Vice President JD Vance, who chairs President Donald Trump’s Task Force To Eliminate Fraud, said during remarks on Wednesday that the effort has identified $230 billion of suspected fraud so far.
“We’ve been able to stop $56 billion in fraudulent payments that would’ve otherwise gone to fraudsters, rather than to the people who need them,” he said at a task-force roundtable event with lawmakers.
Vance called for reforms to help tackle the fraud.
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He said when the federal government distributes money to states for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the federal government has “no visibility into who is ultimately getting those benefits.”
He said that if California provides “those food stamp benefits to an illegal alien, to a violent criminal, the federal government has no visibility, and sometimes the states themselves have no visibility.”
“So we need to work with Congress, and we need some legislation that would actually force some data sharing between the state governments and the federal governments,” the vice president said.
Vance also floated the idea of tougher sentencing against those convicted of fraud.
White House deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller called for “strict, clear, mandatory minimums” for fraudsters, saying they should be slapped with “a very substantial prison sentence.”
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“That change alone would be watershed for fighting fraud because it would mean that the Department of Justice would be able to, through prosecuting a few hundred or thousand cases in a year, be able to chill the criminal conduct of millions,” Miller said.
