The Fraud Story is a Fraud

Fans of pet-eating migrant stories are thrilled to hear that JD Vance is heading up an anti-fraud task force operating out of the White House. As best anyone can tell, the purpose is to drum up absurd allegations of fraud against prominent Democrats, like California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.

If the reference to pet-eating migrant stories is too obscure, let me remind everyone. During the presidential campaign, Vance admitted that he invented stories about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, to advance the Trump ticket’s anti-immigrant political agenda. This is important background when considering the sincerity of his new anti-fraud crusade.

The other important background item is that Trump just gave us an anti-fraud crusade last year. Doesn’t anyone remember Elon Musk running around with his chainsaw and his “super-high IQ” DOGE boys? He was supposed to find trillions of dollars of fraud and send us all $5k dividend checks. I still haven’t gotten my check.

What fraud is JD Vance’s team going to find that Elon Musk’s crew somehow missed? We don’t have to believe that Musk is some sort of super-genius, but surely he is not completely incompetent. He had a large team of anti-fraud crusaders that invaded one government agency after another. If there was large-scale fraud, it’s hard to believe they couldn’t produce at least some evidence.

But the Republicans all seem super-excited about this rerun. They even got Trump’s top all-purpose adviser, Steven Miller, to hype the project. Miller said:

“I believe, and I know President Trump believes, that when this theft is exposed, we will see that if all of it were stopped, it would be enough to balance the budget….. The extraction of wealth from American taxpayers to people who don’t belong here is the primary cause of the national debt.”

This statement tells everything there is to know about Vance’s fraud project. It is yet one more chance to yell about black and brown-skinned people ruining the country. Exploiting racism is the one thing Trump does better than anyone else.

Just to remind the number challenged, there is no remotely plausible world where fraud connected with undocumented immigrants can be anywhere in the ballpark of explaining the national debt. The national debt is roughly $39 trillion or $39,000,000 million. The economy is $31 trillion, and the federal budget is a bit over $7 trillion.

It would take some really fantastic stories to somehow get to $39 trillion in fraud from whatever portion of the budget might wrongly be paid to undocumented immigrants. This is obvious to everyone remotely familiar with the budget.

Right off the bat, almost three-quarters of the budget goes to Social Security, Medicare, Veterans benefits, the military, and interest on the debt.  Even Elon Musk didn’t try to claim large-scale fraud by immigrants in these areas after his team examined them. Most of the rest is Medicaid and other health care programs for which undocumented immigrants are not eligible. Maybe Miller thinks undocumented immigrants are getting farm subsidies.

Surely there is some amount of fraud that immigrants do commit, but we’re talking millions, maybe hundreds of millions. Taken over decades, it could get into the low billions, almost certainly less than 0.01 percent of the federal debt. And immigrants pay tens of billions of taxes, which means the net effect is almost certainly to reduce the deficits and debt.

Miller’s use of outlandish numbers to describe the size of the fraud the Vance’s gang will find makes its purpose clear. This fraud task force is yet another Trump effort to push racist lies to attack political opponents and nothing more.

While fraud is a real problem, Trump has fired most of the people who investigate it, specifically the independent Inspector Generals of individual departments and agencies. He also has sought to cut back the budget of the Government Accountability Office, an independent congressional agency. Meanwhile, Trump has been pardoning convicted fraudsters as quickly as they can shovel him the payoffs.

Everyone should be clear that Vance’s latest toy is nothing but crude racism and has nothing to do with a genuine search for fraud. When Trump started yelling crazy numbers about fraud in Minnesota, Democrats all ran for cover and threw Tim Walz, a successful and popular governor, under the bus. This may have been partly motivated by a desire to get rid of a potential contender for the 2028 presidential nomination, but it was nonetheless shameful.

Sleazy racism should not be rewarded. Serious accusations of fraud need to be investigated, but Team Trump’s cry of “Black people, fraud,” only deserves contempt.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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