Commerce, Justice, Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment Appropriations Act, 2026
Floor Speech
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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, with all of this upheaval in Minnesota and certainly with some other States, Tennesseans are learning a whole lot more about what is happening in this country with fraud and how people are defrauding not only the Federal Government but many State and local governments as well.
The calls that are coming into our office and the emails that we are getting show that this is an issue that has really grabbed the attention of Tennesseans. I think that one of the reasons is that people have seen fraud play out in their local communities. They have seen title theft, where forgers go in and steal properties. Then someone finds out their property is going to be sold on the courthouse steps. They all know of contractors who take deposits. They are fly-by- night, and they never show up to do the work. They know senior citizens who are being defrauded out of life savings. They have seen kickback schemes in their local counties and cities, where local officials go hire a friend and make a contract there at these enormous rates.
I do think that what has happened in Minnesota has caused the American people to look more closely at what is happening with their hard-earned taxpayer dollars and how these are being stolen through fraud.
We know that this issue goes far from Minnesota and into every corner of the country. The Government Accountability Office--and this report, I think, is significant--estimates that each year, each and every year, our government is losing between $233 billion and $521 billion to fraud--fraudulent programs, fraudulent claims.
So think about that. You have individuals and entities which willfully misrepresent themselves so that they can get taxpayer benefits--taxpayer dollars. They are stealing up to $521 billion a year of your money, and that $521 billion could be an underestimation. We have a former Assistant Director for the Government Accountability Office who believes the number is actually closer to $750 billion a year. For context, that $750 billion is more than the entire amount of money we spent on Medicaid in fiscal year 2024.
That is $750 billion--estimate--that is going to fraud that would have more than funded everything we spend on Medicaid, and it is just shy of the $850 billion that we spend on defense. Those are some of the biggest components of our Nation's budget--Medicaid and defense--yet the estimate is that money is being spent via fraud.
Now, these figures don't include the taxpayer dollars that are lost through improper payments. These are payments that go to the wrong person or that maybe exceed the correct amount. Since fiscal year 2003, the GAO estimates that the Federal Government has lost $2.8 trillion to improper payments.
So you have to say ``Where is the money going?'' when you look at these numbers. According to the GAO, in fiscal year 2024, more than half--$85 billion--were improper payments under Medicare and Medicaid. That is called sloppy bookkeeping. And this should come as no surprise: In Minnesota, this is where much of the fraud has been occurring, including through the Medicaid housing program. This fraud could help explain why Minnesota saw the second highest in per-enrollee Medicaid spending under the ObamaCare expansion, where Federal dollars are underwriting nonexistent services and treatments. So Minnesota, with all of the fraud going on there, has the second highest cost per enrollee, and it shot up during the ObamaCare expansion.
We learned even more about the fraud occurring in blue State Medicaid Programs and in ObamaCare during the Schumer shutdown. Last month, the GAO released findings that showed just how easy it was to commit fraud with the Biden bonus credits under ObamaCare. It is the same program that the Democrats fought to bankroll with another 450 billion taxpayer dollars.
To test the program's safeguards against fraud, the GAO said: We are going to conduct an experiment. So they decided to make up 24 fictitious applications, and they did these quite sloppily. They made up names, addresses, information. They left out some required information on these 24 applications. So they are all false, and they are all missing information.
How many of those applications do you think were approved for ObamaCare? There were 23 of the 24 that were approved. They were fake, but they got approved anyway. So the Federal Government was paying more than $10,000 a month each and every month to insurance companies to provide coverage for enrollees who did not exist. That is a lot of money being wasted.
It gets worse. A preliminary analysis by the GAO found that there were at least 190,000 applications between 2023 and 2024--that is that fiscal year--that had unauthorized changes by agents or brokers. That means the individual--of course, we now know that many of these are fake--they didn't approve this or submit it or ask for it; it was the agent or the broker, without permission, who made that change.
Over the same period, there were close to 100,000 duplicate Social Security numbers enrolled in the program. In 1 case, there was 1 Social Security number that was used to apply for more than 125 policies. And guess what. They got approved. And guess what. All fake.
It is the insurance companies making the money every month, and it is your tax dollars at work for what is a fraud scheme.
Despite all of this fraud, the Democrats this week demanded a vote to overturn the Trump administration's Marketplace integrity rule, which protects consumers from the fraud that plagued the system under President Biden and his administration. I can't believe they wanted to overturn Marketplace integrity, but, oh, they did.
This is just one part of the puzzle. Every year, we spend more than $4 trillion on more than 2,400 aid and subsidy programs. Get that? More than 2,400 aid and subsidy programs. And almost all are vulnerable to fraud--housing subsidies, student loans, childcare programs, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and the list goes on.
We should be grateful that President Trump is working to root out this widespread fraud. The American people expect the government to work for law-abiding citizens, not criminals, and ensuring these scammers face justice is crucial to restoring trust and accountability.
To support his efforts, I recently introduced the Fraud Accountability Act. This legislation would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to explicitly make clear that fraud is a deportable offense. This will provide another tool for the President to deport or denaturalize scammers who have come to our country to steal from the American people--to steal from the U.S. taxpayer; to steal from the Federal Government--and pad their pockets.
Hard-working taxpayers deserve to know their money goes to those who truly need it. It should not be going to criminals who are choosing to game the system. I know the Fraud Accountability Act will help and assist in holding these individuals to account.
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