The Movement: Behind the GOP’s anti-fraud midterm push

The Movement The Movement: Behind the GOP’s anti-fraud midterm push Comments: by Emily Brooks - 06/23/26 8:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied by Emily Brooks - 06/23/26 8:00 AM ET Comments: Link copied

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From Vice President Vance’s task force to a wave of messaging bills in Congress, Republicans have gone all-in on an anti-fraud push ahead of the midterm elections, turning to a long-running GOP theme in the hope that it is a political winner.

Underscoring the importance of the issue to the GOP midterm message, Vance highlighted his anti-fraud messaging at rallies in Nassau County last week — where Republicans hope to unseat Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) — and in Bangor, Maine, last month, where Republicans are defending Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

Several congressional committees have undertaken investigations into fraud in federal programs. House Republicans passed a wave of anti-fraud messaging bills this month aimed at boosting agencies’ ability to detect and stop fraudulent payments, and fiscal hawks still hoping to pass another party-line reconciliation bill say that it will be focused in part on rooting out fraud.

Republicans have for decades decried “waste, fraud and abuse,” with budget hawks, even compiling annual lists of projects they see as objectionable spending. But this “war on fraud” — as President Trump articulated in his State of the Union speech early this year — takes the push to an extent not seen outside the party’s reeling over claims of a rigged election in 2020.

Outside conservative groups say the anti-fraud message is resonating with the grassroots base. Daniel West, government relations director at Heritage Action, brought up the anti-fraud messaging unprompted as I was chatting with him about the conservative group’s top areas of focus in the midterms.

A Trump administration official recalled seeing an internal poll that showed anti-fraud was a bigger issue to Republican voters than immigration.

Conversations with GOP staffers and operatives reveal that the push is something of a refinement of anti-fraud and anti-waste messages that have been major themes through Trump’s second term.

One GOP staffer supportive of the anti-fraud endeavors quipped that the push is like DOGE 2.0 — casting it as a new-and-improved effort at rooting out fraud that is more disciplined with lasting effects, and without the negatives of the miscalculations, cuts and firings that hindered the public’s view of the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts.

Some of those involved with the anti-fraud endeavors would certainly not characterize it as being like DOGE, though. They see rooting out clear fraud as distinct from DOGE slashing entire agencies, programs or budgets.

Even with the negatives, DOGE helped reveal an interest and hunger among the conservative base.

Republicans had built on that sentiment a little bit last year when they presented the “One Big Beautiful Bill” as combatting waste, fraud and abuse in Medicaid and food assistance programs, pushing back on any descriptions of its provisions as cuts to the programs — and feeling encouraged at polling they saw from the message.

But the anti-fraud message really ramped up to a whole-of-party focus at the start of the year after right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley went viral for his videos alleging fraud at Somali-run childcare facilities in Minnesota. That video had a “powder-keg effect” for the anti-fraud messaging, according to West of Heritage Action.

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi used the videos to renew attention on other federal charges and convictions against individuals of Somali descent in the state, who took $250 million in COVID-19 funds — ostensibly for a child nutrition program — for lavish personal use.

Another national Republican operative said that when Shirley’s video came out, there were high-level conversations in the party on the potential to make fraud concerns more of a national issue. Republicans planned investigations and learned how to probe potential fraud in other states. Shirley testified in a House Judiciary Committee hearing.

The Vance-led anti-fraud task force, though, had already been in the works well before the Shirley videos came out, according to a Trump administration official — and that the task force was not conceived as anything that was political or electoral in nature.

“This is just something that the president and vice president have really cared about,” the administration official said. “Frankly, this is the only administration that actually wants to do anything about it.”

Still, an anti-fraud message, the other GOP operative said, was “central to what we as Republicans have been running on: Cleaning up the mess that Joe Biden Democrats left behind.”

Top Republicans have certainly echoed that sentiment.

“He likes fraud,” Vance said of Suozzi during the Nassau rally last week. “Because unfortunately the story of this state has been that your government, your leadership and too many of your congressmen have allowed the government to rip you off and give your money to fraudsters.”

Vance pointed to the Department of Justice announcing a lawsuit against New York’s director of Medicaid for allegedly facilitating fraud. That is just one of many actions the White House has touted as part of its “unrelenting full-scale assault on the fraudsters, scammers, and corrupt operators.”

The administration has also halted billions in Medicaid payments to states; blocked millions in student loan applications; announced charges in several fraud cases; and suspended hundreds of “high risk” hospice and home health providers in California.

The anti-fraud efforts have gotten a small amount of pushback and scrutiny from Democrats and the wider public but much less than Republicans expected.

A Washington Post report last week that scrutinized the effort said the fraud task force was “sweeping up legitimate small businesses” — pointing to 43 hospice centers that said they were wrongfully shut down. The story quoted Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz in a June press conference: “If we have two dozen hospices that we need to turn back on again, and we’ve shut down 900, that’s a fairly good hit rate.”

