In a further sign of the apparent indifference of Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill to the ongoing revelations of vast amounts of taxpayer funds being stolen through fraud, only one out of seven Democratic senators showed up for a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on fraud on Wednesday, which is estimated to total hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

As independent analysts have determined, the scale of the fraudulent theft of taxpayer funds has likely reached levels far beyond what internal government agencies have estimated. In February, Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Special Services & LexisNexis Risk Solutions Government, testified before Congress that fraudsters are likely robbing taxpayers of a staggering $1 trillion per year, doubling the top-end estimates of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which assessed losses of between $233 billion and $521 billion annually based on data from fiscal years 2018 through 2022.

Talcove further detailed that the losses amount to “$115 million every single hour, of which 70% is related to transnational criminals.” He also hinted that the $1 trillion estimate may actually be “a little bit light” after Medicaid data was released by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Witnesses at Wednesday’s Senate hearing confirmed the widespread fraud unfolding under the noses of government officials. Investigative journalist Nick Shirley testified that after he posted a video in December exposing dozens of fraudulent daycare centers in Minnesota that went viral, government officials finally started to take action.

“Over 30 bills have been created and introduced in Congress regarding fraud. A new fraud task force has been created, and the Treasury is working on new systems to stop fraud at unprecedented levels,” he reported. Shirley also noted that Democratic officials like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and California Governor Gavin Newsom are suddenly acknowledging that fraud is taking place in their states after initially labeling him a “white supremacist.”

“[I]t just so happens that over 80% of the fraud committed in Minnesota is by the Somali population after Minnesota,” he observed. “I exposed widespread fraud in California within the daycare and hospice community, where an impossible one-third of Americans on hospice care were set to die in Los Angeles the next day.” Shirley further highlighted how California’s Medi-Cal Medicaid program “has now more than doubled from $108 billion in 2022 to a proposed $222 billion” even though “enrollment has only rose by less than 1%. The system is filled with bad actors and fraudsters.”

Shirley went on to detail how in New York City, “government-funded adult daycares pay for elderly Koreans and Chinese to play ping-pong and do tai chi at the taxpayer’s expense. An impossible number of patients are registered, and those patients receive kickbacks for attending and signing up their friends. Over $2 billion has gone to these fraudsters at the taxpayers’ expense.”

“I’m just one person doing the work of many people. If the government and media is not going to do their job to help America, it’s the responsibility of strong men and women, however old they may be, to do it,” he insisted.

Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-Ky.) concluded the hearing by commending Shirley for his work while also putting his finger on the “systemic problem” of why fraudulent theft of taxpayer funds continues to occur in such large volumes.

“Why didn’t government have someone like Nick Shirley that worked for them? Why weren’t we doing this?” he asked. “There’s a systemic problem, and the systemic problem is worth looking at, because systemic problems can fix thousands of downstream problems. The systemic problem is basically [because] you sign up for welfare at the state level. The payment comes from the federal level. The states look at federal payment as free because we have a printing press up here. We just add it to the national debt, the $40 trillion debt, the numbers that are spiraling out of control. But food stamps, Medicaid — you sign up at the state level. So if you tell a state that we’re going to pay for 90% or 100% of Medicaid, if you expand it, is there any incentive for them to check people’s credentials to make sure they’re eligible for Medicaid or for food stamps? … No, because they’re not paying for it. So the states have no incentive.”

Paul further noted that he and other senators have proposed legislation to “change some of these percentages.”

“Obamacare enticed all the states to expand Medicaid,” he explained. “… The government paid 100% of it for like three years. And now, 15 years later, the government is still paying 90%. The rest of Medicaid is closer to 50/50 or 45/55. So the states have some skin in the game. If they allow too much fraud to occur, they’re paying for part of the fraud. But if 90% of it is paid to the federal government, you’re not paying [for] fraud. We had a proposal that would have changed the formula back to this split formula where states pay about half and the federal government pays half. And I think it was an $800 billion savings over about 10 years. And so, we have to police the fraud.”

“We should be learning from what you guys are doing with investigative reporting,” he told Shirley and the committee. “We should hire investigators. … Why don’t [the Inspectors General] have a team of investigators that are going out and doing what you’re doing? So we should do that. But we also have to, as a legislature, look at these ratios and at these split performances, and you have to connect them. The people paying have to be doing the oversight. Some of that’s happening, but only because you brought it to light.”