By Breitbart News Network | Created at 2026-08-06 01:44:55 | Updated at 2026-08-06 11:18:31
16 hours ago
WASHINGTON—Vice President JD Vance, who heads the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, called on Congress to codify anti-fraud measures and pass legislation that both forces data sharing between the state and federal levels and establishes harsher criminal penalties for fraud.
Vance’s laid out his vision for more robust anti-fraud laws during a roundtable with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who are top officials on the task force, and Republican members of Congress on Wednesday in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
“This effort will fundamentally always have a limitation unless our colleagues in the House and the Senate are working with us,” Vance said. “We don’t want the next administration, whoever you know, God forbid, you’re going to have President El-Sayed in three years, we don’t want him to undo all the incredible work that we’ve been doing when we’ve been taking out the fraudsters and saving the American people money.”
“In order to make this really work, we need our colleagues in Congress to really codify some of this stuff to make sure that it becomes law,” he added.
Vance said that data sharing is of the utmost importance because of the “black box” around certain states’ programs. He pointed to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as one example.
“We know that there is a lot of fraud in the SNAP program. We know that there are illegal aliens who benefit from the SNAP program; people who have no legal right to be in the country, we would like to stop that,” he said. “But I think the American people would be shocked to learn because I was certainly shocked when I learned it a few months ago that when we send tax dollars to the states to administer the SNAP program, we have no visibility into who is ultimately getting those benefits.”
“In other words, 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 added, calling for Congress to force state data sharing to the federal government.
Miller said that “95 percent” of the fraud issue can be addressed with data sharing.
“On data sharing, and technology, and integrity, you can solve 95 percent of this problem with simple technological verification and data sharing measures that is in technology that was invented 20 years ago,” he said. “Now the technology today, of course, is even more astonishing. But if every single person who wanted to enroll in SNAP or enroll in Medicaid or enroll in public housing was in a shared database that the federal government had access to to verify age, citizenship, criminal record, other basic biographic facts, that single step alone will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Ferguson said that “fraud is easy because data is difficult to get, and data is the enemy of fraud,” and said data sharing should be required for states to participate in programs like SNAP.
“Data sharing should be a requirement for participating in these programs because that will unleash the power of American AI ingenuity and innovation in these agencies to stop the fraud before it happens,” he said.
Secondly, Vance said he wants harsher penalties for those perpetrating fraud.
“One of the things I said at the very beginning of the task force is that I was shocked by how often we would just let low-level fraud go, like a million dollars of fraud — that’s a lot of money,” he said. “A person who would enrich themselves in the tune of a million dollars — sometimes we wouldn’t even prosecute this stuff, and even when we do prosecute it, we are limited by the penalties applied.”
“The most important thing that we can do in prosecuting fraud is to make sure that the people who engage in fraud actually suffer some real penalties, and so we would love to work with all of you and see some stiffer penalties for the people that we’re successfully prosecuting,” Vance added. “We are throwing a lot of people behind bars, but we’re limited… in some ways, by the statutes that exist. 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.”
Miller stressed that fraud under a million dollars has regularly gone unpunished.
“It is, first of all, true, as the vice president said, as hard as it is to believe, that for most recent history — which in the case of these programs would be in the history of these programs — if you committed a million dollars of fraud or less, you were unlikely to ever be criminally punished in any way at all,” he said.
“And if, for some strange reason in the past, a bureaucrat had the courage to defy that agency guidance and actually bring you to trial and put you in front of a jury, you’d be unlikely to do any real jail time at all,” he added.
Miller said that “strict, clear, mandatory minimums” are necessary to punish and disincentivize fraud.
“Because by the time you’ve been convicted, you have already proven to a jury… beyond a reasonable doubt that you deliberately, willfully, maliciously engaged in a scheme to steal from the American taxpayer and from those in genuine need,” he said. “And when you satisfied 12 jurors of that fact and have been convicted, you deserve to have a very substantial prison sentence. That change alone would be watershed for fighting fraud, because it would mean that the Department of Justice would be able to, through prosecuting a few hundred or thousand cases in a year, be able to chill the criminal conduct of millions.”
Vance also asked for “a little bit of money” from Congress for anti-fraud efforts.
“But we need a little bit of resources because while we’re saving the American people billions and billions of dollars, and we’re not spending very much, we need a little bit more appropriated to expand this fraud effort. I think we’ll save even more money in the process… Every dollar you give us comes back at least five or tenfold, so it’s a good investment, and it’s the sort of thing that we need to see happen,” he said.
