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WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance called on Congress to codify more anti-fraud protections in upcoming bills during a Wednesday roundtable at the White House, in order to avoid, he said, a future Democratic administration undoing his task force’s work.
So far, the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force has uncovered $230 billion in fraudulent funds that have gone out the door through taxpayer-funded benefit programs — and halted at least $56 billion that would have otherwise gone toward scammers, Vance told reporters.
But the vice president added that his team’s efforts “will fundamentally always have a limitation unless our colleagues in the House and the Senate are working with us.”
“We don’t want the next administration, whoever, you know, God forbid you’re gonna have President El-Sayed in three years,” Vance said, “we don’t want him to undo all the incredible work that we’ve been doing.”
El-Sayed has been critical of Vance’s task force and dismissed concerns about taxpayer funds being wasted, defrauded or abused.
Only Republican senators and reps attended the roundtable in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, but the vice president expressed hope that Democratic lawmakers would join their efforts to write laws imposing stricter penalties for fraudsters and allowing more data sharing between the feds and state governments.
President Trump’s signed Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill into law in July 2025, restricting the eligibility of non-citizens seeking benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
But Vance claimed in Wednesday’s roundtable discussion that without more transparency from certain states, illegal aliens will be allowed to keep receiving SNAP benefits.
“If the state of California gives those food stamp benefits to an illegal alien — to a violent criminal — the federal government has no visibility, and sometimes the states themselves have no visibility,” he said.
At least five states — California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine and Washington State — allow some form of SNAP eligibility to non-citizens, according to the National Immigration Law Center.
“So we need to work with Congress and we need some legislation that would actually force some data sharing between the state governments and the federal governments,” the vice president continued. “And the second is that we would like to see stiffer penalties for fraudsters.”
“We’d like to change those statutes and actually make it harder for people to commit fraud and make sure that when they do commit fraud, they go to jail and they go to jail for a long time,” Vance also said
The ringleader of the largest COVID relief fraud scheme in the US, known as the Feeding Our Future scam, was sentenced to more than 40 years in prison for bilking taxpayers out of $250 million meant for meals to serve needy kids.
In some cases, though, Vance and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller noted that fraudsters have taken millions of dollars in federal benefits without having to serve jail time.
The House has entered its August recess and the Senate is expected to depart at the end of this week for the rest of the month.
Both chambers will return in September, when deliberations will continue over a government funding bill as well as a budget framework that includes supplemental funding for US military amid the Iran war.
It’s unclear whether either the funding measure or the budget bill will include anti-fraud provisions.
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