President Donald Trump speaks on Monday before signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House as Vice President JD Vance listens.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said his administration will go after California for providing public benefits to people living in the country illegally during an Oval Office ceremony Monday where he launched a new anti-fraud task force and personally attacked Gov. Gavin Newsom for his dyslexia.
In an executive order creating the task force, Trump directed Vice President JD Vance to bring together federal agencies to develop stricter eligibility verification procedures for welfare programs and pursue fraud networks across the country.
The task force will be empowered to identify benefits that it considers most susceptible to fraud schemes and recommend where to withhold federal funds from jurisdictions with anti-fraud requirements that it considers inadequate. The administration argues that this could save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and balance the federal budget, but it has encountered some initial skepticism in the courts for targeting Democratic states.
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Though he promised the venture was “not a Republican-Democrat thing,” Trump largely trained his ire on two liberal states: Minnesota, which has been enveloped in a scandal involving organized theft of welfare funding, and California, where the president claimed without evidence that fraud “is 10 times worse.”
“I think they’re going to find numbers that are far higher than you even think,” he said. “It seems that it’s usually in blue states. If it’s in a red state, we’ll go in there, too. But it seems that it’s heavily, heavily, heavily Democratic. What they’ve done is so sad.”
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Trump accused officials in Democratic states of building their political power by shielding foreigners who rely on public services from federal immigration authorities so that they become dependent on those officials for benefits. He suggested the problem is especially bad at nursing homes and child care centers in California.
“When you see all these people coming in illegally into our country,” Trump said. “You look at California. And more and more come in, and yet they never had money, and yet they pay them. You know why they pay them? Because the federal government is charged with paying.”
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California does allow low-income residents to qualify for some public benefits, including subsidized health care, regardless of their immigration status — a frequent source of conflict with the Trump administration, even though state tax revenues, not federal dollars, fund those programs.
A spokesperson for Newsom did not directly respond to the president’s comments about fraud in California, but shared an old video in which the governor said that “they’ll find a state that’s taken the issue very, very seriously,” unlike the Trump administration.
Trump has become increasingly obsessed with fraud in California since the Minnesota scandal took off in conservative media last fall.
Since then, the president has repeatedly warned that he would crack down on California as well, even briefly cutting off billions of dollars in federal child care subsidies in January, before a judge stepped in to temporarily restore the money. Trump pledged to “take care of this problem” during his annual State of the Union address last month, where he previewed the fraud task force.
Other Republicans have embraced the fight as well. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, who is leading a congressional investigation into the fire that burned down much of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles last January, sent a letter to Vance last week, before the task force was even official, asking him to look into how California has used federal funding for wildfire prevention and recovery.
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Hospice services in Los Angeles County are a particular point of contention. The county is home to nearly a fifth of all licensed hospices in the nation, many of which are suspected fronts for embezzling Medicare funding. Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, visited a Los Angeles neighborhood that is a hospice hot spot earlier this year, where he filmed a controversial video tying the alleged fraud to the local Armenian community.
After a Los Angeles Times investigation in 2020, California began cracking down on bogus hospices by freezing new licenses and revoking more than 280. But hundreds more potentially fraudulent operations remain, which has led to finger-pointing between Newsom and the Trump administration over who is to blame: California, which licenses the hospices, or the federal government, which runs Medicare.
As pressure mounts on California over fraud, Newsom is hitting back aggressively at Trump, whom the governor has dubbed “the personification of fraud.” Lately he has criticized the president for granting clemency to wealthy fraudsters, depriving their victims and the United States of nearly $2 billion in court-ordered repayments.
Trump, in turn, has ramped up his personal insults against Newsom, whom he calls “Newscum.”
In the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said Newsom was racist and unqualified to be president because of comments he made about his dyslexia during the Atlanta stop of his book tour last month. Newsom told the mixed-race crowd he was “no better than you” because of his low SAT score in high school. Republicans slammed the governor for patronizing Black people and suggesting they weren’t smart, but Newsom and his supporters have forcefully rejected that characterization.
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“I think it was the worst interview I’ve ever seen of any human being in my life,” Trump said. “Gavin Newscum has admitted that he has learning disabilities. Honestly, I’m all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president. I think a president should not have learning disabilities, OK? And I know it’s highly controversial to say such a horrible thing.”
Newsom joked on social media that Trump had just named him president.
“NO THANK YOU, WE BELIEVE IN FREE ELECTIONS!” he wrote.