Florida, and seven times as much as Louisiana. But we hear nothing about the Trump administration’s plan to freeze Medicaid payments to those states.
This is not to say that there is no fraud problem in California.
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“There is fraud, of course … when taxpayer money is being spent on services, it entices some bad actors to cheat,” CalMatters columnist Dan Walters rightly observed. “It was happening long before Newsom became governor; it will continue to happen after he leaves. And when it is discovered, people go to jail.”
Those who commit Medicaid fraud deserve to be punished. They are harming the most vulnerable people and deserve special condemnation for doing that. But what the Trump administration is doing to California will do nothing to protect those people. It is just another means of mudslinging against America’s largest blue state and its Democratic governor, who hopes to succeed Trump in the White House.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.