“This is the kind of corruption that shreds the fabric of a nation, and we are working on it like you wouldn’t believe,” Trump said before declaring that Vice President JD Vance would lead a “war on fraud” — an operation the president promised would recoup so much money “we will actually have a balanced budget overnight.”
At a press conference a few days later, Vance said the administration would pause $250 million in Medicaid funding to Minnesota — another state Trump cited in the speech — in response to widespread welfare fraud found there. Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, then sued the federal government to release the withheld funds.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, who was at the press conference with Vance, vowed that other states would soon face similar sanctions.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell says she’s prepared.
“If the President tries to illegally withhold Medicaid or any other federal funding from Massachusetts based on this fabricated crisis, we’ll take him to court as we’ve done nearly 50 times already,” she said in a statement. “Trump doesn’t get to hold Massachusetts families hostage to advance his own political agenda. Congress appropriates funding, not the President. If he breaks the law, we’ll be ready.”
Though Trump’s mention of Massachusetts at the State of the Union upped the ante, the federal government has been homing in on fraud in the Commonwealth for months.
The US attorney for Massachusetts, Leah B. Foley, has held two press conferences in recent months to announce federal charges against people accused of siphoning millions of dollars from the government.
The first case, announced in December, involved nearly $7 million allegedly stolen from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, by two Mattapan store owners. Then, in February, Foley said more alleged fraudsters had been charged, this time in a case involving both SNAP and pandemic relief benefits in Massachusetts and Rhode Island totaling about $1 million. (Just $115,000 of the SNAP fraud was perpetrated in Massachusetts.)
“We will be having more charges that are going to be brought in the next couple of weeks,” Foley, who has held the job since the start of Trump’s second term, told the Globe. “Through these new charges, we’re starting to get a sense of how prevalent [the fraud] is. We’re hoping it’s not a Minnesota type of problem. But so far, every time we go looking, we find it.”
Foley and Governor Maura Healey have clashed in recent months about whether the state or federal government deserves credit for discovering and reporting these fraud cases.
Karissa Hand, a spokesperson for Healey, said in a statement that the governor “is focused on punishing fraud and protecting tax dollars. Less than 1 percent of SNAP caseload has been found to have committed fraud, and our team is working with our state and federal partners to get that number even lower.”
With benefit theft on the rise nationally since the pandemic, the state Department of Transitional Assistance — which administers SNAP in Massachusetts — has strengthened its detection and identification of these schemes, Cecille Avila, a DTA spokesperson, said. That includes a dedicated team within DTA that uses data analytics to detect fraud, she added.
State officials are fighting a request by the Trump administration to access personal information, like Social Security numbers, of Massachusetts SNAP recipients. The US Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, said it’s seeking the information to assist fraud investigators. Healey has said the state opposes the effort because she has received no assurances the information won’t be used to aid Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Hand pushed back against the White House’s justification for its fraud focus, arguing that “what President Trump is doing is misleading people about SNAP to distract from how his disastrous agenda is making life harder and more expensive for everyone.”
Regardless, Foley is doubling down on fraud enforcement. She recently announced her office is hiring a fraud coordinator to lead a team of prosecutors targeting scams.
That echoes a move the Trump administration has made at the national level, nominating federal prosecutor Colin McDonald to serve as the head of a new Department of Justice division for fraud enforcement. Foley, who has worked with McDonald in the past, said “he’s absolutely the right person” for the job.
When Vance first announced the new position in January, he said the so-called fraud czar would report directly to the White House and focus on prosecuting fraud in Democrat-led states, both unprecedented directives that raised concerns over politicization at the DOJ.
However, at McDonald’s nomination hearing last month, he vowed to “work with everyone … regardless of political party” if confirmed. McDonald also claimed he would report directly to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and Attorney General Pam Bondi, not to the White House, and that his focus would be on combating fraud in taxpayer-funded programs like SNAP and Medicaid across the country.
Many Democratic senators present at McDonald’s hearing were skeptical of those assertions. They pointed to McDonald’s role in the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group as evidence of his willingness to politicize law enforcement. The group was formed to study alleged instances of DOJ weaponization during the Biden administration, but Democrats say it’s nothing more than a staging ground for retribution against Trump’s political foes.
“I think all of us are absolutely outraged by fraud. We want to get to the bottom of it and more power to you,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, a Democrat, said to McDonald at the hearing. “One of the concerns that I have is the erosion of the sense of impartiality in the Justice Department.”
Welch went on to say, “I am appalled by the Weaponization Working Group because everything that I hear from the president is that the people that he disagrees with become his political enemies, and then he uses the Justice Department to go after them. There is absolutely no place in our justice system for the Department of Justice to be doing that. Would you agree?”
“Senator, I think you may have misunderstand the work of the Weaponization Working Group. The Weaponization Working Group has been looking at instances of weaponization of the government during the Biden administration,” McDonald replied.
If there are more fraud-related funding freezes to come, expect lawsuits.
The Trump administration in January paused $10 billion in health funding meant for five blue states without the consent of Congress, claiming fraud as the impetus. The states, which included Minnesota, sued and a judge blocked the action while the case is litigated further. Even so, Vance, at the late February press conference, said he felt “quite confident we have the legal authority to do this.”
He also asserted that the fraud crackdown is apolitical. “I’m not worried about the politics,” Vance said, “I’m worried about the justice of it all.”
Julian E.J. Sorapuru can be reached at julian.sorapuru@globe.com. Follow him on X @JulianSorapuru.
