Remarks: JD Vance Holds a Fraud Task Force Event in Kansas City, Missouri - September 14, 2026

Good morning, everybody. Thank you all. Please have a seat. First of all, good morning to our great FBI agents and all the people, the law enforcement representative here who keep us safe. We're thankful for your efforts and thankful for your hard work. And most of all, uh, thankful for your courage and dedication to what you do. So pleased to be here, pleased to be, uh, here to announce a very, very important anti-fraud effort.

And I'm gonna kick it over to, uh, Todd Blanche after this, but there are two big things we want to announce here today. The first is that under the leadership of Kelly Loeffler, who by the way has been an amazing advocate for the American people, has probably been the most zealous anti-fraud person in the entire administration, we are gonna suspend 870,000 people permanently, people who defrauded the government over the last couple of years, uh, the last couple of decades.

We're gonna make it impossible for them to get loans from the federal government. If you think about the PPP program, which was set up by Congress and by the administration during the first Trump administration to ensure that our small businesses were able to operate in the incredibly challenging environment that was created by the COVID pandemic, and of course, by the state government response to the COVID pandemic, what we did is we created a program to ensure that small businesses were able to operate, and importantly, American workers were able to be supported.

But as happens with so many of the ge- -- the programs that are born out of the generosity of the American taxpayer, we had many, many people who took advantage of those programs. People who decided to steal from the American taxpayer, steal money that was supposed to go to small businesses and American workers.

Well, we think it makes sense that if you were caught stealing from the American taxpayer, you shouldn't be able to benefit from these loans anymore. So we're gonna suspend about 870,000 people from being able to access these funds in the future and from being able to borrow money from the American taxpayer.

If you screwed the American taxpayer, the federal government is now gonna say, "You're cut off. No more. You shouldn't be applying anymore. And if you do apply, you're no longer able to get those benefits." Pretty common sense. You know, I think this drives me to my second point, which is unfortunately, we've seen this with so much of our anti-fraud efforts and hard work over the past couple of years, this should have been done earlier.

It's kind of ridiculous that so much of the fraud that we saw under the PPP program wasn't actually enforced, wasn't taken seriously by congressional Democrats or the Biden administration. So what we've done here is say that no fraud is too small. If you tried to steal money from the American taxpayer, if you took funds that ought by right have gone to American small businesses or American workers, not only we're gonna cut you off, but we're gonna prosecute you.

And I'll let Todd talk a little bit more about this, but in just the last three months, we've taken close to 90 prosecut- -- prosecutorial decisions that are making clear and sending a message to the fraudsters that if you defraud the American people, if you steal money from the American taxpayer that should go to American workers, we're actually gonna prosecute you and we're gonna try to send you to prison.

I think the American people have every right to expect that when they write the check to the IRS, when they write a check to the federal government, that money is gonna go where the law says that it should go and not to fraudsters. We're taking a number of actions here today to ensure exactly that happens.

To the American people, we want to protect your money. We want to ensure that your generosity goes to the legally entitled recipients and not to fraudsters. And to Congressional Democrats, I'd say we'd love to have your help. Why don't you guys support our efforts to fight fraud instead of making it harder for us to fight fraud?

So with that, I'll turn it over to the great attorney general of the United States to talk a little bit more about what we're doing on the administration of justice side. Todd, come up here and take it away. Todd Blanche.

Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Thank you very much for, for both you and President Trump leading in what has been an historic effort to combat fraud in this country. Um, as everybody knows, um, the president's task force to eliminate fraud is led by our great vice president and we've seen more happen, um, since the establishment of that task force than we have for years and years and years.

And that's, um, something the American people should be appreciative of. Um, President Trump has, is, is, is very focused on eliminating fraud and waste in this country. There has never been a president in American history more serious about stopping fraud and protecting the American taxpayer than President Trump.

He said the ripoff of this country was over. And we're delivering on that promise and the results, some of which we're gonna talk about now, speak for themselves. It's an honor to be in the great state of Missouri, a state that still believes in hard work, honesty, and common sense, and standing with real fraud fighters like our great, um, SBA administrator, Kelly Loeffler, our new Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, Senator Schmidt, Governor Mike Kehoe, our Inspector General Kirk, who you're gonna hear from in a few minutes, and our U.S. attorneys who are here today, and all of our federal and state partners and federal agents here.

