Anti-fraud campaign a boost for JD Vance

ANTI-FRAUD CAMPAIGN A BOOST FOR JD VANCE. Has any government enterprise generated more initial excitement, and then more disappointment, than the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in the first days of this Trump administration? Special government employee Elon Musk’s effort to root out government waste and fraud was admirably bold but soon fell victim to one disabling fact: For all their smarts, neither Musk nor the whiz kids he hired knew much about government. They could not deliver anything close to what they promised.So DOGE went away. But there’s no doubt that in creating the group, President Donald Trump tapped into a deep desire among Americans to stop the government from throwing away their money. And that is the feeling behind a new Trump administration effort, Vice President Vance’s White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. An event that took place Monday in Kansas City, Missouri, featuring Vance, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Small Business Administration chief Kelly Loeffler, and others, illustrated the task force’s potential.Everyone knows that enormous fraud took place in the COVID era. To keep workers and businesses afloat during shutdowns, the government shoveled billions of dollars in emergency “loans” to individuals in the form of the Paycheck Protection Program, the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, and others. Of course, much of that money was desperately needed and helped keep workers going through the pandemic. But PPP and EIDL were also big, fat targets for fraud. “During the pandemic, the Small Business Administration delivered $1.2 trillion through COVID EIDL and PPP,” Loeffler said Monday. “Now, at least $200 billion of that was stolen.” That is an enormous amount of money. The figures, by the way, come from a June 2023 report by the SBA’s inspector general.What did the government do to recover the stolen money and punish the thieves? For a while, not much. “The Biden administration looked the other way and attempted to forgive known fraudulent loans,” Loeffler said. “Now, thanks to President Trump and Vice President Vance, those days are over.”The administration’s response runs along two lines. One is to prosecute individual cases of fraud where there is sufficient evidence to support criminal charges. The other is to prevent those suspected of fraud from ever receiving government loans again. That second track covers a lot of people.“We think it makes sense that if you were caught stealing from the American taxpayer, you shouldn’t be able to benefit from these loans any more,” Vance said Monday. “So we’re going to suspend about 870,000 people from being able to access these funds in the future and from being able to borrow money from the American taxpayer. If you screwed the American taxpayer, the federal government is now going to say you’re cut off, no more.”The Justice Department says those 870,000 people were “tied to $39 billion in suspected fraudulent PPP and EIDL activity.” They have not been prosecuted or found guilty, so Vance said there would be an appeals process if anyone feels he or she has been unfairly shut out of government loans. But Vance added: “We know from prior history that not many people are going to appeal that ruling because most of the people who have defrauded the federal government, they know exactly what they’ve been up to.”The group also announced the results of something called Operation No Doze, which the DOJ describes as “a surge of criminal enforcement actions targeting fraud in SBA’s small business Covid-era loan programs.” Federal prosecutors across the country “obtained felony charges against nearly 80 fraud defendants responsible for approximately $100 million in intended loss to the United States,” the DOJ said. In addition, 43 defendants have pleaded guilty to COVID fraud, accounting for another $44 million in losses. And another 40 have already been sentenced on fraud charges, for another $100 million in losses.“Together, this targeted surge resulted in fraud enforcement actions spanning over 160 criminal defendants and involved approximately $245 million in intended loss to taxpayers,” the DOJ said.One might say that, in Washington terms, $245 million is not a lot of money, especially when it is thought that $200 billion was stolen. Indeed, it is not. But the additional $39 billion in suspected fraudulent activity is, even in Washington, a big pot of cash.And besides, COVID fraud was a serious problem, occurring at a time when lawmakers were in such a rush to help people that they knew that parts of the massive money-distributing program they created would be misused — yet they passed it anyway.So undoing some of the damage that fraud did during COVID is a good thing. It is also a good thing politically for Vance. The vice president was handed an impossible task when Trump asked him to take the lead in negotiating an end to the Iran war. It was a terrible assignment — and then Vance did not do it well, looking out of his depth the whole time.But voters care a lot more — a whole lot more — about things like stopping fraud and saving taxpayer dollars in the United States. And beyond COVID, it appears there are massive amounts of health and social-welfare spending fraud to be uncovered and prosecuted in Minnesota, California, and beyond. So now, Vance has associated himself with a good cause and a win-win proposition: The more he succeeds in fighting fraud, the better his case to the voters.