Senate Democrats Skip Their Own Fraud Hearing — Chairman Rand Paul, to the Empty Dais: ‘There Doesn’t Appear to Be a Great Deal of Interest Across the Aisle.’
On July 15, 2026, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee gaveled in a full hearing titled “Exposing Fraud in America” — three witnesses whose entire body of work is finding fraud on camera, and a Republican-only dais to hear them. Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) presided. Independent journalist Nick Shirley, O’Keefe Media Group CEO James O’Keefe, and the Project On Government Oversight’s Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette testified about Medicaid, day-care, and voter-registration fraud they had personally documented in multiple states.
Of the committee’s seven Democratic members, only Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI) showed up — and he left after opening statements and a handful of questions, well before Republicans finished questioning the witnesses. When Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) pointed out there was no Democrat left to take a turn, Paul answered for the record: “There doesn’t appear to be a great deal of interest across the aisle.”
Six Democrats never appeared at all — Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), John Fetterman (D-PA), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) — and none of the seven issued a joint statement explaining why. Five days later, RealClearPolitics ran the verdict as a headline: “Dems Damn Themselves With No-Shows at Fraud Hearing.”
- 6 of 7 — Democratic members of the Senate Homeland Security Committee who never appeared at all — the 7th, Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI), left before the main witness testimony began
- $90 million+ — intended losses in a Minnesota Medicaid-fraud case cited in Nick Shirley's testimony, part of a 15-defendant federal charge
- $46.6 million — alleged fraud in a separate Medicaid autism-services case involving kickbacks and unprovided care, also cited in testimony
- $222 billion — California's current Medicaid spending, up from $108 billion while enrollment grew less than 1%, per Chairman Paul
- 28 — recorded exchanges of Los Angeles petition circulators offering cash or drugs for ballot signatures, per James O'Keefe's testimony
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has broad jurisdiction over waste, fraud, and abuse across federal programs, and Wednesday’s session was a full committee hearing, not a subcommittee formality — convened at 10 a.m. in the Dirksen Building’s SD-342, with a fully occupied Republican side that included Paul, Moreno, and Rick Scott (R-FL). Peters showed up for opening statements, asked a handful of questions, and left before Paul turned the floor over to the main round of witness questioning.
By the time Moreno moved to hand the next round to the minority — standard committee custom — there was no one left to hand it to. “If there were a Democrat here, yes,” Paul replied when Moreno asked whether a Democrat was next in the queue. “So, there’s no Democrats present at a hearing about fraud,” Moreno said. Paul’s answer, entered into the record, became the headline of the week: “There doesn’t appear to be a great deal of interest across the aisle.”
Shirley, the independent journalist whose undercover videos of Minnesota day-care centers and health agencies helped trigger the current wave of congressional fraud legislation, testified first. “Fraud is so rampant in the United States that I could go to all 50 states and uncover millions of tax dollars being defrauded, wasted and abused,” he told the committee, describing a Minnesota Medicaid case that led to 15 defendants being charged with more than $90 million in intended losses, and a separate Medicaid autism-services case involving $46.6 million in alleged kickbacks and unprovided care. “When a fraudster commits fraud,” Shirley said, “he or she steals from all of us.”
O’Keefe followed with hidden-camera footage from Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where his investigators recorded 28 exchanges of petition circulators offering homeless residents cash, cigarettes, or marijuana in return for voter-registration signups and ballot-petition signatures — some using forged signatures under the names of real registered voters. One woman identified in the footage, Brenda Brown Armstrong, has since been federally charged and agreed to plead guilty to paying people $2 per registration. “The question before this Committee is not whether this fraud exists,” O’Keefe testified. “The question is why the incentives allow it to flourish.”
Hedtler-Gaudette, testifying for POGO, took a step back from individual cases to argue the problem is structural — that weak internal-control requirements and thin oversight staffing across federal and state benefit programs, not any single bad actor, are what let fraud of this scale recur. His written testimony called for systemic reforms rather than case-by-case prosecutions alone.
Moreno made the empty dais itself part of the record, not just a passing aside. “Literally the entire Democrat dais is empty,” he said, before witnesses had finished testifying. “There is an entire party that does not care whether taxpayer money is burnt.”
