The Republican "Fraud" Lie

Musk, Trump, and the GOP aren't even looking for fraud. They just want to destroy agencies and slash benefits.

Not fraud.

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Donald Trump has been asked repeatedly whether he plans to cut funding from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, he usually gives the same answer, as he did at a photo-op with his cabinet on Wednesday: “We aren’t going to touch it. Now, we are going to look for fraud.”

That has become the all-purpose justification for the devastating cuts to programs that have already occurred, and the ones Republicans will build their upcoming federal budget around. What they won’t tell you is that we already investigate fraud in these programs. So what are Trump, Elon Musk, and congressional Republicans going to do in their heroic fraud eradication program that isn’t already being done ?

The answer is: nothing. But they are going to say they’re not only looking, but finding fraud. It is a lie. And it is going to be used in particular against Medicaid, which they are targeting for enormous cutbacks.

“Waste, fraud, and abuse,” the old familiar tune

The term “waste, fraud, and abuse” was popularized four decades ago by Ronald Reagan, who told the public again and again that the federal government was absolutely riddled with this trio of horrors. Then as now, the cure for the supposed illness was not a careful and systematic program of identifying and rectifying inefficiencies and malfeasance, but slashing away at programs Republicans never liked in the first place.

As they toss cluster bombs into every corner of the federal government, Musk, Trump, and Republicans in Congress justify their assault by claiming they are eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and especially “fraud.” It is vital to understand two things:

1. Musk has been unable to find any actual fraud, not because there is no fraud but because his methods are suited only for wide-scale destruction.

2. Whenever any of these people utter the word “fraud,” they are lying.

Republicans are preparing a budget bill in which safety net programs — especially SNAP (what we used to call food stamps) and Medicaid, which now serves 72 million Americans (plus another 7 million kids in its subsidiary program CHIP) — will be slashed mercilessly in order to pay for trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations. Those cuts will be justified by claiming that the programs are beset by “fraud,” as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson explains:

“Medicaid is hugely problematic because it has a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse,” Johnson says, claiming that there is “$50 billion a year in fraud alone in Medicaid.” And perhaps there is $50 billion in Medicaid fraud. But how will the Republican budget go about locating that fraud? Johnson doesn’t say. The reason is that while health insurance fraud is common in both private and public programs, finding it is difficult and time-consuming, and usually has to be done on a case-by-case basis.

What does that kind of fraud consist of? It usually involves health care providers submitting fraudulent claims — procedures that never took place, “upcoding” of patient conditions, and so on. But it’s not as though the claims are submitted with a “This Is Fraud” code, and you could just go through Medicaid’s payments, sort out all the fraud, and refuse to reimburse those providers. Yet if you listened to Elon Musk, you’d think that’s how it works.

To get a sense of what’s involved in finding this kind of fraud, consider the case of Columbia/HCA. Under its CEO Rick Scott — yes, the future Florida governor and senator — it committed an absolutely massive fraud on Medicare and Medicaid, billing for unnecessary procedures, submitting false diagnosis codes, etc.; Scott skedaddled before the heat came down, but the company eventually had to pay $1.7 billion in fines.

But here’s the thing: The investigation took five years and a significant expenditure of Justice Department resources. It wasn’t a matter of having some 22-year-old open a spreadsheet and say “Lookie here, fraud! Got ‘em!” Because of how health insurance works, insurance fraud is relatively easy to commit and difficult to find, even for experienced investigators. Musk’s crew is not going to find it, nor are Republicans in Congress going to figure out a way to make it disappear.

What they can do, however, is just cut the program, then claim they’re doing so to “root out the fraud.”

When very smart idiots read spreadsheets they don’t understand

DOGE and Congressional Republicans are going about this joint project in different ways, but with the same end in mind. Congress is planning across-the-board cuts at its disfavored programs; for instance, Medicaid is in line for a cut of up to $880 billion over ten years (though we don’t yet know what the precise number will be). DOGE, on the other hand, is going through agency budgets line-by-line and cancelling contracts and grants. But while it might seem like the latter approach is more likely to identify actual waste or fraud, in fact nothing of the sort is happening.

Instead, Musk’s team of 20-something dudebros is merely striking through anything that looks to them like it might be fishy or unnecessary. Since like their leader they are a bunch of ignoramuses who have zero understanding or experience in government, they have been chasing after phantoms but finding no real fraud.

Here is a perfect example of the mindset at work. Musk posted this on X not long ago:

It takes a special kind of moron to see a budget entry that reads “Large scale social deception” and rather than say “That sounds weird, I wonder what it’s really about” simply leap to the conclusion that the Department of Defense is paying the Reuters news agency millions of dollars to deceive the public on a large scale, as though they would describe it that way in the budget. The truth is that the DoD awarded a small contract to a Thomson Reuters subsidiary (not the Reuters news agency) to study “automated defense against social engineering attacks” from foreign governments and bad actors, which in today’s world seems like not a bad thing to do. But to learn that, you have to ask somebody who knows what they’re talking about, or even just do a little digging. Neither Musk nor his minions can be bothered.

Every time Musk has proclaimed that he found some shocking case of fraud, it turns out that either he didn’t understand what he was looking at (like the time he thought he had discovered that Social Security was paying benefits to people who claim to be 150 years old) or he was just lying. This kind of malignant stupidity is being repeated on a grand scale across the government.

Now imagine you actually cared about “efficiency” and wanted to stop “fraud.” How would you go about it? If you thought an agency was bloated with employees who weren’t adding value to the organization, you’d have to find some way to assess them, which can be complicated and take time. But that’s boring! So instead, you just fire everyone who has been on the job less than a year (“probationary” employees), since that’s within the president’s legal authority — good employees, bad employees, whatever. If you don’t like what an agency does (e.g. USAID), you shut it down entirely, then lob some slanderous accusations of corruption at the people who work there. And you have your oblivious dudebros go down the list of contracts and programs and cancel whatever doesn’t look right to them.

This is the point where I issue the required caveat that yes, there is plenty that could be done to make the government more efficient, and there is indeed fraud that targets government programs. But the crew of berserkers now demolishing the federal government doesn’t care about any of it. Which is why it is impossible to have an honest discussion right now about improving the way government works. The only task is to make sure everyone knows they’re lying, and mitigate the damage they’ll do.