Thank you for being here. I flew in from Washington, D.C. This morning for one reason. The American people were robbed, and they deserve to know. The Paycheck Protection Program, which the vice president just talked about, was run by the SBA. It was created to save jobs and keep good American businesses alive during COVID, but some fraudsters treated it like a personal piggy bank.

The DOJ, the FBI, the Small Business Administration, and their great Office of Inspector General saw this happening, and now we're looking to every day fix it. We're talking about today just less than two months, between June 12th and August 31st. With the help of 40 U.S. attorney's offices and 20 federal and state investigative agencies, we uncover, uncovered approximately $245 million in losses.

There's a lot of people that have been implicated or charged, but so far we've charged over 80 individuals tied to this theft of $245 million. Now, I just wanna talk about two cases to give, to give you all an example of what we're talking about here. In one case out of the Western District of Missouri, which encompasses Kansas City, Jamie Gray allegedly attempted to steal more than $55 million from tax buyer, payers by filing hundreds of these loans.

He claimed to own dozens of businesses that were in operation prior to the pandemic, but in every instance but one, these businesses didn't even exist. The only business that he claimed to own that did exist was a business called Fur Lives Matter. Now, it was a business out of Texas and it does exist, but when law enforcement talked to the people who actually worked at Fur Lives Matter, they had no knowledge of Mr. Gray.

And so for that, he's been charged with three count- -- three counts of wire fraud and one count of money laundering by the DOJ. One more case to show you the brazen nature of some of these fraud cases. This is out of the Northern District of Iowa. A grand jury charged two individuals with 47 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy.

And here's what they did. They submitted and attempted to obtain fraudulent PPP loans on behalf of a hundred and plus immigrants from Cuba. They falsely claimed that they were self-employed and each had earned approximately $100,000 in gross income in 2019, so before the pandemic, when they actually were not self-employed.

They actually worked at a Northern Iowa meat packing plant or, or somewhere else in Northern Iowa. This effort was an attempt to collect $4.5 million in taxpayer money. And PPP actually distributed over $2 million as part of this scheme. Now, this couple has now fled the company, uh, the country, excuse me, and they remain at large, but we're working hard to, to get them back here.

So those are two examples of the many, many examples you've heard about for the past six months and that I expect you're gonna hear about, um, until we defeat every fraudster in this country. And that's why we're here in Kansas City today. The Western District of Missouri has been one of the top prosecuting offices in this surge that I talked about over the past couple months.

Our U.S. Attorney, Matt Price, who's here on the stage with us, his, he and his office have done great work over the past couple months and shown the country exactly how it's done. So thank you, Matt, for the work and for that of your prosecutors. I also wanna recognize, uh, Colin McDonald and the work of the department's new National Fraud Enforcement Division.

We created that, um, that new division this year and it's already up and running and doing great work. In less than six months, that division has already delivered results and that does not happen by accident. It happens by the support of President Trump and of the Vice President who drove this from the very beginning.

And, and the work that, that that division has already started to do will continue, um, for the next several years, if not for longer. So for years, fraudsters got the message that Washington would look the other way. That era is over. We're charging more defendants, we're convicting more, we're taking the money back, we're working with every single federal agency to use every tool in our toolbox to go after these fraudsters.

The Department of Justice will continue expanding our reach across the country to pursue all fraud, no matter how large or no matter how small. So thank you to the president. Thank you, Mr. Vice President, for being here today. And thank you again to every prosecutor, every investigator in this fight. Let's get back to work.

Thank you.

Thank you, Attorney General Bryant, Blanche and Vice President Vance for your incredible leadership on this task force. And I wanna thank law enforcement and I wanna thank everyone on the stage with me for the partnership. Small businesses are our nation's largest job creators, and among our nation's biggest taxpayers, like every taxpayer, they deserve to know that programs that they fund are not siphoned away by criminals who would rather steal from hardworking Americans than become hardworking Americans.

During the pandemic, the SBA delivered $1.2 trillion through COVID idol and PPP. Now, at least 200 billion of that was stolen, meaning scam artists purchased luxury cars, homes, vacations with the stolen money that was aimed at small businesses and saving the employees that they employ. The Biden administration looked the other way and attempted to forgive known fraudulent loans.

