Restoration Responds: Trump Admin Tackles Rampant Fraud Across Programs
Every American should be outraged about how much of their money is stolen from them for shady purposes.
Every day, it seems, numerous stories emerge that reveal the amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in federal social programs. Benefits that should go to worthy recipients instead get siphoned off for political cronies and criminal organizations. Bureaucracies grow as the benefit systems get less effective. The Trump administration has begun the arduous process of cleaning it all up.
Not that you'll hear about it in the liberal media.
The professional Left will predictably accuse Republicans of stealing benefits from the marginalized and disadvantaged, impugning them with accusations of hatred. But what's really going on is a long overdue cleanup of corrupted and abused benefit programs that we as a society agreed to set up to support the most vulnerable of our fellow citizens.
That's why President Trump signed an executive order in March 2026 to form a Task Force to Eliminate Fraud.
The results have been stunning. As of mid-September, the Task Force has uncovered at least $245 billion in fraud. That's just what they've found this year. And that doesn't include the $215 billion in annual inefficiencies and waste eliminated in 2025 under the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Estimates of fraudulent payments from federal programs run at least double that amount. The administration has dealt with it by ending fraudulent spending and prosecuting individuals involved in schemes to defraud the government.
At a roundtable event in May, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said, "The amount that has been fleeced from us is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. I believe, based on what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard, is that we could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the Treasury went to individuals who were properly, lawfully, correctly eligible to receive them."
That seems impossible, until one examines the true scope of waste, fraud, and abuse in federal social spending.
September's Laundry List of Fraud Announcements
- September 14—870,000 SBA borrowers suspended over $39 billion in suspected COVID-era fraud.
- September 16— Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced approximately $75 million laundered through homeless services, mostly in California. Nonprofit organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) spent taxpayer dollars on vacations, private jets, luxury automobiles, and other lavish personal expenses. HUD also uncovered non-existent identities registered as "homeless people" receiving aid.
- September 18—USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins posted on X that they had interrupted significant fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP):
Since the start of the Trump Administration, we have already:
Stopped more than $5.8 BILLION in fraud
Suspended or disqualified nearly 6,000 retailers
Disabled or blocked more than 2,000 illegal point-of-sale devices
- Sec. Rollins also revealed that USDA had removed nearly 6 million ineligible people from SNAP, reducing enrollment from 43-44 million to 35-36 million.
- September 22—Vice President JD Vance, who chairs the Task Force, announced $2.2 billion in Obamacare fraud recovered by removing ineligible recipients.
- Throughout September—FBI Director Kash Patel announces several arrests from the Most Wanted Fraudsters list. Total combined losses could top $2 billion, with arrests happening across the globe.
Why It Matters
- Every dollar stolen through fraud or awarded in a crony kickback scheme should have gone to a qualified American citizen who needed that money. Every dollar wasted originated through tax dollars paid in good faith by American citizens.
- Americans must be able to trust their government to be good stewards of their tax dollars. A loss of faith in the institutions will decay social cohesion.
- Democrats in Congress refuse to allow proper oversight of these programs, solely for political reasons. They would rather accuse Republicans of hatred towards the needy (while allowing their cronies to cash in) than to clean up the problems they caused by expanding spending in the first place.
- Restoration News' Senior Fellow Walter Curt has uncovered several stories of fraudulent payments in the Medicaid system, including benefits paid out to illegal aliens, for services billed by non-existent entities. Notably, a disproportionate number of those stories occurred in blue states. It is imperative that investigators continue to shine a light on the massive amount of fraud happening right in front of us.
The Bottom Line
The rapid-fire announcements in September 2026 represent only snapshots of the totality of fraud perpetrated by bad actors in federal social programs. Americans will maintain faith in their government institutions if they believe someone will investigate, prosecute, and end the waste. If we lose faith in that process, we lose faith in the very concept of self-governance.
- Trump Fraud Task Force's 10-Point Plan to Stop Crooks Pilfering Your Services—Why It Matters
- Unbridled Spending: Billions for Medicaid Expansion Congress Never Approved
- The New Michigan Medicaid Fraud Machine
- Follow the Fraud: These States Are Still Stonewalling SNAP Transparency
- Multi-Billion-Dollar DOJ Medical Fraud Takedown Underscores How Elections Have Consequences
