Federal law enforcement and prosecutors are revealing that rampant fraud is plaguing the entirety of the U.S. — not just cities like Minneapolis or Los Angeles. The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced at a press conference Tuesday that it has charged more than 450 individuals across 45 states for defrauding taxpayer-funded health care programs of approximately $6.5 billion.

“This announcement marks the greatest combined federal and state effort in combating health care fraud in history,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asserted. “This team is working tirelessly to take down fraudsters who steal from taxpayer-funded programs and prey on vulnerable Americans.”

According to Blanche, the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud and the DOJ have been joined by multiple executive branch agencies and 41 state attorneys general to tackle crippling fraud across the country. “That’s what we talk about when we say this is an all-government approach to combating fraud. It’s not just the Department of Justice, it’s not just HHS — it’s all government, including working with our state and local partners,” Blanche affirmed. “Today, we are announcing federal and state charges, all of which were charged or unsealed at some point over the past two weeks’ — the past 14 days’ coordinated nationwide action. Since June 8, we’ve charged 455 defendants across … 45 states.”

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, “President Trump directed this administration to confront health care fraud aggressively, and we are doing that.” Kennedy, a former Democrat, thanked blue state attorneys general for joining the effort. “Fraud does not recognize party lines, and neither does accountability,” he stated. “These schemes did not target government programs. They targeted the American taxpayer. They stole money from workers who pay taxes from families who depend on Medicare and Medicaid, and from patients who trusted their health care professionals to be serving their health interests, when it turns out they were just chasing money from our agencies.”

The individuals charged have been accused of fraudulently billing programs like Medicare and Medicaid for services never performed, stripping taxpayers of billions of dollars. One individual in Arizona was charged with fraudulently billing Medicare over $1 million per patient for “wound grafts,” netting $1 billion in ill-gotten money. Ten other defendants were charged with fraudulent “wound care” schemes, amounting to more than $2 billion in fraud. The defendants would purchase wound graft materials for anywhere from $30 to $75 and then inflate the price to nearly 50 times that, pocketing the difference reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid and paying kickbacks to marketers, nurses, and others. According to the DOJ, the defendants “then used the taxpayer money to bankroll multimillion dollar homes, luxury vehicles like a $135,000 Maserati, jewelry like an $865,000 Bulgari necklace, and — to top it all off — to fund the construction of a $4.6 million hotel at a beach resort in the Philippines.”

According to Kennedy, health care providers ordered medically unnecessary tests and prescriptions that patients did not need in order to pocket the Medicare and Medicaid refunds, and even “fueled opioid addiction to increase their own revenue.” In several cases, patients died because their health care providers were more concerned with defrauding American taxpayers than with helping their patients.

In one case, a hospice care owner illegally paid others for the personal Medicare and Medicaid information of patients who had died. Kennedy noted that the federal government has shut down over 800 hospices in the Los Angeles area due to suspected fraud. “One of the ways that we’ve been able to detect that fraud is that in many of them, the patients never die. They live forever. That’s not supposed to happen in hospices,” he said, adding that the hospice owner purchasing the information of deceased patients was then using that information to artificially make it appear as though patients were dying in hospice at a normal rate, in order to avoid detection. He made nearly $30 million from the scheme and purchased himself a Rolls-Royce. “That case illustrates exactly what is at stake,” Kennedy emphasized. “Every fraudulent dollar diverted into a criminal scheme is a dollar unavailable for patient care, for medical innovation, or for services for vulnerable Americans.”

In another case, a health care provider used predatory marketing schemes to scare student athletes into submitting to cardiovascular testing to prevent cardiac arrest. Instead of examining any test results, the defendant simply “rubber-stamped” them. One of the young men, whose 64-image test results were marked as healthy within 11 seconds, actually had an enlarged heart and cardiovascular issues, which the health care provider no doubt would have noticed had he actually examined test results instead of attempting to maximize his payout from taxpayer-funded programs. Just a few weeks later, the student athlete suffered a cardiac arrest and died on the basketball court.

Due to the inaction and negligence of former President Joe Biden’s administration and numerous Democratic officials, such as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz or California Governor Gavin Newsom, many fraudsters have managed to evade law enforcement. Out of the $6.5 billion in taxpayer funds stolen by fraudsters, the DOJ has recovered $182 million in cash and assets over the past two weeks, accounting for less than 3% of stolen funds. Of the many defendants charged with fraud schemes in 2025, the DOJ just managed to get two extradited from Estonia and transferred a third to U.S. custody in an unnamed foreign state.

In fact, the Biden administration actively facilitated fraud. According to Kennedy, former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, now a candidate in California’s gubernatorial election, implemented a “pay and chase” program, ordering HHS not to stop payments to likely or known fraudulent entities but to instead try to “claw back” those funds at a later date. “This is crazy because, of course, we never claw back anything,” Kennedy quipped. Becerra further instructed HHS employees to “focus on enrollment” in taxpayer-funded programs and to ignore fraud.

Additionally, Biden and Becerra tried to “liquidate” HHS’s program integrity office, which is charged with identifying and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse of taxpayer funds. According to Kennedy, Becerra slashed the number of program integrity officers from 80 — which Kennedy said is already too low a number for policing multiple programs over 50 states — to only six. He stressed, “That opened up the floodgates for all of this fraud, $100 billion in fraud a year that are being stolen now from my agency.”

The lax standards of the Biden era have been replaced with stringent controls to allow the federal government to identify and prevent fraud in the future, in addition to identifying previously committed fraud and prosecuting fraudsters. “If you exploit patients for profit, if you steal Medicaid or Medicare dollars, if you treat taxpayer dollars as your personal bank account, we will investigate you, we will build the case, and we will bring you to justice,” Kennedy pledged. “We will find fraud. We will stop it. We will recover taxpayer dollars whenever the law permits, and we will restore integrity to the programs that millions of Americans rely on for their care.”

“Fraud is no longer being tolerated. It is not being put up with,” said Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel. “The interagency and state and local partners focused on one mission and one mission alone: to combat fraud and make sure the American public’s precious taxpayer dollars go where they’re supposed to go, to the American people that need them the most, and not to these criminals who are stealing from us day in and day out,” Patel continued.

Blanche added, “This is just the beginning. Fraudsters can no longer rip off American taxpayers. If you seek to harm or cheat Americans, we will find you, seize any assets, and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”

The widespread fraud has also gotten the attention of lawmakers like Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who say that a significant portion of the theft was largely enabled by Biden’s inflationary injection of $7 trillion into the U.S. economy.

“He threw $7 trillion worth of money into the economy — no economic basis for that, just sending it out, and people committed fraud all over the place,” he pointed out during “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “And … then you don’t have enough oversight.”

Biggs further emphasized that Congress must begin attaching enforcement mechanisms to spending bills. “We need to keep working with DOJ and other law enforcement to make sure they have the tools that they need, but we have to make sure that we start putting checks in the spending bills. When people get going around here, they just sign off on spending bills instead of putting in all the checks and balances and restrictions necessary to make sure only the people that are intended and are qualified to receive those benefits receive those benefits.”