Eric Eggers says the federal government just exposed the visible edge of a fraud machine that Washington spent years protecting.
The Vice President of Research at the Government Accountability Institute pointed to a new Justice Department takedown that FBI Director Kash Patel valued at $6.5 billion, with more than 450 people charged. Eggers called it real money — and only a fraction of what’s out there.
“That’s actually more than the GDP of two of the countries in the World Cup right now,” Eggers said.
But the number isn’t his real story. The posture change is.
Eggers says that under Joe Biden, the official in charge of Medicaid services sent every state a letter instructing them to leave suspected fraudsters on the rolls.
“You are not allowed, even if you suspect people enrolled in Medicaid and Medicare are committing fraud, you’re not allowed to remove them from the rolls,” Eggers said, describing the December 2024 directive. “Compare that to today, where you’ve got lots of federal officials saying, we’re making arrests, we’re saving money.”
He tied the rot directly to election integrity, arguing that a system that lets the dead collect benefits can’t be trusted to keep them off the voter rolls.
“If you think dead people can bill California and the federal government for Medicaid reimbursement, do you think they can’t vote?” Eggers said.
He saved his sharpest criticism for the states. Eggers says California lied about its fraud rate for decades and collected federal cash bonuses for it.
“They’re actually making states like California, which has for decades lied about their fraudulent rate and received cash bonuses for lying,” Eggers said. “They’re putting them on the hook.”
Now, he says, the incentives have flipped. Federal officials are forcing states to own their error rates on programs like SNAP, and every agency is racing to report savings.
“Cabinet meetings now, Dan, are like prices, right? You’ve got every agency tripping over themselves to say, we saved this much money in fraud,” Eggers said. “Obama and Biden completely ignored it for decades.”
Eggers reserved his final word for the officials who let it happen. He named Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as someone who could face DOJ scrutiny, arguing states had every chance to stop the fraud and chose not to.
“They had a chance to stop this at the state level. California had a chance to stop this at the state level. They went the other way,” Eggers said. “Instead of stopping it, they stopped the investigators from actually trying to pursue charges.”
It took Washington, he says, to do what the states refused to.
Watch the clip above.