Now thanks to President Trump and Vice President Vance, those days are over. As part of Operation Heartland Surge, the SBA is announcing our largest fraud enforcement to date. As of today, we've suspended 870,000 SBA borrowers. As you heard from the vice president, it's tied to an estimated $39 billion of taxpayer money across 45 states and territories.

Now, you add that to the previous five states that we announced from Maine to Minnesota to California, that takes us up to now all 50 states, about $49 billion in fraud. These suspensions bar them from accessing small business loan and contracting, federal contracting programs, but exposing these criminals is only the first step.

This summer we referred $22 billion to the United States Treasury for collections. And today, the SBA and our Inspector General, who you'll hear from in a minute, is operation, is launching Operation No Doze. We're issuing demand letters to suspected pandemic fraudsters across the country starting here in Missouri and Kansas.

The message is simple. If you stole from the Paycheck Protection Program, if you created fake companies and lied about your employees, we know who you are. We will claw back the money and where warranted, we will refer you to law enforcement so that you can face the jail time that you deserve. The Trump administration is ending the corrupt practice of protecting criminals at the expense of honest American taxpayers.

Thank you and I will now turn it over to our great FBI director, Kash Patel.

Uh, thank you Mr. Vice President. Thank you Kansas City. Fighting fraud takes a team effort, and thanks to President Trump and Vice President Vance, they have led an initiative to combat fraud globally and around the world. And this is what the team looks like. We're doing it every day 24/7, so thank you to the prosecutors, the DAs, the investigators, state and local authorities.

And for me, to my FBI team, thank you for continuing to crush it. One of the things we learned while chasing violent crime and national security criminals aggressively was there was also a tremendous amount of fraud thanks to the reckless abandon of the prior administration. Thanks to the President Trump and Pre- -- Vice President Vance, um, just in the last 18 months, y'all are familiar with the FBI's top 10 most wanted list.

In the last 18 months, this FBI has captured nine of the top 10 most wanted violent offenders around the world. That's more than twice the amount of the entirety of the prior administration. It is a monumental achievement to safeguard America's national security, to safeguard our communities and to safeguard our children.

When I was briefing our vice president about some of these successes of their administration, he said, "Kash, why don't we have a most wanted fraudsters list?" And I said, "Because I'm not as smart as you." Um, it was literally one of these ideas that thanks to the leadership of Vice President Vance, that was right in front of you the entire time, but no one else thought to do it. And the reason we had so much success in our top 10 most wanted list is because the American public are our best partners for information.

We resolved and solved and manhunted these perpetrators around the world because they gave us the information that we were missing. And so thanks to the vice president, we put together the most wanted fraudsters list. And in just the last three months, Mr. Vice President, as you know, we have captured five of the most wanted fraudsters.

They were on the run for a collective 4,000 days. We went to three separate continents and captured fraud totaling value of $2 billion, five in just three short months. But Mr. Vice President, we have even good, more good news for you today, and for the American people, and a message to the world that we will manhunt these fraudsters on every corner of the planet.

Just this past weekend, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with our international law enforcement partners, captured Emylee Thai, a most wanted fraudster on our Most Wanted Fraudster list in Vietnam, who had been there hiding since at least 2023. She herself was responsible for more than $100 million of Medicaid fraud.

So as a result of the Vice President's Most Wanted Fraudsters list, this FBI and our s- -- state and local partners along with our international law enforcement partners have captured six of the most wanted fraudsters on planet Earth, spanning every, almost every continent in the world and totaling over $2 billion in just three short months.

And I hope to bring the same resolve that we did with the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list to this Most Wanted Fraudsters list and double that number by the end of the year. Mr. Vice President, I just wanna thank you for your leadership on that. And just know, uh, for me as your FBI director, uh, to my cadre of FBI director, uh, FBI employees serving around the world, thank you for your dedication to this mission.

Thank you for your relentless pursuit for justice. And most importantly, thank you to all of law enforcement for protecting our most precious resources when it comes to fraud, our elderly and our youth, they deserve it and the Trump-Vance administration is putting them first exactly where they belong. Thanks everybody.

The American people are tired of getting ripped off, and that's really why we're here today. And I wanna thank, um, the President for his leadership. I wanna thank the Vice President specifically for being here today, uh, in Missouri and his leadership on this issue. He has been tenacious. He's very committed to this issue, and that's what it takes.

