Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...Pot, meet kettle. The Trump administration wants us to know it cares a lot about health care fraud.
Late last month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his department was “deferring” nearly $870 million in Medicaid payments to California and approximately $199 million to Minnesota.
Why?
Because the administration says it suspects those states’ public health insurance systems are overrun by fraud.
“CMS is done trying to chase down stolen and misused funds,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, at a July 21 news conference.
Did Dr. Oz provide concrete examples of fraud in California or Minnesota?
Not one, according to the Associated Press. In April, per the AP, President Trump’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services admitted that it made a “significant error in figures used to help justify a fraud probe” into New York’s Medicaid program.
And in June, “California’s Medicaid director told a congressional committee that CMS had not yet provided ‘any instances of fraud, waste or abuse’ to the state in its justification of a $1.3 billion Medicaid funding deferral announced in May.” (Yes, the administration did this to California three months ago.)
I realize that it’s 2026 and irony is dead. But can we still laugh at the obvious insincerity of Trump’s concern with fighting fraud?
This goes way beyond the fact Trump is the only president found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and liable for fraudulently inflating the value of his assets to defraud banks and insurers.
Safeguards discarded
Consider the administration’s efforts to dismantle the federal government’s watchdog system.
“For some reason, the Trump administration has fired or forced out at least 21 of the inspectors general (IGs) since January 2025,” wrote Cato Institute analysts in April. “In its recent budget, the administration proposes cutting real IG funding by 23% between fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2031.”
Today, nearly 40% of the federal government’s 72 inspector general positions are currently vacant, according to the libertarian think tank.
Trump’s 2027 budget even proposes cutting staff at the office specifically in charge of investigating fraud at Health and Human Services.
Far from fighting scams in America’s federal health system, this president has granted clemency to hundreds of people convicted of health care fraud, including more than 10 executives convicted of specifically swindling Medicare.
Trump even commuted the 20-year prison sentence of a nursing home magnate, Philip Esformes, convicted of scamming Medicare and Medicaid to the tune of $1.3 billion, the “largest health care fraud scheme ever charged by the Department of Justice.”
The president is searching for any sliver of an excuse to punish his political enemies, real or imagined.
In February, he used his State of the Union speech to lambaste Democratic-run California, Maine, Massachusetts and Minnesota as hotbeds of fraud. Following his lead, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Energy and Commerce announced they were investigating California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, Nebraska, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington for Medicaid fraud. (Notably, nine of those 10 states are run by Democratic governors.)
Will they find fraud in these states? Of course! Medicaid is a huge system, and it attracts lots of fraudsters — just like the ones Trump has pardoned.
In fact, federal investigators will, undoubtedly, find tons of fraud in California. We’re a state of 40 million. We have the most of almost everything.
Florida, Texas spared
If Trump and the House GOP care about health care fraud, I suggest they also consider deferring billions of public health dollars deployed to ruby-red Texas and Florida. Those are two states with notorious records for waste, fraud and abuse. Health care scams have kept Florida’s prosecutors so busy for years that Miami is called the “Medicare fraud capital of the world.”
Texas even ranked first for Medicaid fraud in 2022. The amount of fraud in absolute terms in the Lone Star state that year was more than double California’s. Quite a feat for a state with 10 million fewer people.
So why isn’t the Trump administration withholding their Medicaid and Medicare funding?
If this were really about fraud, Trump never would’ve been firing inspectors general. He wouldn’t be leaving their offices vacant. He wouldn’t be shrinking the very offices charged with investigating Medicare and Medicaid fraud. He wouldn’t be springing convicted Medicare and Medicaid swindlers out of prison. He’d be hunting criminals instead of tilting at windmills.
This is what happens when the federal government becomes the plaything of a petty partisan gone mad.
The message is clear: If you vote for Trump’s political enemies — like California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — then your state’s funding is in the cross hairs.
That’s not law enforcement. That’s political retaliation with taxpayer dollars.
Californians should be infuriated.
Our state’s taxpayers routinely send more to D.C. and get back less than any other state’s. In 2024, Californians paid $275 billion more to the federal government than we received in benefits.
Trump wants to make that imbalance much worse.
In May, as mentioned, his administration put a freeze on $1.3 billion for Medi-Cal.
Last year, it rescinded around $4 billion for one California transportation project. It canceled nearly $2 billion in research grants at the University of California. And it terminated more than $1 billion in clean energy projects in California, many of which are in the Bay Area. (When this news organization studied the partisan distribution, it found that the Trump administration was 3,700% more likely to cut funds for projects in Democratic-controlled congressional districts.)
Those direct cuts don’t tell the full story.
The real long-term impact of this administration’s antipathy for California will come in the form of changes to funding formulas embedded deeply and, often cryptically, in legislation, not executive orders. For example, California anticipates losing more than $30 billion to Medi-Cal (the state’s version of Medicaid) annually beginning next year from Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
Those aren’t Trump’s dollars. They’re California’s.
If this state’s officials or Medicaid recipients broke the law, then show the evidence and file charges. Prosecute every crook. Recover every dollar. Until then, President Trump, stop playing games with California’s cash.
Max Taves is the editorial page editor of Bay Area News Group. He can be reached at mtaves@bayareanewsgroup.com.