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White House: Loss Of ‘High Trust’ Society Requires Congress To Institute Harsher Penalties For Fraud

Welfare programs were created in a ‘high trust’ America that no longer exists.

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THE WHITE HOUSE — Vice President J.D. Vance has been leading the charge against billions in taxpayer fraud. But to mobilize the entire federal government in combating the theft, Vance said Wednesday, Congress needs to create harsher punishments for fraudsters and force states to share data for welfare recipients.

Vance hosted a roundtable with members of Congress at the White House midweek, attempting to hammer out plans for legislation to strengthen the executive branch’s ability to investigate fraud and expand prosecutors’ options to penalize Americans and illegals committing fraud.

Since the start of Vance’s anti-fraud task force, the group has uncovered $230 billion in fraud, with Vance noting the force was “conservatively estimating” the total, and stopped $56 billion in payments that were on their way to fraudsters.

Along the way, however, the task force has found some roadblocks to being able to uncover and stop even more fraud. Vance said there are three primary areas that need congressional approval to advance the mission: data sharing, stiffer legal punishments, and funding.

Among those goals, the “first and most important thing” is data sharing.

“One of the weirdest and most difficult parts of this is the black box that exists around certain state programs,” he said. Vance went on to add, “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. 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.”

Andrew Ferguson, Federal Trade Commission chairman and vice chair of the anti-fraud task force, said that “data sharing should be a requirement” for taking part in federal programs, and noted that fraud is relatively easy to achieve in America because of the lack of data. “Data is the enemy of fraud,”........

© The Federalist