I think when the American people see the scams of the fake hospice center at a burrito stand in California or the Fur Lives Matter, I guess, scam, uh, that was just announced or what we saw in Minneapolis, uh, it drives them nuts and rightfully so. And these are not victimless crimes. You have on one hand, the American taxpayer.

And not just an abstraction of the taxpayer, but what I think of is the guy that's out here in the summer heat in Kansas City swinging the hammer all day. I think of my dad who works seven days a week in the midnight shift, so we could go on a, a vacation once a year. Those are the people who are being robbed, and they have faces and they have names and their families.

And then you think of the other victims, the people who desperately need access to some of these programs, the family who has a son or a daughter with a disability or the family desperately looking to get their elderly parent into a hospice center. They're being robbed. And that's why I think this effort is so important because when people hear it and we talk about it and politicians use the term waste, fraud and abuse, what the American people wanna know is that there's actually going to be action behind those words.

And that is what is being represented here today on the stage with the full force of this administration led by the Vice President. And, uh, as the lead of the Senate Anti-Fraud Task Force, uh, we're committed to working with the Vice President, the President, um, the Attorney General, the FBI Director, to get this division, which the announcement here of the work that they're being done, get that codified, make sure that that's stood up permanently, that it is a priority of the United States of America, that we have additional tools to find the fraud on the front end so it's not a pay and chase scenario all the time, to make sure that we actually have tougher enforcement and stiffer penalties.

That's what's needed, that's what we're gonna work on. I'm proud to stand with this group of people here today, uh, as the era of accountability has begun in earnest. Thank you very much.

Well, thank you Mr. -- Senator Schmitt and Mr. Vice President. Welcome back to Missouri. On, on behalf of our other statewide elected officials, uh, we're grateful to have you here as well as your team for this collaborative effort to make sure that we really make sure the resources the taxpayers provide go to the people who know how to use it. Uh, it's great to see Chief Graves here with the Kansas City Police Department.

Chief, thank you so much for what you do and your leadership. Mr. Vice President, thank you to you and President Trump. This situation is actually personal to me before politics. I'm a small business owner and my first small business had two SBA loans, Mr. Vice President. And I can't think of where I would be today or where the now over 150 employees that are with that company would be today without the resources of the SBA. But unfortunately, if you have bad actors out there taking those resources and using them improperly, the good guys who are standing in line don't get those resources and we need to make sure they're available.

And Mr. Vice President, as you said, if you're committing fraud against the American people, you ought to go to prison, and we agree with you.

Mm-hmm.

That's why today we're happy to be part of the Heartland Surge. Uh, Director Patel, we're grateful for your leadership efforts in that, as well as the No Doze, uh, effort by the Small Business Administration. An organized, comprehensive and strategic effort between my administration and our state agencies, our Missouri, Missouri Attorney General who's here with us today, the Department of Justice and both of our US attorneys and Tom Albus and Matt Price.

We're aimed at protecting taxpayer dollars by identifying, investigating and prosecuting individuals and businesses that are defrauding the state. Whether it's through referrals and tips, our data analysis that identify fraud, flag, the buck stops here. To anyone looking to defraud the state of Missouri, we're putting you on notice.

We will find you. We will prosecute you, and you will pay. Thank you so much for being here, and once again, welcome back to Kansas City, Missouri.

Go ahead.

I've done a lot of these press conferences as the vice chairman of the president's task force, and we hear lots of huge numbers, and we've heard them today. And the only reason we've achieved these numbers is because President Trump launched this mission and put the vice president in charge of it. Whole of government is thrown around a lot.

This is truly all of government. Cabinet secretary is working with the task force to stop the fraudulent money from walking out the door. When it does make it out the door, inspectors generals chasing it down, investigating it, and handing it to the, uh, Department of Justice led by Attorney General Todd Blanche and Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, and prosecuting these fraudsters and putting them in the jail.

And the ones who run, and the ones who hide, get chased down by the FBI, led by Kash Patel. No matter where they go, Africa, Asia, Europe, doesn't matter, the FBI gets them. The numbers are important, but it is really important to remember why this task force matters and why only the vice president could have been in charge of this.