Republicans are encouraged by polling on their fraud effort.

In public polling, a Harvard-Harris poll conducted in May found that 84 percent of voters believe there is “a lot of fraud in government programs.” Additionally, 78 percent supported “undertaking a full-scale effort to find and eliminate fraud and waste in government expenditures” while 56 percent approved of Vance’s anti-fraud task force, and 60 percent agreed Democrats rushed programs and enabled fraud during the Biden administration.

That poll wasn’t all rosy for Republicans, though, as 52 percent found that voters blamed Republicans more than Democrats for fraud and waste in government.

So, is the anti-fraud push the ticket to Republicans defying historical trends and seeing midterm success? Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Viet Shelton argued that the GOP’s anti-fraud push won’t hold up to scrutiny.

“The inescapable reality is that, thanks to House Republicans, millions of hardworking Americans are seeing their health care get ripped away, rural hospitals close, and costs skyrocket in real-time. No amount of half hearted spin is going to change the fact that voters will hold Republicans accountable for America’s health care crisis,” Shelton said in a statement.

Republicans, meanwhile, think that Democrats have no effective way to argue against an anti-fraud message.

“Elections have consequences. When you put people who are against fraud and as vehemently dedicated to that as the people demand and expect, when you put Republicans in charge, we go root this stuff out, we bring it to your attention, and we eliminate it,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in a press conference earlier this month.

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JD VANCE TAKES THE STAGE

Vice President Vance’s press tour for his new memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” coincided with him selling the administration’s U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding that has divided the party and gotten some intense criticism from big figures in the conservative coalition.

The whole dynamic felt like a test run for a potential 2028 bid — though Vance insisted that was not the point of the book. He was predictably on-message but came off as not feeling rehearsed, while still providing some insights into his personal psyche and thinking.

He also had a few thoughts about the state of the right-wing coalition. Some highlights:

On Megyn Kelly’s show, Vance said President Trump liked the idea of Vance going on the podcast and defending the president’s policies, despite Trump effectively saying Kelly was “not MAGA” because she had criticized conservative radio host Mark Levin over Iran and Israel.

Vance gave Kelly this assessment of the non-interventionist and neoconservative factions in the party: “The frustration that I’ve had with, you know, the non-interventionist side has been that the attitude seems to be, ‘We disagree with the president on this policy.’ Look, we can have that debate but fine. Okay. You disagree with the president on this particular policy. That doesn’t mean you can give up on the entire enterprise. And the reason, Megyn, the reason why neocons are so much more effective in politics than the people on the other side in our coalition is because they play the game. They get disappointed. They make their criticisms. And they go back and they live to fight another day.”

When responding to The New York Times’s Ross Douthat saying that the Trump administration does not have a Christian tone, Vance said: “I’m not saying we’re perfect, because we’re not. My point is that the tone argument is, in some ways, I think, people see what they want to see. And I also think that tonal arguments are ways of, frankly, policing working-class ways of communication and covering them in elite preferences.”

Asked about the administration not overturning the Biden-era rule allowing medication that can be used in abortions by mail, Vance told “Relatable” podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey that it is important that Food and Drug Administration review of the drug is “led by the science” because that is “how you make sure this stuff is defensible once it will inevitably be challenged in court.” “I hear from sort of the abortion abolition movement all the time. And my response to them is you — we can’t be immune to the realities of modern politics. And I worry sometimes that we have lost the persuasion battle, and that’s what really has to change for the pro-life community to win big in the future,” Vance said.

ON MY CALENDAR

Wednesday, June 24: The District of Columbia Republican Party hosts a reception with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), 5:30 p.m. Details here.
Tuesday, June 30: The Federalist Society’s New York City Lawyer Chapter hosts a conversation with Mollie Hemingway on her book on Justice Alito. Details here.

THREE MORE THINGS

America First Policy Institute announced last week that it added three former Trump administration officials to its staff. Todd Lyons, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Chad Mizelle, who was chief of staff and acting associate attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, join as senior fellows. Sonny Joy Nelson, who was special assistant to the president and director of media affairs at the White House, is a new communications adviser.
Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.), a swing-district freshman Republican who has repeatedly broken with party leaders to vote in favor of labor priorities, announced last week that he got the endorsements of the American Federation of Government Employees and the Pennsylvania Conference of Teamsters. The two unions had historically endorsed Bresnahan’s Democratic predecessor in the district, former Rep. Matt Cartwright, including in 2024.
Tucker Carlson says he no longer supports the Republican Party. Carlson, the former conservative cable news host, has been critical of the GOP’s staunch support of Israel, but now said he believes that the Republican Party “puts the interests of a foreign country above those of its own citizens,” referring to Israel. “I would not support the Republican Party. There’s no chance I would support the Republican Party,” Carlson said on the Can’t Be Censored podcast on June 18. He added, however, that he won’t support Democrats either.