HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his predecessor slashed the department's program integrity staff from 80 people to just six, an open invitation, he argues, for fraudsters to loot taxpayer-funded health programs.
Kennedy leveled the charge at a White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud press conference, naming former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra directly and describing a department that was all but defenseless against billing scams when the current administration took over. The accusation lands as the Trump administration is already withholding billions of dollars in Medicaid payments to states over suspected fraud, and as federal prosecutors bring some of the largest health-care fraud cases in recent memory.
At issue is the small team inside HHS responsible for policing roughly $2.2 trillion in annual payments and approximately four million transactions every day. Kennedy told reporters that Becerra reassigned 76 of the team's 80 members after arriving at the agency, leaving a skeleton crew of six to monitor spending across all 50 states and five territories.
"So that when I came in, there's only six people who are in charge of all program integrity for my department. And it was an invitation for the fraudsters to come in and steal everything."
Becerra has not publicly responded to Kennedy's claims. Kennedy did not cite specific internal documents or audits to support the staffing figures during the press conference, and no independent verification of the numbers appears in available reporting.
Kennedy pointed to Los Angeles County as a case study in what happens when oversight vanishes. He said HHS closed thousands of hospices in the city that had no actual patients, operations that billed the federal government $6,000 a month per phony account. Durable medical equipment fraud in the county ran into the tens of billions of dollars, Kennedy said, and a separate stream of fraudulent autism services claims drained tens of billions more.
Kennedy also described a billing policy he attributed to Becerra called "Pay and Chase." Under that approach, HHS paid invoices it knew were fraudulent and tried to recover the money afterward, a strategy Kennedy framed as the opposite of prevention.
"Autism services, tens of billions of dollars all stolen because nobody was minding the store."
The scale Kennedy described is staggering, and the figures remain his assertions rather than audited totals. But the broader pattern he outlined, a federal health bureaucracy that paid first and asked questions later, tracks with what the administration has uncovered in state-level Medicaid programs this year.
The fraud crackdown Kennedy described is not hypothetical. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has already withheld approximately $867 million from California and more than $200 million from Minnesota while it reviews whether those payments were legitimate, Fox News reported. CMS flagged specific irregularities: claims filed for dead beneficiaries, payments to disqualified providers, and spending spikes that far outpaced national norms.
California's In-Home Supportive Services program saw spending jump 24 percent over two fiscal years, roughly double the national average. CMS also flagged providers who billed four or more patients at the same time, submitted claims more than a year after services were supposedly rendered, or ranked in the top 2.5 percent of billers nationwide, the New York Post reported. The total withheld from California in 2026 has topped $2 billion.
Fraud expert Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, estimated fraud accounts for roughly 20 percent of California's IHSS program. He blamed self-reporting, a near-total absence of auditing, and a structure in which the federal government funds the program but states run it with little accountability.
"Anytime you have a program like this where it is self-reported, there is virtually no auditing, and no one gets caught, then the probability of fraud is very, very high."
Governor Gavin Newsom rejected the fraud allegations as "pure politics," claiming California had already cooperated with federal requests. Kennedy's response was blunt: governors who want the money released need only provide documentation proving the services were real.
Minnesota offered an even sharper illustration. The Department of Justice announced federal fraud charges against 15 individuals accused of stealing more than $90 million from the state's Medicaid programs across seven different program areas. Federal officials described it as one of the largest Medicaid fraud crackdowns in Minnesota history, and the autism component was the biggest such scheme the DOJ has ever charged, Just The News reported.
The allegations included fabricated autism diagnoses, billing for services that were never provided, and the theft of $22 million from a housing support program for disabled individuals. Minnesota had already disenrolled roughly 3,000 providers after they failed background checks and site visits, a belated admission that the state's own screening had been inadequate for years.
Kennedy tied the Minnesota cases back to the same systemic failure he blamed on Becerra's HHS.
"When criminals exploit these programs, taxpayers lose billions, and vulnerable children lose their access to care. If we fail to confront the fraud aggressively, these programs will not survive for future generations in the form Americans rely upon them today."
Even Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, acknowledged the severity. "Today's charges and guilty plea are an important step in combatting fraud and protecting our tax dollars," Ellison said. The bipartisan agreement on the problem's scale, if not on who let it fester, underscores how deep the rot runs.
Kennedy's core charge is structural, not just political. A program integrity team of 80 was already thin for an agency processing $2.2 trillion a year across every state and territory. Cutting it to six was not a policy disagreement. It was, in Kennedy's telling, a decision to stop looking.
And the "Pay and Chase" model Kennedy described made the problem worse by design. Paying invoices the department already suspected were fraudulent, then hoping to claw the money back later, is the kind of policy that rewards speed and volume on the fraud side while saddling taxpayers with the losses. Every dollar chased is a dollar that already left the building.
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz put the current posture more plainly: "If it smells like fraud, we're not paying for it anymore."
Several questions remain unanswered. Kennedy has not released internal records documenting the staffing cuts or the formal adoption of "Pay and Chase." Becerra has offered no public rebuttal. And the precise timeframe over which the tens of billions in Los Angeles County fraud accumulated, whether under Becerra alone or across multiple administrations, is unclear from Kennedy's remarks.
What is clear is the result. Thousands of fake hospices. Tens of billions in fraudulent equipment and autism claims. States that failed to screen their own providers. And a federal watchdog office that, by Kennedy's account, was stripped down to a handful of staffers while the money kept flowing out the door.
When the people in charge of guarding the store walk away, the only ones surprised by the theft are the ones who chose not to look.
