By S.T. Karnick, The Heartland Institute
The Trump administration has announced another step in its efforts to identify fraud in government programs and, of equal importance, hold states, organizations, and individuals responsible for it.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have placed a hold on more than $867 million in scheduled Medicaid payments for California and more than $200 million for Minnesota, on top of $1.3 billion and $259 million withheld from those two states, respectively, earlier this year.
Opponents of the administration’s actions in combating entitlement fraud characterize the president’s endeavor as vindictive and politically motivated. Those complaints are unjustified for multiple reasons.
The claim of political spite, for example, is morally unfounded. The administration’s motive for rooting out fraud has nothing at all to do with whether it is good government policy and a just cause. Fraud is wrong, obviously, and the government has a strict responsibility to ensure that it is not allowing some people to steal other people’s money through any means, including via taxpayer-funded programs.
One of the (very few) duties of government is to protect people’s property rights. If a president sees fraud prevention as working to his political advantage, we should be overjoyed that the system is working properly for once.
That makes assertions about vindictiveness irrelevant. The only way to prevent crimes is to uncover violations and punish the perpetrators. It is obvious that merely telling people not to cheat “the government”—which actually involves robbing from their taxpaying neighbors—will not eliminate these thefts. And if state governments can easily get away with gaming the system so they can secure more benefits for their constituents without having to raise the taxes themselves, certainly some will do so.
That means individuals and governments must pay some price for their crimes. States should pay a heavy price for these offenses, as should individuals who engage in these frauds. These are simple truths.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota disagrees with that.
“The Trump Administration is cutting more money in healthcare than they’ve prosecuted for fraud,” Walz, told The Epoch Times. “The math doesn’t add up. They’re not punishing fraudsters, they’re punishing children, seniors, working families, and people with disabilities. This is about cutting healthcare for people they don’t care about in their campaign of retribution against Minnesota.”
The complaint that innocent people will be affected by the punishment as funds are cut off to their states is shortsighted, cynical, or both. The people of California and Minnesota, to take the present examples, voted into office those who engaged in willful negligence or a corrupt and defiant refusal to enforce the law. The people of those states should pay for the offenses along with those who directly committed them, and in proportion with their involvement.
The public gave those elected officials that power, installing a government that allowed rampant stealing from taxpayers in other states.
Holding voters responsible for the results of their choices is the only way to ensure that people take their duty as voters seriously. We need much more of that, not less. As the great journalist H. L. Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
It does seem unfair, of course, that the punishment should fall also on those who did not vote for the miscreants. Our secret-ballot system, however, means that we cannot know who in those states is free of responsibility for installing the politicians who allowed the system to be exploited or actively encouraged the crimes. Hence, we cannot release them from the punishment their state so richly deserves. That’s how democracy works. If you can call that working.
The claim of partisanship is likewise unfounded. If the president’s critics in this matter dislike the fact that his administration has found fraud in two states controlled by the opposing political party, they should direct their anger toward the individuals, groups, lawmakers, and political party or parties that participated in these schemes or deliberately looked the other way. Those are the people who did wrong here.
Failure to enforce the law has obvious consequences. Government program fraud has increased rapidly in recent years under Walz, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and other governors. The number of federal government benefits fraud cases referred for sentencing nearly tripled between fiscal years 2021 and 2025, with almost all the case rise occurring under President Joe Biden.
“Fraud has plagued Minnesota’s safety-net system for years,” and “state spending on the 14 services deemed high-risk for fraud more than doubled from $1.4 billion in 2020 to $3.7 billion in 2025,” Politico reported just last week. The Minnesota Department of Human Services had to disqualify more than 60 percent of the providers it finally checked up on once the federal government applied pressure.
In California, Newsom has presided over an increase in Medicaid payments for In-Home Supportive Services at double the national rate, sending about $608 million per month to more than half a million providers for “home help” tasks such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, errands, and shopping.
Did Newsom really think that the need in California was expanding twice as fast as in other states? Does he really want us to believe that he is that gullible, or negligent?
Predictably, both governors have repeatedly accused the president of targeting his political enemies, with Walz squawking that the federal fraud crackdown is a “campaign of retribution.”
Those complaints are obviously self-serving and slimy. When government officials allow people to steal from other states’ taxpayers, the thieves deserve to be exposed and punished regardless of their governor’s political alliances, rivalries, and presidential ambitions.
Contrary to the complaints, the current enforcement actions are by no means unprecedented or partisan. Under Biden in 2022, “the Justice Department charged dozens of people in connection to a $250 million fraud scheme involving Feeding Our Future, a Minnesota nonprofit that exploited federal childhood nutrition program funds during the Covid-19 pandemic.” There have been more than 60 convictions so far, with the scheme’s ringleader being sentenced to 500 months in prison this past May.
The solution to the perceived fairness problem is simple. If those who are complaining about the fraud investigations feel it is unfair that other states may be getting off scot-free for similar violations, the honorable course is obvious: demand that the White House expand its investigations to encompass the entire country, root out every instance of fraud in every government program, and punish the perpetrators and the states that engaged in these crimes.
I think that the president and his team might be quite happy to oblige.
Sources: The Epoch Times; Politico
S.T. Karnick is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute.
