(Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
Since the advent of DOGE, which was first conceptualized on an X space between President Trump and Elon Musk the summer before the 2024 presidential election, the policy arm of the MAGA movement has been committed to rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in government operations.
While Americans have long known about the wasteful misuse of taxpayer dollars, DOGE spotlighted the issue in a way that could no longer be ignored.
Virtually every single Executive Branch agency was subject to DOGE review and interrogation in some form, and a few – such as USAID – were disbanded entirely because of the level of wastefulness discovered.
Though DOGE’s heyday may have passed, the administration’s commitment to eliminating waste – which is invariably endemic in large, complex bureaucracies – remains a top domestic priority.
The latest iteration of this commitment is observed in the Vice President’s recently launched Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, a whole-of-government operation dedicated to identifying and attacking any form of waste, fraud, and abuse throughout the government – federal, state, and local.
Already during their first meeting the task force identified various categories of fraud in healthcare and hospice centers, which is certainly just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger effort to identify fraud in the healthcare industry – Medicare and Medicaid abuse especially, a well-known issue – nationwide.
Countless Democratic-run states, such as California, New York, and Minnesota, are primed to be ground zero for the work of this task force, given how incompetently run they tend to be, as demonstrated by the exodus of people fleeing these states for Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and other right-wing bastions down south, which reasons why the news headlines always seem to center on these states as epicenters of the type of fraud described earlier.
The whole-of-government approach is also welcome. Part of the problem is that fraud is permitted to fester because of information silos between the agencies.
In the past many agencies had no way of communicating critical information easily between one another.
Though the Executive Branch conceptually and constitutionally operates in uniform, in actual practice logistical and cultural practicalities make the transmission of interagency data more complicated than it should be.
Indeed, in certain cases even within the agencies themselves the transmission of data – such as exchanging critical personally identifiable information used to track down illegal aliens and violent felons, as an example – can run into bureaucratic logjams and information silos.
For certain types of data, no centralized management system exists, yielding more problems. Thus, there is often duplicative work in government, which slows down operations while enabling more fraud along the way.
Under Democratic presidencies, there is a strong push to augment bureaucratic power, as the left-wing ideology which guides Democratic administrations seeks to establish a managerial administrative state that empowers an unelected class of professional “experts” – i.e., the bureaucrats who comprise the civil service.
The larger Government becomes, either with the advent of new agencies or subagencies, the more Government process is susceptible to information silos because agency offshoots tend to sequester information to particular groups of people.
And given the caprices of human nature, subject to petty jealousies of all sorts, government work is often territorial. Ego rules the day in many circumstances. Hence there may be – and often is – infighting within the same agency, complicating processes further still.
Accordingly, whenever the government can operate on an interagency framework – where the principals charged with critical decision-making authority are clearly defined to be presidential political appointees, rather than handing such responsibility over to career civil servants, it anticipates the problem beforehand by centralizing operations, thus making everyone’s lives much easier as a result.
Another way Vance’s Task Force might also help streamline the transmission of information is by integrating artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies, into their workflows.
Whenever anti-fraud identification systems can be integrated from a top-down level for the purpose of aggregating data between the agencies so that operations become automated, it creates a system that is immune to emotion and thus better situated to achieve the goal at hand.
The Vice President’s anti-fraud task force is long overdue and a welcome and natural extension of the DOGE reforms which began over a year ago.
Fraud may seem like an impossible issue to tackle because it feels so systematic and baked into the cake of government operations.
But that is not how it should be: the government is intended to be nimble, small, and serve the American people by maximizing individual liberty.
It was never intended to be a sprawling bureaucracy with too many agencies to count, and so convoluted and intricate as to make fraud, either directly or indirectly, a forgone outcome.
The anti-fraud measures are consistent with the President’s broader mission to consolidate executive power, which ensures that operations are managed by the President and his political appointees, which is the best way to run a government because the ones making the decisions are ultimately accountable to the American people.
For those reasons, Americans should be optimistic about this task force and the opportunity at hand to enact meaningful and lasting change in how the government operates.
In the long run, this will not only save potentially billions of dollars, but more importantly, ensure that the government is serving the people, and not itself.
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