Vice President JD Vance's anti-fraud task force has withheld $1.4 billion in federal funding from home health and hospice providers across the country, following a sweep of payment suspensions targeting operations in California, Minnesota, and several other states. The action marks the most significant financial enforcement yet from the task force Vance launched on March 27, and it carries a striking detail: roughly 90 percent of the suspended providers have not even bothered to contact the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services since the money stopped flowing.
Trump administration officials told Fox News Digital they believe that silence speaks volumes, that the providers who went quiet were never legitimate enterprises to begin with.
A spokesperson for Vice President Vance framed the withholding in blunt terms:
"The vice president's task force continues to stop the flow of taxpayer funds before they fall into the hands of fraudsters and deliver savings to the American people."
The same spokesperson called the action "great momentum in the fight for the President's War on Fraud." And the numbers behind that claim are hard to dismiss. In Los Angeles alone, the task force suspended 447 hospices and 23 home health agencies suspected of fraud, a wave Fox News Digital first uncovered last month. The estimated theft from that single cluster of providers topped $600 million.
That Los Angeles crackdown exposed a pattern so brazen it defied belief, with dozens of hospice companies licensed at a single small office building, raising alarms about how such operations ever passed certification in the first place.
Sheila Clark, president and CEO of the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association, warned congressional lawmakers during an April 22 House Ways and Means Committee hearing that fraud is flourishing across her state. Her testimony painted a picture of an industry riddled with shell operations collecting federal dollars for patients who may not exist.
"You'd be amazed at how many hospices... you can walk up to the door in California and there is nobody there. You can see five months' worth of mail stacked up."
Clark pressed the obvious question: "And yet, they passed a survey. How did that happen?"
She went further, questioning the physical absurdity of some licensed locations:
"How do you put a hospice in a burrito stand? How do you put a hospice in a retail store? That all had to be vetted through licensure, certification and accreditation."
The implication is hard to miss. These operations did not spring up overnight without someone, at the state or federal level, waving them through a licensing process that was supposed to catch exactly this kind of fraud. California's own attorney general, Rob Bonta, recently announced the arrest of five individuals linked to an alleged scheme that reportedly raked in $267 million through fraudulent billing to Medi-Cal. That case alone dwarfs most white-collar prosecutions, and it is just one ring among many now under scrutiny.
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz appeared on Fox News's "Jesse Watters Primetime" on Monday and described a fraud landscape that stretches well beyond California's borders, and well beyond domestic grifters. Oz told guest host Kayleigh McEnany that the schemes involve foreign government connections.
"We've got Russian government involvement, we believe, in Los Angeles. We've got the Chinese government involved in a big fraud ring in New York."
Oz also pointed to South Florida, where he said former Miami Mayor Francis Suarez had flagged what Oz called "the Cuban connection." The scale of the problem there, Oz argued, is visible in a single statistic:
"We've got twice as many durable medical equipment suppliers, selling wheelchairs and canes, as there are McDonald's in South Florida."
That ratio alone should have set off alarms years ago. Oz added that enforcement is complicated by flight risk: "The owners often flee back to Cuba with the money the moment we move in on them." The federal government has since moved to halt new medical equipment business enrollments nationwide as part of the broader crackdown.
A senior White House official drew a sharp line between the current administration's approach and what came before:
"The task force has made clear that the Biden administration's policy of giving direct cash payments to fraudsters is over."
That characterization gains weight when paired with the Small Business Administration's own recent action. Days after the task force's initial meeting, the SBA referred 562,000 suspected fraudulent loans, totaling more than $22.2 billion, to the U.S. Department of the Treasury for collection. Those loans trace back to pandemic-era relief programs that critics warned at the time were ripe for exploitation.
The Minnesota connection reinforces the point. Last year, arrests tied to the "Feeding Our Future" scheme exposed a massive fraud ring that exploited federal child nutrition programs in that state. The Vance task force's decision to target Minnesota alongside California suggests the administration views these cases not as isolated scandals but as symptoms of a system that spent years paying first and asking questions never.
The earlier suspension of 470 Los Angeles providers alone represented a staggering enforcement action, and the $1.4 billion nationwide figure now dwarfs it.
Perhaps the most damning detail in the entire episode is the 90 percent figure. Nine out of ten suspended providers simply went dark when the checks stopped. They did not call CMS to dispute the suspension. They did not hire lawyers to contest it. They did not produce patient records or staffing logs to prove they were running real operations serving real people.
They vanished.
That pattern is consistent with what Clark described in her congressional testimony, offices with months of uncollected mail, hospice licenses attached to retail storefronts, surveys somehow passed by facilities with no apparent staff or patients. It suggests a fraud apparatus that was industrial in scale and brazen in execution, sustained by a regulatory framework that either could not or would not catch it.
The House Oversight Committee has separately demanded answers from California Governor Gavin Newsom over more than $105 million in alleged Medicare hospice fraud, adding another layer of accountability pressure on state officials who oversaw the licensing pipeline.
The $1.4 billion withholding is a significant enforcement milestone, but questions linger. The task force has not disclosed the total number of providers affected nationwide or identified which states beyond California and Minnesota were targeted. The specific legal and administrative mechanisms used to justify the suspensions have not been detailed publicly. And while five arrests have been announced in California, the gap between the scale of the alleged fraud, potentially billions of dollars, and the number of people held accountable so far remains wide.
Whether the task force can translate payment suspensions into criminal prosecutions, asset recoveries, and permanent structural reforms will determine whether this effort amounts to a genuine cleanup or a temporary disruption.
President Trump has made the eradication of systemic fraud a cornerstone of his domestic agenda. The early returns from the Vance-led task force suggest the problem was far worse than most Americans realized, and that the previous administration's oversight was far weaker than taxpayers deserved.
When you cut off the money and 90 percent of the recipients don't even bother to ask why, you have your answer about where the money was going.
