Vance’s ‘Fraud Czar’ Title May Come Back to Haunt Him

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Vice President Vance is having a busy month. He may facilitate negotiations with Iran in Pakistan this weekend—part of the White House’s attempt to maintain the fragile cease-fire in the Middle East. But he’s also got his eye on domestic issues as the administration’s “fraud czar.”

Vance has been the face of the White House’s effort to combat fraud since earlier this year, but Trump reiterated the title in a Truth Social post last weekend. “His focus will be ‘EVERYWHERE,’” he wrote, “but primarily in those Blue States where CROOKED DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS” have allegedly “had a ‘free for all’ in the unprecedented theft of Taxpayer Money.”

In January, Vance announced that the White House was establishing a new division for national fraud enforcement, with its own assistant-attorney-general position. It was a response to a series of child-care-fraud scandals throughout Minnesota—some of which were unearthed during the Biden era but were reinvestigated by Department of Justice prosecutors toward the end of last year. Trump formalized Vance’s new commitments last month, signing an executive order to create the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which the vice president now chairs. If Trump’s announcement last week is any indication, Vance’s job is to focus mostly on blue-state fraud—which, given the fact that fraud is an issue across both Democrat- and Republican-led states, risks restricting the effects of the project.

As laid out in the March executive order, Vance will be focusing specifically on benefits fraud: the crime of claiming benefits for social services that you don’t actually qualify for. (It’s a real phenomenon, but despite some of the administration’s rhetoric, reducing it won’t do much to chip away at the federal deficit.) The Trump administration has tried to address this issue through legislation (for example, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act changed eligibility requirements for food stamps) and through targeted enforcement efforts such as DOGE, a far-reaching initiative to trim the fat across the federal government. DOGE’s progress was hard to track: Its website saw repeated overstatements, deletions, and contradictions about the state of the agency’s work. The department ultimately failed in its mission. Despite shutting down several government agencies, DOGE actually ended up leading to more federal spending, rather than less.

As presidential administrations direct their DOJs to address fraud, they sometimes convene task forces to bolster that work, as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush also did. And federal governments don’t carry out this work alone: State-level operations across the country play a role in reducing fraud too. But Trump’s administration has at times used claims of fraud as political cover—an excuse to withhold funding from its political opponents on the state level. These sorts of targeted cuts have focused largely on blue states, whose immigrant communities often become scapegoats.

According to federal data, benefits fraud can happen at similar levels in both Republican- and Democrat-led districts. But in response to the Minnesota fraud scandal, the Department of Health and Human Services attempted to freeze more than $10 billion in funding for five blue states in January, apparently fearing that taxpayer dollars aren’t safe under Democrats’ control. (A district court has since blocked the move.) The same month, CBS News reported that Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, had directed “nearly all” federal agencies to report the funding they were providing to certain blue states—the idea being to combat any potential “improper and fraudulent use of those funds.”

As the Trump administration conjures up political narratives from its anti-fraud efforts, it is also actively undermining the work of enforcement: In the early days of his second term, Trump fired many of the watchdogs who were searching for perpetrators throughout the country. According to federal data, those investigators were responsible for digging up more than $50 billion in fraud in the 2024 fiscal year.

The anti-fraud task force has already begun its work, and its success or failure will rest squarely with Vance. Trump’s Truth Social post last week was timed with the arrests of eight alleged fraudsters who the FBI has said siphoned more than $50 million from Medicare with “sham hospice care facilities.” There’s an irony here in the fact that Trump has granted clemency to several fraudsters convicted of crimes in a similar vein. Among them are Joseph Schwartz, who stole about $38 million via his nursing-home empire; Lawrence Duran, who pleaded guilty to co-orchestrating a $205 million Medicare-fraud scheme; and Paul Walczak, a former nursing-home executive who didn’t pay his taxes. Walczak was pardoned after his mother reportedly attended a Trump fundraising dinner, where guests were asked to pay $1 million to attend.

Vance will likely put a positive spin on the outcomes of his term as fraud czar, whatever those outcomes may be over the next three years. But he’ll have to answer to tougher critics on the campaign trail in 2028, should he choose to run. That’s what happened to Kamala Harris, who in 2024 had to confront questions about another title that was bestowed upon her: “border czar.” Republicans were eager to highlight failures in the Biden administration’s immigration policy, and the title on Harris’ résumé made her an easy target.

Because the premise of Vance’s fraud mission—that Democrats are uniquely permissive of social-services fraud—is false, his potential results are limited. If Americans aren’t happy with what he achieves, he might come to regret his new title.

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Scientists Are Finally Unlocking a Cancer Treatment’s Full Potential

By Katherine J. Wu

By the time Fabian Müller met the patient at the center of his newest research paper, he was fairly certain that an experimental treatment was her last hope. The patient, a 47-year-old mother of two, had for years been battling three severe autoimmune diseases, all of which were triggering her body to attack components of her blood. Her doctors had made nine separate attempts to treat her conditions, but none of them had worked …

In recent years, [Müller] and his colleagues have made a name for themselves pioneering experimental CAR-T cell treatments—a type of personalized immunotherapy originally developed for cancer—against a variety of autoimmune diseases, with promising early results. Small studies of CAR-T, as well as early results from several ongoing clinical trials, show that many people with autoimmune disease go into remission after treatment; some patients are now years out from CAR-T cell therapy and remain in good health without the help of any drugs. Müller hopes that this latest patient—the most complex autoimmune case to receive the treatment to date—will soon be able to say the same.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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