Vice President JD Vance's anti-fraud task force has withheld $1.4 billion in federal funding from home health and hospice providers across the country, part of a sweeping crackdown on suspected Medicare and Medicaid fraud that has already suspended hundreds of operations in California, Minnesota, and several other states, Fox News Digital reported.
The scale of the action, and the silence that followed, tells its own story. Trump administration officials told Fox News Digital that roughly 90 percent of the suspended providers have not even contacted the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services since their payments were cut off. Officials said they believe the lack of communication indicates the providers were never legitimate enterprises to begin with.
That figure alone should stop every taxpayer cold. Nine out of ten outfits that had been collecting federal health care dollars apparently had no interest in fighting to get them back. They simply vanished, because, the administration contends, there was nothing real behind the billing codes.
The worst of the rot appears concentrated in California and South Florida, though the problem stretches nationwide. In Los Angeles alone, the task force suspended 447 hospices and 23 home health agencies suspected of fraud. The estimated theft from that single metro area: more than $600 million.
Sheila Clark, president and CEO of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association, warned congressional lawmakers during an April 22 House Ways and Means Committee hearing that the fraud is not subtle. It is brazen, and it was allowed to flourish under the noses of state regulators for years.
"You'd be amazed at how many hospices... you can walk up to the door in California and there is nobody there. You can see five months' worth of mail stacked up. And yet, they passed a survey. How did that happen?"
Clark's testimony went further, questioning the very physical premises of some licensed providers. "How do you put a hospice in a burrito stand? How do you put a hospice in a retail store?" she asked lawmakers. "That all had to be vetted through licensure, certification and accreditation."
The implication is damning for California's regulatory apparatus. These were not sophisticated cyber-frauds hidden behind layers of shell companies. They were storefronts with no staff, no patients, and months of uncollected mail, yet they held valid state licenses and passed federal surveys. Someone approved them. Someone looked the other way.
Vance, who has become one of the most visible figures in the administration, hosted the first meeting of the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud on March 27. The results since then have come fast.
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz painted an even more alarming picture when he appeared on "Jesse Watters Primetime," telling guest host Kayleigh McEnany that the fraud networks extend well beyond domestic grifters.
"We've got Russian government involvement, we believe, in Los Angeles. We've got the Chinese government involved in a big fraud ring in New York."
Oz also described what he called "the Cuban connection" in South Florida, a tip he said came from former Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. The administrator offered a striking comparison to illustrate the scale of the problem in that region.
"We've got twice as many durable medical equipment suppliers, selling wheelchairs and canes, as there are McDonald's in South Florida."
That is not a market responding to organic demand. That is a billing factory. And Oz said enforcement is complicated by the operators' exit strategy: "The owners often flee back to Cuba with the money the moment we move in on them."
Whether the alleged Russian, Chinese, and Cuban government connections hold up under investigation remains to be seen. Oz framed the Russian involvement with the qualifier "we believe," and the claims have not been independently verified beyond his statements. But even setting aside the foreign-government angle, the domestic numbers are staggering on their own.
The hospice and home health suspensions are only one front. Days after the Los Angeles crackdown, the U.S. Small Business Administration referred 562,000 suspected fraudulent loans, totaling more than $22.2 billion, to the U.S. Department of the Treasury for collection.
The SBA said those loan files had been flagged for suspected fraud during the Biden administration. They were never sent to Treasury for recovery. The money just sat there, uncollected, while the suspected fraudsters kept the proceeds.
A senior White House official framed the contrast bluntly in a statement to Fox News Digital: "The task force has made clear that the Biden administration's policy of giving direct cash payments to fraudsters is over."
That characterization will draw objections from Democrats, but the underlying fact is hard to argue with. More than half a million loan files were flagged as suspicious, and the prior administration did not refer them for collection. The current one did. Readers can draw their own conclusions about priorities.
The Biden administration's inaction on those flagged loans stands in sharp contrast to the current administration's willingness to pursue accountability even when it creates political friction.
State-level enforcement is beginning to catch up, at least in California. Attorney General Rob Bonta recently announced the arrest of five individuals linked to an alleged multimillion-dollar hospice scheme that reportedly raked in $267 million through fraudulent billing to Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program.
The arrests are a start. But Clark's congressional testimony raises a harder question: how did these operations survive long enough to bill $267 million in the first place? The licensing, certification, and accreditation systems that were supposed to screen out bad actors clearly failed, and failed repeatedly.
The Trump administration has made the eradication of systemic fraud a cornerstone of its domestic policy. The focus intensified after arrests connected to the "Feeding Our Future" scheme in Minnesota, which allegedly defrauded the government of hundreds of millions of dollars. That case exposed how federal nutrition program funds were siphoned through a network of fraudulent meal sites, a pattern of abuse that mirrors the hospice ghost operations now under scrutiny in California.
A spokesperson for Vice President Vance told Fox News Digital the momentum is building: "The vice president's task force continues to stop the flow of taxpayer funds before they fall into the hands of fraudsters and deliver savings to the American people."
The same spokesperson added: "This is great momentum in the fight for the President's War on Fraud."
The most telling detail in this entire story may be the quietest one. When you cut off $1.4 billion in payments and 90 percent of the affected providers don't even pick up the phone to object, you are not dealing with a few bad apples. You are looking at an industry segment that had been colonized by fraud, and everyone in the system either knew it or chose not to look.
The providers who were legitimate will have their chance to make their case to CMS. That process should be fair and timely. But the overwhelming non-response suggests that the vast majority of suspended operations have nothing to defend.
Vance, who has drawn both praise and intense criticism from the left for his high-profile role in the administration, including attacks that have extended to his family, appears undeterred. The task force is barely two months old, and it has already identified and acted on more suspected fraud than many federal agencies address in a full term.
Several open questions remain. Which specific states beyond California and Minnesota were targeted? What legal or administrative authority underpins the mass suspensions? And will the Treasury Department actually recover any meaningful portion of the $22.2 billion in suspect SBA loans, or will the fraudsters have long since moved the money beyond reach?
Those answers will determine whether this crackdown produces lasting results or just impressive press releases. But the early returns, $1.4 billion withheld, hundreds of phantom providers exposed, half a million suspect loans finally referred for collection, suggest the task force is doing something the previous administration conspicuously did not: treating taxpayer fraud as a problem worth solving.
Critics of the administration, including prominent Democrats who have taken their objections overseas, have spent months questioning the motives behind every enforcement action. But it is difficult to argue with a straight face that shutting down hospices operating out of burrito stands is an overreach.
Meanwhile, Vance has shown a willingness to engage across a range of fronts, from fraud enforcement to diplomatic outreach with the Vatican, projecting a seriousness of purpose that the scope of these numbers demands.
When nine out of ten suspended providers don't bother to call back, the fraud wasn't a secret. It was a business model, and the only question is why it took this long for someone in Washington to shut it down.
