Rampant fraud committed by immigrants in Minnesota has captured headlines for weeks, but President Donald Trump’s “America First” Treasury secretary has a plan for addressing the issue. Already, the Trump administration has swarmed the state with immigration law enforcement agents and instituted a new Justice Department task force to quash fraudsters in Minnesota and across the nation.

Now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is plotting to incentivize members of the widespread fraud schemes to turn on each other. Bessent confirmed in an interview Thursday that the Treasury will offer cash rewards to individuals who can detail the fraud operations, including how cash was transported, when major decisions were made, and who else was involved.

“We know that these rats will turn on each other. We heard today that one of the people who has been convicted of fraud, she was given $200,000 to bribe a juror, and she was so corrupt, she skimmed $80,000 of it and only tried to give a $120,000 bribe,” Bessent asserted. “So we are going to offer whistleblower payments to anyone who wants to tell us who, what, when, where, and how this fraud has been done. And I think that that will give us a great report on how to get it done.”

The Treasury Department is also scrutinizing financial firms used to wire money abroad, particularly targeting remittances to Somalia, where millions of dollars wound up in the coffers of Islamist terrorist group Al-Shabaab. “This is an outrage, President Trump is outraged, I’m outraged, the whole administration is outraged,” Bessent said Saturday, while visiting Minnesota. “We’re here to follow the money, because that’s what Treasury does. We have done that for years, we did it with the mafia, we have done it with the cartels, and now we are going to do it with these Somali fraudsters,” he explained.

The Treasury Department has already launched four investigations into money service businesses suspected of being used by fraudsters to send stolen funds to Somalia, and Bessent announced that the “suspicious activity” threshold for financial transfers will be lowered from $10,000 to $3,000. “From now on,” he added, “anyone who wires money out from one of these money service businesses has to check a box saying whether they are on public assistance, and if you are on public assistance, we are going to start pushing that you cannot wire money out of the country.”

Relying on data from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Bessent further alleged that as much as 10% of the federal budget is lost annually due to fraud. “So it’s about 10% of the federal budget, 1 to 2% of the GDP,” Bessent told investigative reporter Christopher F. Rufo, who was one of the first to bring the Somali fraud scandal to national attention. “If we can narrow that number, President Trump asked for a $500 billion increase in the defense budget to fortify, you know, 10-20 years of neglect and the forever wars that we’ve been involved in that he’s determined not to get us into,” the Treasury Secretary added. “If we need to flex up our military budget, if we can get rid of this waste, fraud, and abuse, we can finance a safer, sounder U.S. with that, without taking on more debt. It sounds like a pretty good outcome to me.”

According to the GAO, between $233 billion and $521 billion in taxpayer money was lost annually to fraud from fiscal year 2018 through fiscal year 2022. That fraud is separate from “improper payments” made by the government, which the GAO estimated had cost taxpayers nearly $3 trillion since 2003.

Bessent also cautioned Americans that investigations into the fraud scandal are ongoing and that results and conclusions may not be seen immediately. “The Silicon Valley motto is ‘Move fast and break things.’ I said my personal motto and the Treasury motto is ‘Move deliberately and fix things.’ And that’s what you’re going to see in our investigations,” he said. “You’re not going to see headlines tomorrow. You’re not going to see them next week. But in a month, a quarter … once we get people in the bear trap, they’re not getting out because we will have conclusive evidence to present,” Bessent asserted. He suggested that fraudsters would be pressured “to turn in higher ups, to help us map out how this happened,” and pledged, “We’re going to take this Minnesota map to the other 49 states.”

“How can we use the investigations in Minnesota as a model for what’s happened, and push it out to the other 49 states?” Bessent asked, rhetorically. “Because Minnesota is likely the most egregious. Maybe not, we’ll see, I have an open mind. But the scale, just because of this population size — California, Illinois, New York — that what’s going on here is a microcosm of what’s going on there,” he posited. “Benefits have been turned into businesses. It is a cottage industry of teaching people how to form multiple LLCs, how to game the system, how to move money around, and we’ll see where the money goes. I’m here because what Treasury does is follow the money.”