By Jose E. Navarro, MBA | National | September 18, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Vice President JD Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud has spent six months publicizing individual wins: a $260 million funding clawback from Minnesota, a lawsuit against New York over diverted Medicaid dollars, nearly $6.3 billion in federal contracts flagged as potentially fraudulent. What the task force has not publicized is what the Government Accountability Office’s own audit found for the same period: improper payments across federal social-service programs rose, not fell, on its watch — from $162 billion in fiscal 2024 to $186 billion in fiscal 2025, a $24 billion increase concentrated overwhelmingly in the programs the administration says it is fixing.
The breakdown matters more than the headline number. Medicare accounted for $57 billion of the total and Medicaid for $37 billion, with the Earned Income Tax Credit and SNAP adding roughly $31 billion between them. The Department of Health and Human Services attributed the Medicaid increase specifically to breakdowns in eligibility redeterminations and provider screening as pandemic-era flexibilities were phased out — an administrative failure, not a fraud ring, and one that predates and will likely outlast any single crackdown. Nineteen programs posted error rates above 10 percent; six exceeded 25 percent. Roughly 82 percent of the total, $153 billion, was money sent to people or providers who should not have received it. The rest, about $33 billion, was underpayments and undetermined errors — meaning some share of that money never reached people who actually qualified for help. For context, this year’s error rate is roughly in line with pre-pandemic norms, and the cumulative total since 2003 now exceeds $3 trillion — a reminder that payment error is a structural feature of large benefit programs under administrations of both parties, not a partisan invention of this one.
Even $186 billion understates the problem. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which spent $16.5 billion in fiscal 2025 supporting the country’s poorest families, reports no improper-payment estimate at all, because HHS lacks the statutory authority to require states to produce the data GAO would need to calculate one. A program built specifically to serve people with the least capacity to absorb administrative error is the one program GAO cannot even measure.
The gap runs in the other direction too. Vance has pointed to Hawaii as a state that has recorded zero indictments and zero convictions for Medicaid fraud in recent years — despite receiving federal funding specifically earmarked for states to prosecute it. That is not a Washington failure; it is a state declining to spend money already appropriated for oversight it was funded to perform. Notably, it does not appear anywhere in GAO’s $186 billion figure, which measures payment errors, not unprosecuted fraud. The two numbers describe different failures inside the same system: one is money that went out the door incorrectly, the other is money that sat unused while the errors kept happening.
That distinction sits awkwardly next to the task force’s public messaging. Vance has singled out California, New York and Hawaii for what he describes as a pattern of states treating benefit programs as “political patronage,” and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz has floated the idea that some governors are complicit. Those are prosecutorial claims aimed at specific bad actors, and some of them may well be accurate. But GAO’s finding is structural, not prosecutorial: the government’s own eligibility-verification and provider-screening systems, the machinery meant to catch errors before a check goes out, are not keeping pace with the volume of claims moving through Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP and EITC. A lawsuit against one state’s Medicaid vendor does not touch that machinery. Neither does flagging $6.3 billion in contracts for a 30-day paperwork review. Both may be legitimate enforcement actions, and neither moves the number that actually measures whether the underlying system is working.
Congress has known about the TANF reporting gap and the eligibility-verification shortfall for years; GAO has repeatedly recommended fixing both. Neither recommendation has been enacted. What is different this year is the politics: an administration that has made fraud its signature accountability message is now the one whose own watchdog shows the underlying error rate moving in the wrong direction. That is not proof the crackdown is failing on its own terms — criminal referrals and contract fraud are a genuinely different problem than systemic payment error, and the two shouldn’t be conflated. But it is a reminder that the loudest accountability story coming out of Washington this year is not the same story GAO’s auditors are actually telling, and American taxpayers, along with the families these programs are supposed to serve, are the ones absorbing the difference.
Human-Directed AI Journalism — reporting and analysis produced under human editorial direction with AI research and drafting assistance.