Every single press conference I've done from coast to coast, we highlight real people are hurt by this. It isn't just numbers, and it isn't just thievery from the American people, real people. In Minnesota, veterans homeless programs are raided by fraudsters to the point of bankruptcy. In Texas and other states, fraudulent commercial driver's license are handed out by candy, and American citizens are maimed and killed when those people cause horrible accidents on the road.

In Detroit, fraudulent trucking companies can exploit the system by using fraud, and they transport drugs and other crime across our border, and sometimes open the door to terrorism. And in states throughout the country, mothers who try to use SNAP benefits to feed their children find their SNAP benefits used up by fraudsters and their children have to go hungry.

And at the end of the day, that's why this is so important. That's why President Trump launched this task force and put the vice president in charge of it. This isn't just about the numbers. It's not just about the thievery. It's about protecting real American citizens, our friends, our families, our neighbors, everyone that we live in this country with and that we need to work with this, in this country to make it a better place to live from real harm caused by fraudsters, undoing the damage caused by four years of the Biden administration, fixing the fraud, punishing the fraudsters, and protecting our fellow Americans from real physical and financial injury.

And that is why this is day is so important. And with that, I'm gonna turn over to Bill Kirk, who's the Inspector General at SBA, who with Administrator Loeffler have been two of the greatest fraud fighters that the entire administration has. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Vice President Vance, Attorney General Blanche, Administrator Loeffler, Chairman Ferguson, and all of you for being here today. Your presence honors the work of my fellow inspectors general and the special agents, investigators, analysts, and auditors of the Small Business Administration Office of Inspector General.

Under the leadership of President Trump and you, Mr. Vice President, we are taking the fight against fraud to every ZIP code in this country and to the neighborhoods of the almost 38 million small businesses that Administrator Loeffler and her SBA team serve. Until about six years ago, my wife and our family lived here in the Kansas City Metro area when I was invited to join President Trump's team in Washington, D.C. Today, I'm happy to be back in the Kansas City area now as the Inspector General for the SBA. My office is charged with investigating and arresting fraudsters who have stolen from the taxpayer.

I'm proud to stand alongside the vice president, the SBA administrator, and the attorney general to announce Operation No Dose. We will start this national operation here in Kansas and Missouri, collaborating with US Attorneys Price and Kriegshauser and their teams as we work across state line road to fight fraud no matter how big or how small.

Working with Administrator Loeffler, we are taking the fraud fight to Main Street. Starting tomorrow, the first set of SBA demand letters are going to suspected fraudsters in Kansas and Missouri. It does not matter when the fraud happened. If you stole from the taxpayer by claiming a pandemic, PPP, idle, disaster, or any SBA loan that you are not entitled to, answer the demand letter you're going to receive from the SBA. If you do not, you will face consequences.

We know who you are and where you live. Operation No Dose will keep you up at night. If you didn't commit fraud, but know of fraud, waste, or abuse involving SBA programs, please report this information on our hotline located on the sba.gov Office of Inspector General homepage. Thank you very much.

All right. Well, thank you all. A great team, and I wanna echo something Andy Ferguson said, which is that this really has required a whole of government and a whole of team effort. And so I wanna thank, most of all, the President of the United States for making this possible. This is, uh, hard work in a lot of ways.

A lot of the guys behind me, a lot of you in law enforcement are working hard on this, but it's not complicated work. All we really needed was a president of the United States to empower the Attorney General and the broad administration to go after the fraudsters. And I have two final thoughts on that. If you're thinking about defrauding the American taxpayer, if you're thinking about skimming off the top, if you're thinking about taking a program that was meant for hungry children or for needy young mothers, don't do it. Go and get a job instead, because this administration is not gonna let you steal from people who we're supposed to be taking care of in this country so that you can get rich while the American taxpayer works their tail off in order to fund our government.

They're working to fund the United States government. They are not working to fund fraudsters, and we're not gonna let it happen anymore. And this brings me to my second point. When we look at all of the fraud that's happened, I remember when Eric and I served in the United States Senate together, Eric Schmidt, a great, great United States senator.

And we would hear about these thousands of cases of PPP fraud. And at the time, Joe Biden was the president of the United States. And I remember thinking people talked about it as if it were an act of God, something that could not be prevented, something that could not be dealt with, and yet we find out that under President Trump's leadership, all you really need is an administration in power to go after the fraud.

