Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is now centering its efforts on targeting what he called the “fraud crisis” plaguing the United States, providing more details about a newly created anti-fraud division.

The newly created National Fraud Enforcement Division would “zealously investigate and prosecute those who steal taxpayer dollars and rip off the American people,” Blanche said. The focus of the effort, which was announced during former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s tenure, will be on health care, tax, benefits, and corporate fraud, he said.

He said that every U.S. attorney’s office across the country will join the effort, which will direct dozens of prosecutors to handle fraud cases. The newly created division, he said, would use several agencies and be a “data-driven” operation that is meant to find complex fraud schemes involving federal funding.

Colin McDonald, previously a top aide to Blanche, was confirmed in a vote of 52 to 47 in March to serve as the assistant attorney general in charge of the new division.

Blanche’s announcement comes after a number of recent actions related to fraud by President Donald Trump’s administration that included the recent creation of a White House task force led by Vice President JD Vance. Several administration officials, including Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have separately announced investigations into fraud in multiple cities in recent months.

In his first appearance as the head of the anti-fraud task force, Vance said during a news conference on March 27 that the federal government for years hasn’t taken fraud around social programs seriously and vowed to fix the problem.

“This is not just the theft of the American people’s money,” Vance said. “It is also the theft of critical services that the American people rely on.”

The announcement comes months after allegations surfaced of fraud involving day care centers run by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, which prompted enforcement operations focused on illegal immigration in the Midwestern city, triggering daily protests. In December 2025, the DOJ announced that nearly 100 people had been charged in Minnesota with benefits fraud, saying that 85 of them are of Somali descent.

Last week, federal officials arrested eight people they say were involved in various health care fraud schemes totaling $50 million in and around Los Angeles. Five of the cases involved hospice-care centers in the cities of Glendale, Artesia, Tarzana, and Simi Valley in the Los Angeles area, and alleged that the defendants billed Medicare for patients who were not terminally ill and did not qualify for hospice services.

One person was arrested in Idaho and another in Los Angeles for allegedly defrauding a West Coast labor union’s health care plans. An additional person arrested in the city was accused of forging immigration medical documents, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

Blanche, a former personal attorney to Trump, was named by the president as the acting attorney general earlier this month after it was announced that Bondi would be leaving the administration to work in the private sector.

Blanche also oversaw the release of hundreds of thousands of files and documents related to notorious convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein pursuant to a Congress-passed law last year.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.