Vance Brought Twenty Lawmakers to the White House Over Medicare Fraud. The Audited Improper-Payment Bill Is $94 Billion a Year.
On Wednesday morning, August 5, 2026, Vice President JD Vance (R) hosted roughly twenty members of Congress — House and Senate both — at the White House to talk about a single line item: fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. Fox News reported the meeting the day before it happened. The White House did not release an attendee list, and no individual member has been publicly confirmed as being in the room.
The audited case for holding that meeting is not in dispute. In an April 27, 2026 report, the Government Accountability Office found the federal government made $186,000,000,000 in improper payments in fiscal year 2025 — across 64 programs at 15 agencies, up $24,000,000,000 from the year before, with roughly 82% of that total consisting of overpayments. Medicare and Medicaid sit on GAO’s High-Risk List and together accounted for more than 66% of the government-wide improper-payment estimate the prior year.
The administration has its own numbers too, and they are much larger. Those are self-reported by Vance’s task force rather than audited by GAO, and this story keeps the two sets on separate ledgers on purpose — because the difference between them is exactly what Congress is being asked to legislate against.
- $186,000,000,000 — government-wide improper payments in FY2025, across 64 programs at 15 agencies — GAO-26-108694, April 27, 2026
- $37,390,000,000 — Medicaid improper payments in FY2025 (6.12%), up from $31.1 billion and 5.09% in FY2024 — CMS FY2025 Improper Payments Fact Sheet
- $56,730,000,000 — combined Medicare improper payments — Fee-for-Service, Part C and Part D added together — per the same CMS fact sheet
- $23,670,000,000 — Medicare Advantage (Part C) improper payments, the one major line moving the wrong way — up from $19.07 billion in FY2024
- $230,000,000,000 — fraud the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud says it has identified since inception, with $56 billion halted before payment — Vance's own figures, July 31, 2026, not GAO-audited
Vance chairs the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, created by executive order in March 2026 and stood up with its first meeting later that month. Nearly everything the task force has done since has been executive-branch work: flagging suspect contracts, referring cases to the Justice Department, and freezing payments before they leave the Treasury. The August 5 meeting is a different kind of ask. Payment freezes and referrals live and die with an administration. Statute does not.
That is the practical argument for putting members of both chambers in one room on one morning: the fraud patterns the task force keeps surfacing — hospice enrollment of people who are not dying, durable medical equipment billed to patients who never ordered it, skin grafts billed at rates no clinician can explain — are enabled by rules Congress wrote and only Congress can rewrite. The White House framed the session as being about legislative action specifically, not about announcing new enforcement numbers.
GAO’s April 27, 2026 report is the number that matters most, because it is the one nobody in either party disputes. Government-wide improper payments hit $186,000,000,000 in fiscal 2025, spread across 64 programs at 15 agencies. That is an increase of $24,000,000,000 over fiscal 2024, and roughly 82% of the total was overpayments — money that went out the door and should not have.
One definition has to be nailed down before any of this makes sense. An improper payment is not the same thing as fraud. It is a payment that should not have been made at all, or was made in the wrong amount, or cannot be documented well enough to prove it was correct. Some improper payments are theft. Many are paperwork. Conflating the two is the fastest way to lose an argument about this subject, and it is why the numbers in §03 come with their own footnotes attached.
What is not ambiguous is where the money concentrates. GAO’s February 25, 2026 High-Risk List update keeps both Medicare and Medicaid designated as high-risk programs, a status they have carried for years, and notes that the two together represented more than 66% of the entire government-wide improper-payment estimate for fiscal 2024. Two programs. Two-thirds of the problem.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services publishes its own improper-payment estimates, and the fiscal 2025 fact sheet is more interesting than the headline total suggests, because the lines are moving in different directions. Medicare Fee-for-Service came in at $28,830,000,000, a 6.55% error rate — genuinely improved from $31,700,000,000 and 7.66% the year before. Medicare Part D landed at $4,230,000,000, or 4.00%, the cleanest of the major lines.
Then there is Medicare Advantage. Part C improper payments rose to $23,670,000,000 at a 6.09% rate, up from $19,070,000,000 and 5.61% in fiscal 2024 — a $4,600,000,000 increase in a single year, in the fastest-growing corner of the program. Add Fee-for-Service, Part C and Part D together and Medicare’s combined improper payments come to roughly $56,730,000,000. That is the number a hearing witness should be asked about, and it is the one most coverage skips.