You can save the American taxpayers a lot of money. You can save these programs from being defrauded and stolen from, and you can put the fraudsters behind bars. This is not that complicated. The government should've been doing this for years. The fact that it's only been doing it for the past 18 or so months is a great indictment of our political system.

I want to thank the governor of Missouri for being here, but not just for being here today, most importantly, for working with us. And I will say to the great credit of a few Democrats across the country, we have seen some people in state leadership, state attorneys general who have been working with us in the Trump administration to fight fraud at the state level while we fight it at the federal level.

But you know who hasn't lifted a finger to help us? Congressional or Senate Democrats in Washington DC. In fact, they've lied about our anti-fraud efforts and they fought us every single step of the way. If you're looking to cast a ballot in November for somebody who's gonna protect your taxpayer dollars and ensure that the food stamp program actually goes to young families, whose ensures that the Medicaid program actually ensures that our low income children have access to a doctor, who ensure that our small business administration goes to upstart companies, not to fraudsters, then you need to think seriously about why congressional Democrats have refused to help us at every step of the way.

So to our friends in Congress, to, uh, some of Eric's colleagues in the United States Senate, let's get serious about fighting fraud. And so long as congressional Democrats are not serious about fighting fraud, they shouldn't be anywhere near the halls of power. Thank you all and we're happy to take a few questions now.

Go ahead. Whoever's got a question.

Yes, sir. Uh, Matt Felina from KNBC9 News in Kansas City. Uh, we'll definitely talk about fraud, but I also wanna talk about redistricting. That has been a big topic here in the state of Missouri over the past week. The Missouri Supreme Court came out with a ruling last week. We had the Secretary of State Missouri Attorney General here as well.

What message would you send to the Missouri Supreme Court about redistricting here in the state of Missouri?

Well, look, I'm sure this implicates a number of legal matters that I'm hardly an expert on, but what I find most bizarre about the Missouri redistricting debate is that you already had a primary election where people cast ballots with the districts as they exist now. So if the courts don't do what I think that they should, you can have people who are going in the general election and casting ballots in districts that are different than the ballots that they cast just a couple of months ago in the primary.

That to me is an affront to the democratic process. And if the, the Supreme Court wants to step in and change things, they should've changed things back then. And given that they've let these maps exist during the primary election, it seems to make sense to let them exist for the general election. And, and, and the final point I'd, I'd make on this is just on the politics of this, Missouri is of course a pretty deeply red state.

What you have in some of the bluest states in our country, and frankly, even some purple states that lean blue is some of the most absurd congressional districts that I've ever seen. I mean, districts that look like, you know, children's art rather than common sense, reasonably drawn congressional districts.

And, and the problem is when you have courts that say that Missouri is not allowed to draw its districts the way that it would like to, but certain blue states are, what that means is that those courts are saying that the votes of a Missouri Republican or a Missouri Independent count less than a Massachusetts Democrat.

I think it's a fundamental affront to the idea that every single person is entitled to cast their ballot as they see fit. So the courts are gonna do what they do. Obviously I've got my preference, but the weirdest thing about this is to have a congressional primary map that's different than a congressional general map.

That doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Go ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Vice President. This is Mary Margaret Olihan with The Daily Wire. Good to see you again. Uh, a couple members of your fraud task force said that the Biden administration turned a blind eye to this PPP fraud that you're talking about today. Do you have reason to believe that Biden administration officials were aware of this fraud?

And if so, would the Fraud Task Force look into them?

Yeah, m- -- th- -- that's a great question, and certainly the Fraud Task Force is looking into that. When you ask the question, did the Biden administration know this was stuff go- -- this stuff was going on, of course they did. It was an open secret. If you talk to any state governor, the small business administrator, any United States senator in 2022 or 2023, we knew that the PPP program was ri- -- rife with fraud.

I'm not talking about a few dozen cases. I mean, in the state of Ohio, I remember talking to, uh, Lieutenant Governor Jon Husted, who now is, is the senator, uh, representing the state of Ohio. I remember talking to John about this and him being just exasperated that the federal government wasn't taking the fraud more seriously.

And of course, this was early on in the Biden administration. So everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew people were, were skimming off the top. It's just the federal government wasn't doing anything to stop it. Now the federal government is doing something to stop it, but absolutely, we need to be looking into the officials who are turning a blind eye to this stuff because basic good government.

