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Vance and Oz Announce Actions to Address Fraud, Waste, and Abuse, Feb. 25, 2026
February 25, 2026 · The White House · 0:36:17
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
Vice President JD Vance and CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz announced a package of anti-fraud actions on February 25, 2026 — the first public step of the war on fraud the President had assigned to Vance in the State of the Union address the night before.
Vance announced that the administration would temporarily hold certain Medicaid funding going to Minnesota “in order to ensure the state of Minnesota takes its obligations seriously to be good stewards of the American people’s tax money” — the federal reimbursement to the state would stop until the state acted, while providers on the ground, he noted, had already been paid by the state. His central example, as he stated it: a program meant to give autistic children access to after-school services, in which fraudsters set up sham businesses and sham clients — “people who are not even autistic proclaim to be autistic” — taking money from the children the services were meant for.
Oz, who called it “the largest fraud initiative of this kind in CMS history,” put the numbers and the three actions on the record as he stated them: $259 million of deferred Medicaid payments to Minnesota, based on an audit of the last three months of 2025, releasable once the state proposed a comprehensive corrective plan; a six-month national moratorium blocking all new enrollments of durable medical equipment suppliers, an area he tied to a $1.1 billion fraudulent brace-orders scheme; and a request for information crowdsourcing anti-fraud ideas from providers, payers, technology companies, and the public over the next 60 days. His wider figures, as he stated them: $300 billion a year spent on fraudulent or wasteful health care, almost $6 billion already stopped this year, and a skin-substitutes crackdown worth $132 extra for every senior. In questions, Vance gave Minnesota’s governor 60 days to respond with affirmative verification steps, and, asked about Iran, said the President was sending two negotiators to Geneva the next day and that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.”
Why it matters
This announcement is the operational launch of the Vance-led war on fraud — a named dollar figure withheld from a named state, a national enrollment moratorium, and a deadline for a governor — and it is the direct predecessor of the fraud task force the President formalized by executive order in March. It is recorded on the Fraud, Waste & Corruption hub.
Scoreboard watch
This is a candidate item for the weekly scoreboard: the $259 million Minnesota Medicaid deferral, the six-month durable medical equipment enrollment moratorium, and the 60-day corrective-plan clock, all as announced by the Vice President and Administrator Oz. The scoreboard entry itself remains review-gated.
Sources: The White House, “Vice President Vance and Administrator Oz Announce Actions to Address Fraud, Waste, and Abuse,” The White House, February 25, 2026 (official upload, embedded above). All figures and characterizations as stated by Vice President Vance and Administrator Oz at the announcement.