Photo: Alamy
Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday that he will work with the Justice and Treasury Departments as part of what President Donald Trump has described as a nationwide “war on fraud.”
During his State of the Union address Tuesday night, the president announced that he was appointing Vance to oversee the administration’s response to public welfare fraud. The president pointed to recent high-profile cases involving large-scale fraud tied to members of the Somali expatriate community in Minneapolis.
President Trump did not detail the scope of Vance’s authority, but the vice president said in an interview with Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” that the effort would involve coordination across multiple agencies.
“The Department of Justice is going to be investigating and, where possible, throwing fraudsters in prison,” Vance said. “It’s also going to mean that [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent and some of our friends at the Treasury Department, [are] going to be looking at income tax records.
“We’re going to be trying to understand how it is that the American people have been defrauded, how it is that people have used resources and programs that should go to American citizens, instead have been going to fraudulent uses,” he added.
Vance said his team would move “very aggressively” this year to address fraud in public programs and raised questions about whether people in the country illegally may have benefited from improper payments.
“The story of the American economy in so many ways during the Biden administration … is that the American citizen was ripped off for people who shouldn’t be here and by politicians who should have known better,” Vance said. “The president has asked me to take a full, whole government approach to trying to understand that.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has acknowledged fraud cases in his state and said his administration is working to strengthen oversight and enforcement measures.
The administration has not yet released additional details about specific initiatives or timelines for the expanded enforcement effort.