Vice President JD Vance has sharply criticized Michigan U.S. Senate primary winner Abdul El-Sayed, warning that he could one day run for the White House. Speaking after El-Sayed's primary victory, Vance said, "God forbid, you're going to have President El-Sayed in three years," arguing that such a presidency could reverse the administration's achievements.
The remarks have intensified political debate ahead of the general election, drawing attention to El-Sayed's growing national profile and the broader battle over the future direction of American politics. Watch the full comments, reactions, and analysis.
#JDVance #AbdulElSayed #MichiganPrimary #USPolitics #SenateRace #BreakingNews #WhiteHouse #Election2026 #PoliticalNews #Washington
#MichiganElection #JDVanceNews #AbdulElSayedNews #SenateElection #ElectionNews #USSenate #AmericanPolitics #WashingtonDC #BreakingPolitics #2028Election
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The remarks have intensified political debate ahead of the general election, drawing attention to El-Sayed's growing national profile and the broader battle over the future direction of American politics. Watch the full comments, reactions, and analysis.
#JDVance #AbdulElSayed #MichiganPrimary #USPolitics #SenateRace #BreakingNews #WhiteHouse #Election2026 #PoliticalNews #Washington
#MichiganElection #JDVanceNews #AbdulElSayedNews #SenateElection #ElectionNews #USSenate #AmericanPolitics #WashingtonDC #BreakingPolitics #2028Election
~PR.462~HT.408~ED.194~VG.HM~
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NewsTranscript
00:00Andrew, this effort will fundamentally always have a limitation unless our colleagues in the House and the Senate are working
00:08with us.
00:09We don't want the next administration, whoever, you know, God forbid you're going to have President El-Sayed in three
00:16years.
00:16We don't want him to undo all the incredible work that we've been doing when we've been taking out the
00:23fraudsters and saving the American people money.
00:25And in order to make this really work, we need our colleagues in Congress to really codify some of this
00:31stuff, to make sure that it becomes law.
00:33And again, this is the sort of thing where while I, you know, I see only Republicans surrounding us today,
00:38we really have been able to work in some cases with Democratic governors and Democratic attorneys generals on the anti
00:46-fraud task force.
00:47And we would love, I'm not necessarily holding my breath, but we would love to work with Democrats in Washington
00:52to codify some of the anti-fraud actions that we've taken.
00:55And to take it to the next level, we are here to kick off what is at this point been
01:02an informal effort, which is working with Congress to help us combat fraud.
01:07So as you know, when the president United States started the fraud task force and really set the federal government
01:13to taking a whole of government approach to the anti-fraud issue,
01:16that was mainly an administrative thing.
01:19That was something we were working with our colleagues at HNHS, at DOJ, at all of the various agencies of
01:25the federal government and trying to root out fraud.
01:27And I'd remind all of you and remind the American people and remind what these congressmen and senators don't need
01:32reminding,
01:33which is that fraud is really a dual victim crime.
01:36The most obvious victim, of course, is the American taxpayer, who has their hard-earned tax dollars stolen from them
01:42to enrich people who are violating our laws and taking advantage of our country.
01:46But I think more profoundly and more sadly, the second victim of fraud are the people who benefit from programs
01:53that the American people have set up in their generosity and in their kindness of spirit.
01:57And those programs don't function as well or don't even have the resources necessary to work because they've been stolen
02:04from by fraudsters.
02:06I think an example that is particularly close to my heart because we have a two-week-old newborn at
02:12home is a program that we set up through the Medicaid program
02:15to actually provide high-quality health care to new moms and to newborn infants.
02:20To people who can't afford high-quality health care, we, as a generous nation, ensure that they have access to
02:26the resources that they need.
02:27And yet, we have, working with DOJ and others, we have identified, prosecuted, a number of cases of people where
02:35they have taken from this program,
02:38not provided an ounce of service to a new mom or a young baby, and enriched themselves by literally taking
02:45money from the medical care of newborn infants.
02:49This is despicable behavior, and it's something that we've allowed to go on for too long in the United States
02:55of America.
02:55I'm very proud that you could not just look at these sort of qualitative stories about what's going on, but
03:02we can actually measure the success of the fraud task force.
03:06Working with Andrew Ferguson and with Steve Miller, two of the great all-stars of the Trump administration,
03:12that we have been able to identify $230 billion of fraud just since the fraud task force was set up,
03:21and that's, frankly, by conservatively estimating it.
