Vice President JD Vance told Fox News that federal investigators probing massive welfare and Medicaid fraud across multiple states are expected to uncover criminal wrongdoing, and that government officials who looked the other way could end up behind bars. The warning, delivered in an exclusive interview on "Saturday in America" with host Kayleigh McEnany, came days after the administration deferred $1.3 billion in federal Medicaid funding to California and issued 22 subpoenas tied to an alleged fraud ring in Minneapolis.
Vance did not mince words about where the investigation is headed.
"I guarantee there's going to be some criminal wrongdoing that we're going to find, because there's so much wrongdoing, somebody had to know what they were doing."
That statement alone should rattle bureaucrats and elected officials in states where taxpayer-funded health programs have been treated less like safety nets and more like open cash registers. The vice president chairs a White House anti-fraud task force that has already shut down fraudulent hospice centers, frozen new Medicare enrollments for hospice and home care providers for six months, and begun sending letters to all 50 states demanding proof they are actively fighting Medicaid fraud.
The most dramatic action so far landed squarely on California. On Wednesday, Vance and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz announced the administration would defer $1.3 billion in federal Medicaid reimbursements to the state, citing oversight concerns. The New York Post reported that the deferral targeted roughly 800 hospice and home-care facilities, and that Dr. Oz said officials believe at least half of the hospices around Los Angeles are fraudulent.
Half. That is not a rounding error. That is an industry-scale grift operating in broad daylight.
Vance framed the problem in personal terms during the Fox News interview, zeroing in on Gov. Gavin Newsom's response, or lack of one, to reports of fraud in his state. He said he had a pointed question for any governor who receives a report detailing widespread fraud and does nothing about it.
"When I hear about a report that says to the governor, 'Here's all this fraud,' and he doesn't do anything about it, I ask myself, 'Was anybody engaged in criminal wrongdoing? Was anybody in his office engaged in criminal wrongdoing?'"
He followed up with a promise that carried real weight: "I am going to promise the American people we're going to look into that stuff, we're going to investigate it, and we're going to take it seriously. Because if there was criminal wrongdoing, then people ought to go to prison for it."
Newsom's office pushed back hard, telling Fox News Digital that California has long been working to root out fraud. A spokesperson pointed to the governor's 2022 moratorium on all new hospice provider licenses as evidence that Sacramento was ahead of the federal government.
"Tackling fraud is nothing new to California, which is why Governor Newsom implemented a moratorium on all new hospice provider licenses back in 2022, to root out fraud while preventing bad actors from entering the system. We're glad to see the Trump administration follow California's lead on this after weeks of us calling for them to do the same."
The response is a familiar move: claim credit for action you took only after the problem grew too large to ignore, then accuse the other side of being late. Newsom himself posted on X that the Trump administration was "home to the biggest fraudsters on Earth" and accused the federal government of trying to "blame California for issues with THEIR federal programs." He added that he was "glad to see the Feds finally taking seriously the fraud in the programs they themselves manage...only 15 months after Trump took office."
But the timeline tells a different story. If Newsom's moratorium went into effect in 2022, and Dr. Oz now says half the hospices around Los Angeles are still believed to be fraudulent, the moratorium plainly did not solve the problem. A moratorium on new licenses does nothing about the bad actors already inside the system, the ones billing taxpayers for services that may never have been delivered.
Vance has taken on a leading role in several major White House enforcement fights, and the anti-fraud portfolio may be the one with the broadest political impact heading into the midterms.
California is not the only state in the task force's sights. Vance said the federal government issued 22 subpoenas tied to an alleged fraud ring in Minneapolis, a reference to the sprawling Minnesota welfare fraud scandal that drew national attention before fading from headlines. The National Review reported that Vance convened the first meeting of the anti-fraud task force on March 27, 2026, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and that the White House is ramping up its crackdown partly to strengthen Republican messaging ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The political calculation is straightforward: taxpayers hate being robbed, and the scale of the alleged fraud gives the administration a clear target. But the enforcement actions are not just messaging. The task force has real teeth.
Vance made that explicit when he warned states that fail to aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud: "If they do not, we are going to turn off the money that goes to these anti-fraud units." In other words, states that refuse to use their federally funded fraud-control units for their intended purpose will lose the funding altogether.
HHS Inspector General Thomas Bell reinforced the threat in a letter to state attorneys general, as Newsmax reported. Bell warned that failure to cooperate could cause a state's entire Medicaid program to be deemed out of compliance, with penalties that could extend to withholding all federal Medicaid funding. "This means your failure to do your job has put all of your state's Medicaid funds in jeopardy," Bell wrote.
That is not a suggestion. It is an ultimatum backed by federal statute.
Vance has emerged as one of the administration's most visible figures on domestic enforcement, a role that extends well beyond the fraud portfolio. His willingness to take public positions on politically charged issues, from classified national-security disputes to welfare enforcement, has made him a lightning rod, but also a credible face for the administration's accountability agenda.
At a stop at Bangor International Airport in Maine on May 14, Vance tied the fraud problem directly to illegal immigration. He accused Maine Gov. Janet Mills of refusing to cooperate with the federal government on enforcement and pointed to illegal immigrants receiving taxpayer-funded benefits that should go to lawful residents.
"If you look at the illegal immigrant communities who have taken benefits that ought to, by right, go to the people in this room," Vance told the audience, the Washington Examiner reported. When an audience member suggested sending Medicaid fraudsters to Guantanamo Bay, Vance replied: "No comment, sir. But I kind of like sending the fraudsters to Gitmo. We got to get them out of this country, and we got to get them in prison."
The Guantanamo remark was clearly a joke, but the underlying point was serious. The administration is arguing that lax state enforcement and permissive immigration policies create a combined vulnerability, one that bad actors exploit at the expense of people who follow the rules and pay their taxes.
That argument resonates because it matches what ordinary Americans see in their own communities: rising costs, strained services, and a political class that seems more interested in defending the system than fixing it. The vice president's growing political profile within the party is built in part on his willingness to name these failures plainly.
Several questions remain unanswered. Vance referenced a report that was allegedly delivered to a governor detailing fraud, but he did not name the specific report or confirm which governor he meant. The identities of the 22 subpoena targets in Minneapolis have not been disclosed. The legal basis for the $1.3 billion California deferral has not been publicly detailed. And the exact start date of the six-month Medicare enrollment freeze has not been specified.
These gaps matter. Investigations of this scale live or die on specifics, on documents, on evidence, on charges that hold up in court. Rhetoric about prison time means nothing if it does not lead to indictments.
But the administration has taken concrete steps that go beyond talk. Subpoenas have been issued. Funding has been deferred. Hospice centers have been shut down. A nationwide freeze is in place. Letters have gone out to every state in the country. And the vice president has said, on the record, that he believes criminal wrongdoing will be found.
Vance's involvement in high-profile enforcement actions has become a pattern. He has publicly pushed investigations into sensitive diplomatic matters and domestic fraud alike, positioning himself as the administration's point man for accountability.
Newsom can post all the sarcastic messages on X he wants. The question is whether his state can account for the billions in federal health dollars that flowed through an industry now suspected of being rotten from the inside. If it can't, the next press conference from the White House won't be about deferred payments. It will be about charges.
Taxpayers deserve to know where their money went. And if officials in Sacramento, Minneapolis, or anywhere else chose to look the other way while the fraud piled up, they deserve to answer for it, in a courtroom, not a press release.