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Top White House aide Stephen Miller joined Vice President JD Vance to launch the White House anti-fraud task force Friday, pledging to “demolish” the kind of corruption that unfairly burdens taxpayers and gives a free ride to bad actors.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump launched the task force via executive order, saying the administration will “use all available resources and authorities to fight fraud, close loopholes, enforce eligibility rules, and protect benefits for eligible Americans, while ensuring States administering Federal benefits programs do the same.”
Vance serves as its chairman and kicked off the White House event Friday, while FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson serves as vice chair.
Miller said the panel could not come at a better time, with Medicaid and other fraud rings making national headlines in Minnesota and beyond.
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“I think what’s important for Americans to understand about how pervasive and widespread the fraud is, [and] that all of our systems were set up and established for a high-trust society. I think that most citizens probably assume that there’s some verification process that takes place for the receipt of most federal benefits. The reality is, is that there is not,” Miller said.
The outspoken aide added that the high-trust framework in place for decades is woefully inadequate for Democrat-run states, where verification processes are “willfully” lacking and often run on the honor system.
“Imagine in a community, a working-class community in the Twin Cities, say a native Minnesotan who works as a lineman or works as a construction worker; works in any job that requires hard work, dedication, focus; who’s worried about his ability to support for or provide his family,” Miller said.
“And then imagine that he has a neighbor who’s a Somali refugee who arrived two years ago and has a Mercedes, and no financial stress and no worries at all in the entire world that never seems to ever go to work at all because he just went to an office in the state, lied on a piece of paper and got unlimited free money forever for life.”
“That situation repeats itself innumerable times across the country,” he said, “and is exactly what the task force aims to take on.”
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“That is the corruption that this task force under the leadership of the vice president is going to demolish.”
Vance agreed with Miller in earlier comments, saying that Somali-born fraudsters have operated at “an industrial scale” to steal Americans’ tax dollars.
“We think fraud has been a problem for a long time,” he said. “We’re going to do a number of things. First of all, we’re going to turn back on those anti-fraud protections so that all of these cabinet officials are looking at what’s going on and focusing on it.”
He said the key to the task force will be communications between cabinet offices, so that, in his example, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins can communicate on shared concerns with a colleague like HUD Secretary Scott Turner.
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“This is not just theft of the American people’s money. This is also theft of critical services that the American people rely on,” Vance said.
“Some of you have heard me tell the story before, but I think that the autism scam that we’ve seen in the Somalian parts of Minnesota really illustrates well what’s been going on across whole layers of our government.”
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