03:24Andrew and I had a meeting in my office last week, and he said, do you want to estimate it
03:27conservatively or do you want to estimate it aggressively?
03:29And I said, well, I kind of want to estimate it aggressively, but then all you people will criticize us.
03:34So let's estimate it conservatively so that we can give the American people the most rock-solid explanation of how
03:40this task force is working to protect their money.
03:42We've been able to stop $56 billion in fraudulent payments that would have otherwise gone to fraudsters rather than to
03:50the people who need them.
03:51And in the process, we've saved, obviously, the American people a lot of money.
03:55But as much as we've done and as much as we've had great successes, and this brings me to my
03:59final point before I kick it over to Andrew,
04:02this effort will fundamentally always have a limitation unless our colleagues in the House and the Senate are working with
04:10us.
04:11We don't want the next administration, whoever, you know, God forbid you're going to have President El-Sayed in three
04:17years.
04:17We don't want him to undo all the incredible work that we've been doing when we've been taking out the
04:24fraudsters and saving the American people money.
04:27And in order to make this really work, we need our colleagues in Congress to really codify some of this
04:32stuff to make sure that it becomes law.
04:34And again, this is the sort of thing where while I, you know, I see only Republicans surrounding us today,
04:40we really have been able to work in some cases with Democratic governors and Democratic attorneys generals on the anti
04:47-fraud task force.
04:48And we would love I'm not necessarily holding my breath, but we would love to work with Democrats in Washington
04:53to codify some of the anti-fraud actions that we've taken and to take it to the next level.
04:59There are a few things that we really need to do and that we can't do with the federal government
05:04without the cooperation of the Congress.
05:07And the first that I would say the most important of these is data sharing.
05:11So when we've looked at the anti-fraud efforts that we've taken, one of the weirdest and most difficult parts
05:16of this is the black box that exists around certain state programs.
05:21So, for example, the SNAP program, which provides food resources to low income people, it quite literally feeds hungry moms
05:30and children in our country, something that is very important and that I know every person in this table supports.
05:35We know that there is a lot of fraud in the SNAP program.
05:38We know that there are illegal aliens who benefit from the SNAP program, people who have no legal right to
05:42be in the country.
05:43We would like to stop that.
05:44But I think the American people would be shocked to learn, because I was certainly shocked when I learned it
05:49a few months ago, that when we send tax dollars to the states to administer the STAP program, we have
05:56no visibility into who is ultimately getting those benefits.
06:00In other words, if the state of California gives those food stamp benefits to an illegal alien, to a violent
06:06criminal, the federal government has no visibility and sometimes the states themselves have no visibility.
06:12So we need to work with Congress and we need some legislation that would actually force some data sharing between
06:19the state governments and the federal governments.
06:22We need to know where your tax dollars are going.
06:24And if the state of California or the state of New York isn't going to tell us, we need Congress
06:28to force them to tell us.
06:30And I think that's the first and most important thing that we would like to do.
06:34The second is that we would like to see stiffer penalties for fraudsters.
06:37One of the things I said at the very beginning of the task force is that I was shocked by
06:41how often we would just let low-level fraud go.
06:45Like a million dollars of fraud, that's a lot of money.
06:48A person who would enrich themselves to the tune of a million dollars, sometimes we wouldn't even prosecute this stuff.
06:53And even when we do prosecute it, we are limited by the penalties applied.
06:57The most important thing that we can do in prosecuting fraud is to make sure that the people who engage
07:04in fraud actually suffer some real penalties.
07:07And so we would love to work with all of you and see some stiffer penalties for the people that
07:11we're successfully prosecuting.
07:13We are throwing a lot of people behind bars, but we're limited in some ways by the statutes that exist.
07:20We'd like to change those statutes and actually make it harder for people to commit fraud and make sure that
07:25when they do commit fraud they go to jail and they go to jail for a long time.
07:29And finally, we need a little bit of money, not a lot of money, and frankly we're saving way more
07:34money than we're taking in.
07:35But the fraud task force involves every single agency of the federal government.
07:41Every single cabinet secretary has been great.
07:44And I want to give a special shout out to some of our all-stars, Bobby Kennedy at HNHS, Kelly
07:48Loeffler at SBA, Brooke at the Department of Agriculture.
07:52We've really had a whole of government.