Medicaid was the largest single line at $37,390,000,000, a 6.12% rate, up from $31,100,000,000 and 5.09% the prior year. CHIP added $1,370,000,000 at 7.05% — the highest error rate of any of them. But the Medicaid figure carries a caveat that belongs in every honest telling: CMS states that 77.17% of Medicaid’s improper payments were driven by insufficient documentation, which the agency describes as “generally not indicative of fraud or abuse.” Roughly three-quarters of the biggest number in this story is a records problem, not a theft problem. That does not make it acceptable — unverifiable spending is still unverifiable — but it is not the same crime, and pretending otherwise hands critics an easy rebuttal.
Vice President Vance holds the first meeting of the Trump administration's Task Force on Eliminating Fraud.
The August 5 meeting did not start from a blank page. In May 2026, the House Ways and Means Committee — chaired by Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), who has publicly tied the effort to the task force’s findings — advanced a package of anti-fraud bills aimed squarely at the categories CMS keeps flagging.
H.R. 8883, the Protecting Seniors and Stopping Fraudsters Act, sponsored by Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-TX-24), would increase hospice and home-health inspections from once every three years to annually, triple the penalties for reporting failures, and require CMS to notify seniors when they have been enrolled in hospice care. That last provision exists because people have been enrolled without knowing it. The committee ordered the bill reported by a vote of 27-16.
H.R. 8871, the DME Scammer Prevention Act, sponsored by Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL-04), targets durable medical equipment — wheelchairs, braces, monitors — by requiring suppliers to submit electronic claims within 90 days instead of the current 365, and directing GAO to review the fraud-detection technology CMS contractors actually use. Shortening the claims window from a year to a quarter shrinks the runway a shell supplier has to bill and vanish.
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Trump appointee, has described the hospice and home-health problem in unusually direct language for an agency head.
“We've seen systemic and deeply troubling fraud in the hospice and home health space, with bad actors exploiting some of our most vulnerable Medicare patients and stealing money from the American taxpayer.”
Dr. Mehmet Oz · Administrator, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
At a Cabinet meeting held at Camp David on July 31, 2026, Vance announced that the task force has identified $230,000,000,000 in fraud since it was created, and that $56,000,000,000 of that was halted or blocked before payment went out. Those are the task force’s own figures. They have not been audited by GAO or any inspector general, and they are not directly comparable to the improper-payment estimates above, which measure a different thing over a fixed fiscal year.
The underlying case work is more concrete than the top-line tally. In April 2026 the task force flagged $6,300,000,000 in federal contracts flowing to businesses it identified as potentially fraudulent. The starkest single category is allografts — skin substitutes billed to Medicare — where national claims grew from roughly $200,000,000 in 2019 to $14,400,000,000 in 2025, a spike Fox News and CMS have put at about 7,100%. Within that, the task force flagged 4,200 specific claims totaling $224,000,000 through May 2026. And per a July 30 post from Vance, the Justice Department’s fraud unit has brought 460 criminal charges covering $6,500,000,000 in intended loss and $1,400,000,000 in actual loss, with $127,000,000 in assets seized. Defendants in those pending cases are presumed innocent.
Follow @WHFraudTF for all of our work in rooting out all fraud, no matter how big or how small.
Not everyone has taken the invitation to participate. When the task force convened a roundtable of state attorneys general on May 26, 2026, roughly two dozen Democratic attorneys general declined, citing the short notice they were given. Medicaid is jointly administered by the states, which makes state AGs the enforcement partner most likely to actually recover money — and their absence from the table is a fact worth recording, whatever the scheduling merits of the objection.
Vice President Vance's task force to eliminate fraud is ensuring that Americans' tax dollars are used to support Americans.
Vice President JD Vance (R) — chairman of the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, created by executive order in March 2026; hosted the August 5 White House meeting.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, CMS Administrator (Trump appointee) — on record describing “systemic and deeply troubling fraud in the hospice and home health space.”
Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), Ways and Means Chairman — driving the House anti-fraud package and tying it publicly to the task force’s findings.
Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-TX-24) — sponsor of H.R. 8883, ordered reported 27-16.
Rep. Aaron Bean (R-FL-04) — sponsor of H.R. 8871, the DME Scammer Prevention Act.
Roughly two dozen Democratic state attorneys general — declined the task force’s May 26, 2026 roundtable invitation over short notice.
Strip away every contested tally and the audited floor still stands: $94,120,000,000 in improper Medicare and Medicaid payments in a single fiscal year, in two programs GAO has flagged as high-risk for years. Executive orders can freeze a payment. Only Congress can close the rule that let it go out.
