WASHINGTON—Vice President JD Vance convened the first meeting of the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force on March 27 in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building with a commitment to root out waste, fraud, and abuse nationwide using a coordinated, multi-agency approach.

“We’re going to take a whole-of-government approach,” Vance said during opening remarks.

“What we’re going to actually do is force the bureaucracy to take this seriously and work together as political principles to make sure that we stop allowing fraudsters to steal the American people’s money.”

Widespread abuse of government programs and benefits is costing taxpayers billions of dollars annually and limiting access to resources, according to the vice president.

“This is not just theft of the American people’s money; this is also a theft of the critical services that the American people rely on,” he said.

President Donald Trump established the task force with an executive order signed on March 16.

“This is a very big thing that we’re doing,” Trump said at the time.

“The kind of money we’re talking about is country-changing.”

Initial investigations focused on the state of Minnesota, where officials uncovered businesses and schemes defrauding the federal government for education and health care benefits.

Vance announced in February that $259 million in reimbursements to the state were temporarily deferred, pending compliance with requests from federal officials.

Investigators are now looking into other states, including California, to identify and eliminate fraudulent activity.

“While it’s very concrete and very obvious what we’re seeing in Minneapolis, it is replayed again and again and again across many states and across many programs,” Vance said. “It has to stop.”

Schemes to defraud the government are not a new concept, but the pervasiveness and toll on the nation’s finances expanded after President Joe Biden took office, he said.

“A lot of the anti-fraud protections that existed in our government for a very long time were actually turned off by the Biden administration,” Vance said.

“We’re going to turn back on those anti-fraud protections so that all of these Cabinet officials are looking at what’s going on and focusing on it.”

In attendance for the meeting were Andrew Ferguson, task force co-chair and chair of the Federal Trade Commission; Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff; new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullen; and others.

Members of the task force expounded on the need to root out wasteful spending before continuing discussions behind closed doors.

“Fraud shreds the social trust on which these programs and our entire nation depend,” Ferguson said. “This fraud crisis is thus existential. If we fail to address it, the fabric of our nation will swiftly unravel.”