“Literally the entire Democrat dais is empty… there is an entire party that does not care whether taxpayer money is burnt.”
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH)
BREAKING: The Senate is holding an anti-taxpayer fraud meeting right now with Nick Shirley and James O'Keefe... and stunning new footage shows EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRAT SEAT is empty. 100% of Democrats on the committee were invited, 0% SHOWED UP. The Party of Fraud.
The reaction traveled well past the committee room. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who does not sit on the committee, called the no-show Democrats “cowards” in a post of her own. O’Keefe posted his own account of the empty side within the hour, framing it as proof the fraud he and Shirley documented was too uncomfortable for the minority to sit through.
Literally no Democrats showed up the fraud hearing in the senate for myself or Nick. We predicted personal insults or difficult cross examination — instead we got silence, because the truth and the facts of what's on video probably transcend the partisan divide.
Paul used his opening statement to put the scale of the underlying problem in front of the empty chairs anyway. California’s Medicaid program, he said, has grown from $108 billion to $222 billion in spending while enrollment rose less than 1% — a gap that, on its face, invites the kind of scrutiny the hearing was built to provide. Separately, one New York City adult day-care facility billed $12 million against 7,000 registered patients, a ratio investigators flagged as implausible on its face.
O’Keefe’s earlier reporting, cited again at the hearing, had already put a number on one state’s exposure — roughly $170 million in fraud, waste, and abuse uncovered in California. A separate USDA accounting cited by Republicans found California and 40 other states together lost more than $10 billion to SNAP payment errors. None of those figures were disputed on the record, because no one on the other side of the dais was present to dispute them.
Most Democrats couldn't make it to our hearing on government fraud. The empty chairs made their priorities pretty clear. Hard to claim you're fighting waste when you don't even show up.
The hearing did not happen in isolation. Vice President JD Vance (R) chairs the administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, created by executive order on March 16, 2026, and has separately said, “When we find somebody committing fraud against Americans, we’ve got to show up, arrest them, and try to send them to prison.” More than 30 fraud-related bills have been introduced in Congress since Shirley’s earlier viral reporting — a legislative pipeline Wednesday’s hearing could feed, if the record it built holds up.
A hearing’s value to oversight depends on both sides showing up to press witnesses — that is the entire design of a cross-examination model built into committee procedure. With six of seven Democratic members absent and the seventh gone before the questioning that mattered, the record Republicans built on Medicaid, day-care, and voter-registration fraud went unchallenged and unrebutted, whatever its merits. That is a gap in the process, not proof the underlying findings are wrong — but it is a gap the committee’s minority chose, rather than one imposed on it.
No subpoena followed, and the hearing was not rescheduled — because neither mechanism applies here. Subpoenas compel witnesses, not fellow senators, and a sitting member’s attendance cannot be forced the way a reluctant witness’s can. The hearing simply proceeded, closed on schedule, and became a story in its own right: by the following week, the empty dais itself — not the fraud figures presented in front of it — was the headline running across conservative media and, five days later, RealClearPolitics.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) — committee chairman; presided over the hearing and stated for the record that there was “not a great deal of interest across the aisle.”
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) — pressed the point that no Democrat remained to question witnesses and put the empty dais on the record.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) — ranking member; the only Democrat to attend, for opening statements and a handful of questions, before leaving.
Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), John Fetterman (D-PA), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) & Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) — the committee's six other Democratic members; none appeared or issued a joint statement explaining the absence.
Nick Shirley, James O’Keefe & Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette — the three witnesses, testifying on Medicaid, day-care, and voter-registration fraud they documented directly.
Vice President JD Vance (R) — chairs the administration’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, the broader anti-fraud push this hearing fed into.
Six of the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s seven Democrats never showed up to a hearing on fraud in Medicaid, day-care programs, and voter registration — and the seventh left before the questioning that mattered. Nothing compelled them to stay, and nothing will compel a do-over. What’s left is an official record built entirely by one party, a chairman’s line that wrote its own headline, and a taxpayer-fraud debate the other side chose not to enter.
