Show Notes
The White House anti-fraud task force spent last week on a victory lap.
Cabinet official after cabinet official stepped forward to tally the haul: $200 billion in identified fraud across the federal government. The Small Business Administration flagged $22 billion in potentially fraudulent loans.
The General Services Administration found $6.3 billion in crooked government contracts. Social Security investigators turned up millions in stolen benefits, including payouts to people listed on the rolls as being up to 125 years old.
It played like an infomercial for the task force.
But on the latest episode of The Drill Down, Peter Schweizer and Eric Eggers flag something the cabinet meeting left out: the same week investigators were touting those numbers, a congressional amendment was quietly moving that would strip them of the data tools that made the discoveries possible.
“How do you prevent fraud from being exposed?” Schweizer asked at the top of the show. “Well, the first thing you do is deny that it exists. The second thing you do is you prevent fraud investigators from having the tools they need to actually uncover it.”
To unpack it, the hosts brought in Andy McLanahan, former head of Florida’s state office investigating EBT and food stamp fraud, and a veteran of both law enforcement and the data business.
“Another Word for Fraud is Crime”
Eggers set the stakes early, pushing back on the idea that fraud is a victimless paperwork problem.
“When you say fraud, another word for fraud is crime,” he said. “It’s one thing to say, I’m not that interested in looking into crime. It’s another thing to say, I’m gonna actively work against the people who are trying to stop the crime.”
McLanahan reinforced a point he said the public consistently gets wrong: the big losses don’t come from individuals fudging their applications. They come from organized criminal networks, some domestic, some international.
He pointed to a $14 billion Medicare bust last year that the FBI and DOJ tied to Russian actors using identity fraud to bilk the government. That, he said — not the stereotype of a grandmother padding her benefits — is what’s draining the treasury.
The hosts noted the scale of punishment that has occasionally followed. Schweizer cited the Minnesota Feeding Our Future case, in which one defendant was sentenced to 42 years in prison and ordered to repay $243 million in restitution.
The “Digital Defunding of the Police”
At the center of the episode was an amendment attached to the Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Act, scheduled for a hearing the next day.
McLanahan described it bluntly: “Hidden in it is an amendment that essentially is a digital defunding of the police by preventing them to get the access to that data. And that’s going to impact every single agency that’s funded under the CJS Appropriations Act.”
The amendment — introduced by Representative Adriano Espaillat — would prohibit federal agencies and Offices of Inspector General from purchasing data, including public records, for investigations.
Schweizer translated the practical effect: “That’s a member of Congress saying, hey, agencies, you don’t get to look at the data to figure out who’s stealing.”
McLanahan, who has worked these cases from the inside, said the consequence would be a return to a vanished era of investigation.
“Very possibly we’ll be going back to the old gumshoe police detective mentality of paper searches and file cabinets,” he said. “When you blind law enforcement to public records, to identity data, to even license plate reader information, fraud analytics — you’re not protecting privacy. You’re protecting anonymity for criminals and fraud rings.”
The hosts argued the cut would force investigators to hand-search 50 separate states’ court records, property appraiser websites, and driver’s license databases — not stopping fraud investigations outright, but freezing them in place.
Who Represents the District
The hosts spent time on the lawmaker behind the amendment. Espaillat represents New York’s 13th Congressional District, which includes Harlem, and is the only former illegal immigrant to serve in Congress.
A review of public assistance fraud cases touching his district, the hosts said, turned up a SNAP fraud and bribery scheme involving six individuals and more than $66 million; the BH Rags Home Care embezzlement case of $1.3 million tied to a nonprofit and migrant shelter; and a $68 million adult daycare and Medicaid fraud investigation.
“You would say this is an individual who might, on multiple levels, be incentivized to want these problems to go away,” Schweizer said.
The IRS Goes the Other Way
Schweizer and Eggers also highlighted a contradiction inside the federal government’s own posture.
While the appropriations amendment would deny investigators access to public records, the IRS has decided to retain the biometric facial images taxpayers upload when filing — holding them for at least six months specifically to fight tax refund fraud.
“All the data you want when it comes to tax returns in the IRS, we’re all in on that,” Schweizer said. “But when it comes to public assistance — which is taxpayer money being fraudulently given to criminal networks — no, we don’t want you to have access to that data.”
Beyond fraud: the Data Fight Reaches Elections
McLanahan warned the data cut would reach past welfare fraud into child exploitation cases, citing a Child Rescue Coalition briefing that said digital leads from online predator rings have to be converted into real-world identities before arrests and rescues can happen. Without commercial investigative tools, he said, that conversion stalls.
From there, the conversation turned to elections, where Eggers argued the same dynamic is at play: investigators and the public being kept from the data needed to keep systems secure.
He pointed to California, voting this week in its primary for governor and the Los Angeles mayoral race, as a state famous for slow counts and lax procedures — so much so that Governor Gavin Newsom wrote to election officials urging them to speed up.
Newsom warned that “the longer the vote counting takes, the more mis- and disinformation spreads,” and said election administration had reached “a breaking point.” California officials pushed back, insisting that going carefully is how they ensure voters aren’t disenfranchised and the count stays accurate.
Then the DD crew turned to Washington state, where, Eggers noted, ballots are mailed to every registered voter twelve days before election day, and counting can run twenty-one days after — a 40-day window — with no proof of citizenship required to register.
They described a recent episode in which a stack of ballots was found near dumpsters, with the man who discovered them unable to get a straight answer from election officials about what to do. Alongside the ballots, the hosts said, were large numbers of “EBU” cards — “eligible but unregistered” voter registration mailers tied to a database called ERIC.
ERIC, Eggers explained, is marketed as a tool to cross-reference rolls and prevent duplicate registrations, but in practice, it requires member states to send registration offers to eligible-but-unregistered residents. An analysis of the discovered cards, the hosts said, found hundreds directed to an address shared by an immigration attorney — and that 92% of the names on the cards were Chinese, a pattern they said held across multiple years at 92%, 80%, and 77%.
McLanahan tied it back to his own casework. Under the 1996 welfare reform law’s motor-voter provisions, he noted, government welfare agencies are required to ask applicants if they want to register to vote. In Florida’s largest food stamp fraud case, he said, one-third of the related identity fraud cases had also requested voter ballots. “Garbage in, garbage out,” he said.
Schweizer added that ERIC shares its data with member states but won’t provide it to federal authorities like the Department of Justice — the same pattern, he argued, of systems being kept from the people trying to secure them.
The Bottom Line
Schweizer and Eggers framed the whole fight as a single question playing out on two fronts — welfare and elections — over who gets access to the data.
The hosts characterized it as Democrats in Washington pushing to “defund the data,” while Republicans in Washington state back a November ballot initiative requiring proof of citizenship to register.
Asked for a prediction, Eggers said he doesn’t expect the amendment to succeed, but argued the value is in seeing where the factions are choosing to fight.
McLanahan, for his part, returned to the people he said get lost in the debate: the legitimate beneficiaries who get their services faster and more accurately when good data weeds out the fraud.
“They just don’t want fraud to be dealt with,” Schweizer said, “because it must be politically beneficial to them.”
Watch the episode above.
