Vance said his whole-of-government task force has been able to stop $56 billion in fraudulent claims so far across federal food assistance programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Medicaid, which is the healthcare program for low-income and disabled Americans and children. 

The task force was created by President Donald Trump via executive order in March. Since then, Vance said the team has identified $230 billion in fraud and abuse, a figure the vice president identified as a conservative estimate. 

Vance asked members of Congress to require increased data sharing with the federal government to verify eligibility and ensure that illegal immigrants are not receiving federal dollars from state-administered programs. 

The vice president highlighted that several Democrat-controlled states have refused to share SNAP records with the federal government to verify that only U.S. citizens and legal residents are receiving benefits funded by federal taxpayer dollars.

“If the state of California gives those food stamp benefits to an illegal alien, to a violent criminal, the federal government has no visibility, and sometimes the states themselves have no visibility,” Vance said. “So we need to work with Congress and we need some legislation that would actually force some data sharing.”

Vance also asked for stiffer criminal penalties to prosecute fraud, noting that cases with under $1 million in fraudulent claims are often not investigated or prosecuted at all.

Miller said creating tougher penalties for fraud would “be able to chill the criminal conduct of millions, whereas right now, no matter how many people who prosecute, you’re still left with the criminal element thinking ‘I’m willing to risk six months in jail for $5 million in ill-gotten gains.’”

“There needs to be strict, clear, mandatory minimums,” Miller said of sentencing requirements. 

Vince Haley, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, provided a 10-point list for members of Congress to consider for entitlement reform: 

1. Verify Medicaid providers and SNAP retail stores before making payments.
2. Require criminal background checks and fingerprinting for healthcare providers in categories with high Medicaid fraud, and re-verify every three years.
3. Verify beneficiary or recipient immigration status before issuing taxpayer-funded benefits.
4. Compare entitlement program rolls monthly against death records, wage records, and incarceration records.
5. Double the fraud investigators at the state level.
6. Use secure chip technology, photo identification, and expiration dates for welfare benefit cards used in food and cash assistance programs.
7. Prohibit liquor and smoking retailers from accepting food stamp benefits.
8. End the use of automatic reenrollment in Medicaid.
9. End self-attestation of income and household information.
10. Prevent states from issuing Medicaid benefits to insurance companies for recipients who have already died.

The policy council director said the greatest problem is that the ease of fraud in social safety net programs “deny people the benefits and blessings of work.”

“Our responsibility is to root out fraud and corruption in our welfare systems, send people to jail who steal benefits, and make it impossible for public officials to escape their responsibility to establish systems of accountability and program integrity, so that more Americans will realize the benefits and blessings of work,” Haley said. 

Ferguson said multiple times that the anti-fraud efforts by the Trump administration are about “restoring social trust” that enables the public to want to help their fellow countrymen. 

“When Congress was creating these programs, some of them almost 100 years ago, we didn’t expect that these programs were going to be attacked by fraudsters to the tunes of billions and billions of dollars a year,” Ferguson said. “We expected, because that’s the America that we were, that everyone would play by the rules.”