Vance embraces ‘fraud czar’ role, Dems plan to make it an issue in 2028

Democrats began laying a trap the moment that President Trump announced during his State of the Union that Vice President JD Vance would lead a new “war on fraud,” salivating at the possibility of political liability and dubbing the MAGA heir apparent the “fraud czar.”

“It will be blocks of cement around his ankles,” a senior Democratic official told RealClearPolitics last month after the speech to Congress. Another operative predicted that, come 2028, the new role “will be an albatross around his neck.” A third liberal strategist said, “It will be incredible to watch – it’s like he just needed a job but can’t have foreign policy.”

Special responsibilities for vice presidents can later become campaign stumbling blocks for candidates. They provide a measuring stick for the opposition to argue about promises left unfulfilled. Democrats are already accusing the administration of hypocrisy, specifically of targeting their political enemies while turning a blind eye to the alleged fraud originating in the Oval Office. They remember how Republicans pilloried former Vice President Kamala Harris for failing to live up to her billing as “border czar.”

That was a role that Harris rejected outright and never requested. Vance, however, has embraced the brand. When RCP asked the VP about the title during remarks in the Oval Office, Trump interjected, “It’s a good title. I like it.” Moments later, during an exchange that could define him during the next presidential election, Vance followed suit.

“So, I like fraud czar. It’s certainly what we’re going to do. And look, we have to do it,” the vice president told RCP as he described the new job as central to the health of the republic.

“As the president said, this is a problem that has festered in this country for far too long, and far too few people have wanted to do anything about it. That’s what makes this administration different, is that we actually tackle the problems the American people have been confronting,” Vance added.

“I’m very happy about it,” he concluded.

The White House knows the role comes with occupational hazards.

Elon Musk, a former senior advisor to the president, became Public Enemy No. 1 in the minds of liberals as his Department of Government Efficiency made a long march through federal bureaucracy in search of waste, fraud, and abuse to eliminate. The DOGE effort began with lofty ambitions of finding enough savings to balance the budget. But after thousands of relatively small cuts and a few shuttered government agencies, it ended without making much of a dent in the deficit.

Trump was not cowed by that experience. With Vance at his side Monday afternoon, the president predicted that Vance could find “the kind of money” that would be “country changing,” envisioning a balance sheet where so much fraud had been cut that the federal government could “lower your taxes substantially for people.”

He predicted that his vice president would succeed where the last one faltered. “This will not be like a Kamala, where she was put in charge of the border,” Trump said, “and she never went there.”

“You promise,” Trump asked as he turned to Vance.

“I promise,” replied the vice president in a clip that Democrats could soon cut for a 2028 ad.

Contrary to Republican barbs, Harris was never deputized to stem illegal immigration. Former President Joe Biden tasked her, instead, with getting to the bottom of “the root cause” of the phenomenon. Aware of the optics, she still held the issue at arm’s length and only visited the southern border twice during her tenure, a fact that provided the Trump-Vance campaign with endless election fodder.

Now Democrats are preparing to run a similar kind of play, albeit with a twist for the Trump era.

“JD Vance’s first job as ‘fraud czar’ should be investigating Trump and his family for the billions of dollars they have made off of the presidency, the favors, pardons, the government positions bought by Trump’s wealthy friends, and the dropped investigations into corporate bad actors after receiving massive donations,” Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin told RCP.

“The American people, regardless of party affiliation, want our government to take on real fraudsters,” Martin continued, “not abuse the office of the presidency to enrich themselves and go after their political enemies.”

The White House insists that the audit will be apolitical and nationwide. Vance and company will search out waste like the Medicare abuse that ran rampant in Minnesota and captured the attention of the nation. And while Trump has already singled out California, his administration says publicly that they will put red and blue states under the same microscope.

Good government experts cautiously point to an early, positive sign: the call to root out fraud among durable medical companies known to be particularly susceptible to overbilling Medicare and Medicaid. The Department of Health and Human Services has already enforced a nationwide moratorium on new suppliers, a move that affects at least one deep red state immediately: Florida ranks high in Medicare per-beneficiary spending overall.

Some in Congress are still befuddled by the idea that fraud has become a partisan issue. “Tackling waste and grift is bipartisan. We must make the case that government can be good and effective,” Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who plans to introduce legislation calling for a full audit of all 50 states, told RCP.

Republicans argue that the best way to inoculate Vance is simply to run up the score. The more dollars the vice president can save, the less of a talking point Democrats will have at their disposal.

“Honest, tax-paying Americans are terrified by the thought that Minnesota’s fraud is just one case in a nationwide pandemic of scams,” said John Ashbrook, a Republican strategist close to the vice president. “And Vance is in the perfect position to uncover and root it out everywhere.”

If the war on fraud is prosecuted properly, it could pad the vice president’s resume. “If I am JD Vance, and I do a super job of identifying fraud, finding it in all 50 states, and end up saving not just federal taxpayers but state taxpayers lots of money,” said Matt Weidinger, a scholar focusing on welfare at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, “well, when someone calls me ‘fraud czar,’ I’ll take it.”

The new job comes at a moment when Vance finds himself in a potentially precarious position. After years of building a political reputation grounded in opposition to foreign intervention, the vice president has backed a new war, this one against Iran. The White House has batted down speculation that there is any daylight between Trump and his deputy, despite Vance’s many past statements expressing skepticism of American involvement in the Middle East. Trump previously dismissed the idea that Vance required any convincing, telling RCP during a brief interview last week that his vice president “did not take persuading.”

When RealClearPolitics put the question directly to Vance in the Oval, he bristled that the press was “trying to drive a wedge between members of the administration, between me and the president. What the president said consistently, going back to 2015, and I agreed with him, is that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.”

Asked specifically about his current support for war with Iran in light of his past condemnation of the Global War on Terror, Vance, a former Marine who deployed to Iraq, replied, “One big difference is that we have a smart president, whereas in the past we’ve had dumb presidents. And I trust President Trump to get the job done, to do a good job for the American people, and to make sure that the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated. Absolutely.”

Trump has promised a speedy end to the conflict in the Middle East. His war on fraud, meanwhile, is expected to continue all the way until he leaves office, when Vance is expected to mount his own bid for the presidency.