As investigators unearth further evidence of widespread fraud plaguing U.S. taxpayers, President Donald Trump’s administration is taking action to protect taxpayer dollars and penalize both fraudsters and the government officials who turn a blind eye to their abuse of American generosity. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz announced in a Wednesday press conference that “at least half” of all hospice care centers in the Los Angeles area have been determined to be fraudulent, accounting for $1.4 billion in Medicaid fraud in 2025 alone. Roughly one third of hospice care centers in the U.S. are located, Oz charged, in and around Los Angeles.

“Today, we announce 800 of those hospices have been suspended,” Oz confirmed. Turning to Vice President J.D. Vance, head of the White House anti-fraud task force, Oz asked whether or not he would call the federal government if his business had been shut down by the federal government. “Crickets,” Oz quipped, sharing that fewer than 20 individuals affiliated with suspended hospice care centers have complained. “We’re not even sure those are legitimate. Eight hundred hospices shut down, and we’re not hearing much. It’s like crickets out there.”

Oz and Vance further shared that a “moratorium” has been placed on approving new hospice centers and “home health care” businesses across the U.S. as the federal task force continues investigating fraud. According to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) statements, the moratorium will last at least six months.

Vance also stipulated that the federal government is deferring $1.3 billion in federal Medicaid reimbursements from the state of California due to the high levels of fraud identified in the blue state. “The simple reason is because the state of California has not taken fraud very seriously,” the vice president explained. “There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously.”

According to Vance, fraudsters and scammers in California have been intentionally billing Medicaid for medications and prescriptions that patients do not need, sometimes even administering the unnecessary, unwanted prescriptions. “So think about this. You’re the person trying to go see a doctor. You assume that your doctor is doing the right thing, but these fraudulent health care providers are getting rich by giving people medications they don’t even need,” Vance explained. “It’s a defrauding of the American taxpayer, but it’s a violation of the trust that should exist between every American and the people who prescribe the medications,” he added. “This is why we’re taking this action, because we want California to get serious about this fraud.”

The federal funding deferments are not a purely punitive measure but are, instead, a matter of “turning off the resources” that California authorities have clearly not used to investigate and prosecute fraud, so that the federal government can instead use those resources. “We’re gonna use those resources ourselves,” the vice president said, “because we’re actually taking the fraud issue very seriously.”

Vance also confirmed that the anti-fraud task force is probing all 50 states to ensure that appropriate measures are being implemented to prevent and prosecute fraud. “If they do not aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud, we are going to turn off the money that goes to these anti-fraud units,” the vice president said. He noted that some states, like Hawaii, have seen “zero” indictments, prosecutions, or convictions for fraud in recent years. “Not a single indictment, not a single conviction, because the administrators of the Hawaii program just don’t take it seriously. They don’t think that fraud is a big enough problem. They don’t care about protecting the resources,” Vance continued. He noted that New York has only had nine Medicaid fraud indictments over the past year, despite the state’s high population and $100 billion Medicaid program. He added, “Indiana, which has about a third of the population of the state of New York, has had more than four times as many indictments over the same period.”

A recent report highlighted a massive “home health care” fraud scheme in Ohio, defrauding taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars. Over the course of just a few years, nearly 100 offices located in the same building in Columbus billed taxpayers $66 million in Medicaid payments for home health care services. Investigative reporter Luke Rosiak found that nearly every single office was empty, with signs printed on paper taped to the door.

Health care is not the only federal program rife with fraud. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently discovered more than 10,000 likely cases of fraud in the Optional Practical Training (OPT), which allows foreign students to transition from student visas to work visas by finding them jobs. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons shared in a press conference Monday that thousands of foreign students have been placed in jobs with non-government organizations (NGOs) engaged in what Lyons called “suspicious activity,” with high indications of fraud. Some of those students are “phantom employees,” Lyons said: employees who are granted work authorization but never show up for work.

“Our nation will not tolerate security threats originating from the foreign student programs,” Lyons said. “Many of these employers include NGOs engaged in suspicious activity,” he added. “We’ve discovered empty buildings, locked doors, and addresses where hundreds of foreign students are allegedly employed. In many cases, multiple OPT employers claim to operate from the same address, but none actually lease the facility,” he continued. “We’ve found small residential addresses listed as worksites for hundreds of foreign students, yet no employees were present.”

“We’re also seeing financial red flags. Many alleged employers display clear fraud indicators, including tax liens, civil lawsuits, collections, and breaches of contract,” Lyons confirmed. “And we have seen suspicious financial transactions, moving cash across multiple countries.”

The Department of Education (DOE) has also identified widespread fraud, blocking tens of millions of dollars in federal student loans, according to The Daily Caller. The DOE launched a new program to identify and flag likely fraud in student loan applications on April 26. Since then, over 300,000 applications have been flagged, amounting to $60 million. While the fraud detection program, which focuses on verifying the identities of applicants, is currently being used by the DOE, department officials confirmed plans to require individual colleges and universities to use similar measures to verify the identities of student loan applicants.