House To Tackle Fraud When It Returns With Slate Of Bills

Three pieces of legislation aiming to tackle federal and state fraud are set to reach the House floor when members return Monday.

The bills include enforcing data-sharing between state and local governments, as well as creating an assistant attorney general to lead the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to investigate and prosecute fraud. Fraudsters across the U.S. stole or misused funds from several government programs, including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and COVID-era programs intended to feed children.

“Fraudsters have stolen billions in taxpayer dollars from programs meant to help Americans in need, while Democrat leaders looked the other way,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “President Trump and House Republicans are bringing an end to this rampant fraud. With these three bills on the floor this week, the House is answering Vice President [J.D.]Vance’s call for Congress to support the incredible work of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. Accountability is coming for anyone trying to defraud the American people.”

The National Fraud Enforcement Division Act of 2026 would establish an assistant attorney general to “lead the efforts of the Department of Justice to investigate, prosecute, and remedy fraud affecting the Federal Government, Federally funded programs, and citizens of the United States,” according to the bill’s text. The assistant attorney general would oversee multi-agency and multi-district fraud investigations, provide assistance to attorneys generals’ offices on fraud issues and develop national enforcement priorities related to fraud.

Another bill, titled the “Protecting Taxpayers from Health Care Fraudsters Act,” would provide funds to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the DOJ to prevent fraudulent health payments. It would increase mandatory anti-fraud funding drawn from the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund and would permit the HHS’s inspector general to use funds to “detect or prosecute health care fraud and abuse” and “communicate with the public about health care fraud.”

The extra funds are concentrated in fiscal years 2027 through 2030.

The Preventing Rip-offs and Obtaining Oversight of Funds (PROOF) Act aims to “enhance information-sharing” between the federal and state governments on detecting and prosecuting fraud. The legislation would require a governor to provide the U.S. attorney general with information needed to investigate fraud in Medicaid, SNAP, the Coronavirus Relief Fund and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.

Vance said in August that the federal government needed Congress’ cooperation to take certain actions, including data sharing between federal and state governments.

“There are a few things that we really need to do and that we can’t do in the federal government without the cooperation of Congress,” Vance said. “And the first, I would say the most important of these is data sharing. So, when we’ve looked at the anti-fraud efforts that we’ve taken, one of the weirdest and most difficult parts of this is the black box that exists around certain state programs.”

Vance’s task force identified roughly $230 billion in suspected fraud and stopped about $55 billion in payments they flagged as fraudulent.

Federal prosecutors charged over 90 defendants in Minnesota for fraud, with over 80 of the defendants being of Somali descent. A Somali facility in Minnesota, which called itself “The Quality Learing Center,” appeared to be inactive despite being licensed to care for 99 children.

Seventy-eight defendants were charged with stealing over $350 million from Feeding Our Future, a federal child nutrition program.

An estimated $280 billion in COVID-19 aid was stolen by fraudsters, while another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. About $400 billion of pandemic aid was improperly reallocated to falsified or stolen Social Security numbers, a June 2025 report found.

U.S. states reported having to replace over $320 million in stolen SNAP benefits from October 2022 to December 2024, according to a December 2025 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. A Maryland resident was sentenced to 54 months in federal prison “for masterminding” a SNAP benefits “fraud scam” and other related crimes, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

An Obama-appointed judge ruled Monday that SNAP recipients could use their benefits to buy unhealthy foods. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins approved waivers in 23 states, allowing them to prohibit SNAP participants from using their benefits to purchase items such as ​candy and soda, Reuters reported.

“USDA is empowering states with greater flexibility to manage their programs by approving SNAP Food Restriction Waivers that restrict the purchase of non-nutritious items like soda and candy,” USDA’s statement said. “These waivers are a key step in ensuring that taxpayer dollars provide nutritious options that improve health outcomes within SNAP.”

The DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division uncovered roughly $350 million in alleged fraud in late July in several southeastern states, including Alabama, Florida and Georgia. These cases involved SNAP benefits, Small Business Administration loans, housing benefits and tax fraud. Those states agreed to data-sharing agreements with the division to give DOJ access to “publicly available corporate registration and public benefits payment data held by these state agencies.”

The House passed other bills in 2026 aimed at tackling fraud, including the Deporting Fraudsters Act of 2026 and the Stop Child Care Scams Act of 2026.