LOS ANGELES – If you receive Medicare, Medicaid or food assistance, the Vice President has said what this administration means to do about fraud. The answer is to check whether you should be getting them.
He said it on stage at the All-In Summit, in an episode published 15 September. What follows is what he said, and what the government’s own accounting office publishes beside it.
Everything he says is his claim. This page attributes each one, and checks the two figures that can be checked against a published source. It does not settle the political argument around them.
Contents
The figure he gave#
”… we’ve saved about $250 billion of the American taxpayers money that would have otherwise gone to fraudsters.”
He sets that against “a 7 trillion federal budget”.
No source is given for the $250 billion anywhere in the twenty-seven minutes. The transcript was searched for report, audit, inspector general, GAO, study, analysis and published. All seven return nothing. The figure is stated and not sourced, which makes it unproven rather than wrong.
For scale he quotes somebody else, and does not adopt it.
Doge was the cost-cutting unit Elon Musk ran in 2025.
“Elon during the height of Doge said that it was 20%, that’s $1.4 trillion. Uh whether it’s 10% or 20%, you’re talking about something on the scale of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.”
He then works with the lower end: “my guess is that if the number is $700 billion …”.
Those are one range, not two competing numbers. Ten percent of seven trillion is $700 billion, twenty percent is $1.4 trillion. He hedges inside the range twice.
What the government publishes#
The Government Accountability Office published its own figure on 27 April 2026. It says it is “the investigative arm of Congress” and “independent, nonpartisan”.
GAO says agencies “identified $186 billion in payment errors” in the 2025 financial year, across 64 programmes at 15 agencies. Its separate release of 11 March 2025 put the year before at $162 billion.
And part of that rise is not more error. GAO gives two causes. One is “programs that reported estimates in fiscal year 2025 but did not report estimates in the prior fiscal year”. That is more programmes counting. The other, GAO says, is “an increase in Medicaid improper payments”. GAO calls the rise “largely attributable” to both and never says which is bigger.
The two numbers do not measure the same thing, and this is the part worth slowing down for.
GAO says improper payments “are a result of overpayments, fraud, or other causes”. Fraud is one of three. It reports that overpayments alone account for $153 billion, about 82 percent.
A payment sent to the right person in the wrong amount is in GAO’s figure. It is not fraud.
GAO also says its own number is not a ceiling. Its estimates, it says, “do not represent the full extent of government-wide improper payments”, leaving some programmes out.
Honestly, then. The largest official, published, method-attached figure is $186 billion, and most of it is not fraud. The $250 billion is described as money saved rather than money lost. It arrives without a method.
What this means at your kitchen table#
Three of the five programmes GAO names are ones our readers use. GAO reports that “73 percent of improper payments recorded were concentrated in just five program areas …”. Medicare, Medicaid and food assistance are three of those five, it says.
Now read the remedy.
“we could deal with it just by checking eligibility criteria.”
“And when we go to the big blue states and say, ‘Why don’t you help us just confirm basic eligibility?’ We get totally push back.”
He is blunter elsewhere. On Medicare in California he speaks of “people who are illegal, people who aren’t even like human beings. They’re just like a completely madeup, you know, shell of a person”. That last clause is what he means: invented enrolments, not living claimants. On Medicaid he says there are “hundreds of thousands maybe more illegal aliens” on it in three named states. Neither claim is given a source.
Eligibility checking is not an abstraction to the person being checked. It is a letter, a deadline, documents to find, and a benefit that stops if the letter goes to an old address.
And here is the thing neither document joins up. GAO reports what the health department told it. Medicaid errors rose, the department said, “due to increased problems with eligibility redeterminations and provider screening while phasing out COVID-era flexibilities”.
Eligibility redetermination is both the proposed cure and, in the department’s own account, part of the counted error. The department ties it to a one-off: phasing out pandemic rules. That is not an argument against checking. It is a reason to expect checking at scale to produce mistakes that land on people.
The transcript was searched for paperwork, documents, verify, burden, delay, appeal and wrongly. All seven return nothing. The remedy is discussed entirely from the side of the government doing the checking.
The one mechanism he describes precisely#
On food assistance he is specific, and this is the one figure a reader can test.
“California bills us once a month for the cost of their SNAP program. It’s seven or eight or 9 billion depending on the month that we’re talking about. So what happens is the federal government wires $9 billion to California, no questions asked.”
“it’s not an exaggeration to say that we have no ability to know who is even on the SNAP program …”
Nine billion a month is $108 billion a year, for one state. The Agriculture Department’s research service puts the WHOLE national programme at $101.7 billion for the 2025 financial year, serving 42.1 million people a month. So the figure he gives California is larger than SNAP. Nobody on the recording questions it.
He also says what the programme is for. It “ensures that low-income Americans have access to food that they need …”. Making sure “poor kids can eat”, he says, is one of the most important things the federal government does.
Worth quoting: a fraud argument is often reported without it.
What happens next, and what to watch#
He says the obstacle is legal: “actually legally much harder than it should be to force the blue states to comply”.
So the thing to watch is not a number in an interview. It is whether your state adds verification steps, and whether the notice arrives at an address you still live at.
If you get a letter asking you to confirm eligibility, it is not junk mail and it has a deadline. The government publishes this data itself, at the federal payment accuracy site.
The same test applies here: how to check a claim. One number in this piece has a document behind it while the other does not. For the machinery underneath, statute, rule and guidance are not the same thing. Who holds the pen is set out separately.
Source: All-In Podcast, published 15 September 2026, 27 minutes, full transcript pulled and read. The recording is a live stage appearance and the dateline is the All-In Summit’s published venue, Los Angeles, not a location stated on the recording. GAO’s 2025 figures are from its release of 27 April 2026, linked above and read in a browser; the $162 billion is from its separate release of 11 March 2025. The SNAP totals are from the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service, bulletin 304, June 2026. Nobody from this masthead was in the room.