President Donald Trump and unelected billionaire Elon Musk have falsely claimed government “fraud” on federal agencies they don’t like without providing any evidence, notes The New York Times and POLITIFACT:
During Oval Office remarks Feb. 11, Trump said that their efforts to cut spending turned up “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse.”
Trump added: “We found fraud and abuse, I would say those two words as opposed to the third word that I usually use, but in this case, fraud and abuse.”
Trump and Musk used the word “fraud” or “fraudster” combined about a dozen times during their Oval Office question-and-answer session. So far, neither Musk nor the Trump White House has shown evidence of criminal activity…
“Nothing they have identified is, to my knowledge, evidence of ‘fraud’ or ‘corruption.’ Fraud and corruption are crimes,” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law at George Washington University. “This administration simply has different spending priorities than the last administration. But to label all of it as fraud or corruption is extremely misleading.”
Trump has torn down governmental fraud-finding tools. He fired more than a dozen inspectors general whose job was to ferret out fraud and inefficiencies. He paused the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits businesses from taking bribes from foreign officials.
Government reports show that fraudulent spending is a measurable problem for the federal government. But the evidence that DOGE has uncovered new examples has not yet been proved.
The Washington Post reports how judges have pushed back on claims of fraud:
“The Defendants now plea that they are just trying to root out fraud,” U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. wrote Monday in finding the administration had violated a court order by failing to unfreeze the many federal grants it blocked. “But the freezes in effect now were a result of the broad categorical order, not a specific finding of possible fraud.”
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols reached a similar conclusion in blocking Trump and Musk’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Nichols noted that he asked the administration what harm would come from blocking its move to place 2,000 agency employees on leave. Nichols, a Trump appointee, wrote that the administration “had no response — beyond asserting without any record support that USAID writ large was possibly engaging in ‘corruption and fraud.’”
(Sources: POLITIFACT, The Washington Post, The New York Times)