I just, I think the basic social compact that Americans have with their government. They write a check to the government, the government's supposed to protect their rights and ensure that resources go to where it's legally entitled to go. If you're a taxpayer and you write a check to the government and you have no confidence, you're, you're a taxpayer and you see that withholding every single two week pay period that, you know, X dollars goes to Medicaid and goes to Medicare and goes to Social Security and goes to everything else.

If you don't have confidence that the federal government is gonna protect your money, why do you pay taxes at all? That's one of the things that we're trying to do here is to give the American people faith in their government again. You cannot do that unless you take the fraud seriously. And man, the Biden administration didn't take it seriously at all.

Sir?

Mr. Vice President, we heard a lot about what you're doing to get fraud that's kind of already happened. What can the federal government do maybe in a more proactive way with the applications that folks are submitting or the review process to prevent fraud from even taking place?

Well, it's a great question and it's actually one of the reasons why I'm so excited about the action that we're announcing here today is when we say that we're cutting off the people who've defrauded the government in the past, that's perhaps the most proactive thing that we can do because we make sure that if you come back to the federal government, if you come back to the trough, but you've been a fraudster, your application is automatically gonna be dinged as negative.

Now, there's a review process actually in place. People can try to appeal that if they feel like they've been wrongfully tagged as a fraudster. But the unfortunate reality is that almost no one will do that because every single person who has defrauded the government knows when they've done it, they know that they've made a mistake and they know that they shouldn't be getting taxpayer dollars in the future.

And I, I know you guys are asking questions of me, but it did actually just remind me of, of one thing I maybe wanted to ask Todd, which is he said that one of the legitimate government, or excuse me, the legitimate businesses was called Fur Lives Matter. And I wonder, Todd, what product or service was Fur Lives Matter engaged in? Don't, don't answer that question, Todd.

I, I, I, I have no idea, but my one recommendation is find a better name for your business than Fur Lives Matter. Next question.

Matt Kelly with the Kansas City Star. Uh, the KC Metro exports $4 billion of goods to Canada annually. It's four GM plants across the metro and, uh, very complex supply chains across the Canada border.

Sure.

Curious what the administration's going to do to mitigate the economic pain of the, this trade conflict if it, if it drags on.

Well, one of the things the President's trying to do is just make things more fair for the American worker. If you look at what, to your point about that $4 billion export market, we got to ask ourselves, is Canada applying restrictions on Kansas City workers or Missouri workers or Kansas workers that it's not applying to anybody else?

And the unfortunate answer is despite the fact that we all love Canada, it's obviously a friendly country in a lot of ways, their government has imposed extraordinary trade restrictions on American workers all across our country for many years. Now you see this in some cases in the agricultural space where, you know, if, if you buy a pound of butter from Canada, we're not applying any tariffs on it, or at least we weren't. But if we actually send agricultural products into Canada, sometimes our farmers are paying 200%, 300%. The same basic principles applying to our lot of manufactured goods.

And, and at the same exact time, while Canada is imposing a whole host of tariffs on our workers and a whole host of, of export and import controls on American workers, they're letting products come in from the People's Republic of China with nothing like tho- -- that level of restriction. So what the President is doing here, it, it's not in an effort to hurt anybody, certainly not in the United States, not even in Canada.

We're trying to make things more fair. And what we're saying to the Canadian government is, if you want access to American markets, you have to be fair to American workers. This is gonna lead to a place that's much better for American workers, I think frankly, much better for Canadian workers too, but they've got to be more fair.

And if they're gonna mistreat American workers, then it's incumbent upon the President of the United States to fight back, which is exactly what he's doing right now. Next question.

Mr. Vice President, Nicole Sganga, CBS News, thanks for doing this. You said 870,000 borrowers were caught stealing from taxpayers. How many of those have actually been charged with or convicted with fraud? And if they're suspected fraudulent borrowers rather than convicted fraudsters, what recourse does a legitimate small business owner have if they were wrongly convicted?

And then I just wanted to ask because Secretary Loeffler mentioned the SBA says roughly 49 billion is now tied to suspended borrowers nationwide and 22 billion has been referred to treasury. So how much money has actually been recovered for the American taxpayers so far?

