White House creates new assistant attorney general focused on fraud

The Trump administration is creating a new assistant attorney general position to focus on fraud, Vice President JD Vance announced during a White House press briefing on Thursday. 

The new Senate-confirmed position will be located in the White House and report to Vance and President Donald Trump, according to the vice president, who said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has promised a “swift confirmation.”

The creation of the attorney general job comes as social services fraud in Minnesota continues to garner national attention, although Vance suggested that whoever takes the role will also be working on cracking down on violence against law enforcement officers after an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. 

In Minnesota, federal prosecutors have estimated that the total fraud could be as much as $9 billion, although Democratic Governor Tim Walz — who announced earlier this week that he’s dropping his reelection campaign — has disputed that number.

While Republicans have alleged that Walz knew about the issues with fraud and failed to act, Democrats have raised concerns of xenophobia and racism. Most of those indicted for fraud so far are of Somali descent.

The new assistant attorney general will be working with an existing “major interagency task force to make it possible to get to the heart of this fraud,” Vance said, with an initial focus on Minnesota that will expand to other states as well with a “nationwide jurisdiction over the issue of fraud.” They will work at least through the end of the Trump administration, the vice president said.

“We know that the fraud isn’t just happening in Minneapolis. It's also happening in states like Ohio, it’s happening in states like California,” Vance said. “This is the person who is going to make sure that we stop defrauding the American people.”

The Trump administration told five blue states on Tuesday that it was freezing $10 billion in funding for child care and social services programs to review them for fraud, which Democrats have called an act of retribution. It also asked states for data on the programs.

The Department of Homeland Security has also sent agents to Minnesota to investigate fraud and other agencies have paused grants to the state. 

Vance suggested that whoever holds the new position in the White House will also be involved with future efforts against those who “are defrauding the United States by inciting violence against our law enforcement officers,” adding that the new AAG “is going to kick that into high gear.”

The vice president also alleged that “domestic terrorism networks” are trying to thwart the administration’s immigration agenda and said the new assistant attorney general will “prosecute and investigate this stuff even more."

Those comments came after Wednesday's deadly ICE-involved shooting. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has characterized the deceased woman, Renee Nicole Good, as a “domestic terrorist,” although officials in the law enforcement community are asking the public and the administration to wait for more information before coming to conclusions about the incident.

Immigration agents have fired upon at least nine people in the last four months, according to The New York Times. 

In terms of the fighting against the fraud found in Minnesota programs, Linda Miller — a fraud prevention expert who previously was the deputy executive director of the government’s Pandemic Response Accountability Committee — told Nextgov/FCW that “I don’t think that’s particularly helpful in trying to stop this from happening in the future.”

“It’s very likely that other types of frauds schemes are happening in other states and a fraud-dedicated Attorney General in theory can help uncover those frauds schemes, but the structural problems that allowed this fraud to take place must be addressed immediately, and in my opinion are far more important than beefing up enforcement capabilities,” she said via email. 

Among those are structural weaknesses related to agencies' legal authority to slow or pause payments based on documented fraud risk, Miller says.