The White House task force led by Vice President J.D. Vance to target fraud in government programs is working as intended: It’s catching past and current fraud, pushing for prosecutions, and limiting future fraud with new procedural safeguards. The numbers, so far, aren’t the story. Vance said this week that the administration’s anti-fraud effort had “blocked $60 million in student aid fraud,” for example, a number you can compare to $39 trillion in federal debt.
But the task force is also reaching beyond those basic goals to talk about something else, and the something else is becoming unusually important.
In a famous letter written in 1798, President John Adams wrote that the Constitution was organized around an unstated premise. “Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net,” he wrote. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
At a White House anti-fraud roundtable this week with state attorneys general, the recurring theme in the brief public portion of the discussion was about the whale going through the net.
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