So a few, few points on that. So number one is 870,000 people who are no longer able to apply for loans from the federal government, not just because they've been found to be fraudsters in the small business administration program, it's because they've been tagged as having a high likelihood of committing fraud for other actions that they've engaged in. So this actually sets up a system whereby if you have a high suspicion of having defrauded the government, we're not gonna make it easy for you to apply for these loans anymore.

But to your point, we certainly appreciate that some people, you know, mistakes sometimes happen. So we've set up a process to ensure that people can actually challenge whether they've been adequately or accurately, I should say, tagged as a fraudster. Like I said earlier, I don't suspect many people, and we know from prior history, that not many people are gonna appeal that ruling because most of the people who have defrauded the federal government, they know exactly what they've been up to. Uh, we also, you know, you heard from the Inspector General earlier that we, we're actually sending out letters.

We're sending out letters in order to notify people that they're suspected of fraud. So we encourage people to respond to those letters because obviously we don't wanna make mistakes. We don't want people to find out that they've been tagged as a fraudster inaccurately, but we're being very careful, very diligent.

We're sending out some of these letters ahead of time so that we ensure that we're being accurate about this. We're saving the American people's taxpayers money in the process, but we're also not unfairly tagging anybody as a fraudster. We're being very careful about it, but unfortunately there is quite a bit of fraud out there.

Thank you, Mr. Vice --

One more question.

Thank you, Mr. Vice President. Michaela Estruth with Heartlander News. I'm originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, and I was shocked at the fraud there in the state of Ohio. So as --

I thought you were gonna say you were shocked by the Ohio State Buckeyes collapse in fourth quarter.

Yes. So --

[Laughs] I was too.

[Laughs] As this issue across red and blue states, how, and, and yet not receiving bipartisan support, what are your ways of implementing this into law so that it lasts far beyond this administration? And then secondly, is this task force also looking into Medicaid fraud, uh, in transgender procedures that have been done by the DOJ?

So we are absolutely looking into that. We're looking actually at a host of, of Medicaid fraud because, you know, for those who don't know, Medicaid is, I think, one of the most important programs that exist in the entire government and ensures that low income Americans are able to access healthcare. So when you steal money from Medicaid, you're not just stealing it from the American taxpayer, which of course is a very serious problem, you're also potentially stealing it from a kid who grew up in a circumstance like me who needs to go see a doctor, but will find that those services don't exist because the money has been stolen by fraudsters.

We take that extremely seriously. To your point about consensus and, you know, building the kind of legislative framework that could make this anti-fraud task force endure, we would love that. And in fact, we've extended many, many invitations to congressional Democrats to either work with us on a discreet issue of the Anti-Fraud Task Force.

We've actually reached out to people to say, "Would you like to be part of our legislative task force?" Because, you know, Senator Eric Schmidt, he's easy. This guy hates fraud, he wants to protect taxpayers, and he's doing everything he can to help us. But we've actually affirmatively reached out to a lot of congressional Democrats.

And, you know, to the American people, I'd say there's a bit of a good news, bad news situation there. I think the good news is at the state level, some attorneys generals, some governors, we actually have found some Democrat governors who've been willing to work with us. We're grateful to them. We want this to be a bipartisan thing, but unfortunately, I, I, I just, you know, my, my view of it is that Congressional Democrats have been so captured by far left advocacy groups that they can't even participate in something that's as common sense as protecting the American taxpayers' money.

That's a huge indictment of congressional leadership. That's a huge problem for the American people. But we're gonna keep on trying to reach across the aisle because look, whoever the president is in 2029, if it is a Democrat, I want the anti-fraud effort to continue because we can't allow it to be normalized that the American people get stolen by, or stolen from by fraudsters.

And importantly, to the people who are gonna commit fraud out there, I don't want them checking the clock. I want them to know that whoever's in charge of the federal government, they're gonna go after fraud as zealously as President Donald J. Trump has. I want people to know that the way to get rich in the United States of America is to build a business or build a product, not to steal from the American taxpayer.

That's the message that we're sending to this fraud or, or with this fraud task force is we're telling people, do not defraud the taxpayer, go and get a job. Thank you guys. Good to see you all. And to law enforcement, God bless you guys. Keep up the great work. Good to see you all.