07:54Our soon-to-be new attorney general, Todd Blanche, has just been amazing to work with.
07:59And I know other people will say more about that.
08:01But we need a little bit of resources because while we're saving the American people billions and billions of dollars
08:07and we're not spending very much,
08:09we need a little bit more appropriated to expand this fraud effort.
08:12I think we'll save even more money in the process.
08:14It's the sort of investment that, you know, unlike most of the money you guys spend, it never comes back
08:19to D.C.
08:20Every dollar you give us comes back at least five or tenfold.
08:23So it's a good investment and it's the sort of thing that we need to see happen.
08:27But without further ado, I want to kick it over to our amazing co-chair of the task force, Andrew
08:32Ferguson.
08:33You see him on TV. He's amazing.
08:35But most importantly, behind the scenes when he's not on TV, he's doing amazing things for the American people.
08:40This whole thing would not work and would not work as well were it not for Andrew's hard work.
08:45So great job. Great to see you.
08:47Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
08:48And welcome to all my friends from the Senate and from the House.
08:51We're very pleased that you're here.
08:52I want to thank President Trump for creating this task force and assembling us here today.
08:57He is the first president in American history to take this fraud issue, which is an existential crisis for the
09:03American Republic seriously.
09:04And none of this would have been possible without him.
09:06And second, the Vice President.
09:08The only way to confront fraud through the whole federal government is to have the guy that sits atop the
09:14rest of the federal government in charge of it.
09:16Nothing that this task force has accomplished.
09:18And the Vice President just read a lot of the amazing accomplishments of the task force of the whole federal
09:23government is possible without the leadership of the Vice President of the United States.
09:28Fraud is not just about the numbers.
09:30We hear about the big numbers.
09:32We just heard them today.
09:33But fraud hurts real people.
09:35It hurts all of us by taking our hard-earned money out of our pockets and putting it into the
09:41hands of the most reprehensible people in this country.
09:44And second, it hurts real people in specific physical ways.
09:48The best example I have of this involves skin substitutes.
09:51Fraudsters, up until this year, were performing unnecessary surgeries on elderly Americans in hospices and nursing homes because they would
10:00then submit those claims to HHS.
10:03And HHS was reimbursing those claims to the tune of billions and billions of dollars a year.
10:09Fraud doesn't just hurt us all in our pocketbooks.
10:11It physically is maiming real Americans.
10:14And that's what this is about.
10:15It's not about the numbers at the end of the day.
10:17It is about protecting ordinary Americans from the worst of us.
10:21The second thing about this fraud effort that is so important is that it is about restoring social trust in
10:27America.
10:28All of the programs that the fraud effort has focused on were set up for a high-trust society.
10:34The Vice President was just explaining the difficulty in obtaining data to fight fraud.
10:38When Congress was creating these programs, some of them almost 100 years ago, we didn't expect that these programs were
10:44going to be attacked by fraudsters to the tunes of billions and billions of dollars a year.
10:50We expected, because that's the America that we were, that everyone would play by the rules, that the money turned
10:55over to help our friends, our families, and neighbors would be made available only to the people who really needed
11:00it.
11:01And that is just not true anymore.
11:03And so this effort is not just about protecting our programs, making sure that fraudsters don't bleed them so dry
11:09that they cease to exist.
11:11It's also about restoring social trust in this country.
11:15And so with that, I want to talk about two of the things that I think Congress can do to
11:19help us address both of those problems.
11:21The first is on social trust, and the Vice President touched on this just a minute ago.
11:26People commit fraud against our programs because it is relatively easy.
11:31And one of the reasons that it is easy is that the punishments associated with much of the fraud are
11:36relatively low.
11:37We have seen what can happen in America when you really vigorously enforce the laws.
11:43Just take the last year and a half in this country.
11:45Violent crime is at an all-time low, and that's for two reasons.
11:48Number one, thanks to President Trump and Stephen Miller and others in the administration, the border is sealed and the
11:54criminals are not coming here anymore.
11:55And number two, thanks to Todd Blanche and the men and women of the Justice Department, we are vigorously enforcing
12:01our criminal laws
12:02and making sure that people who commit crimes suffer the consequences.
12:05That has to be true for the fraudsters.
12:08Every single person who considers raiding one of our agencies and taking money out of our pockets needs to think
12:14long and hard about what might happen to them if they are caught.
12:17And under this Justice Department, they will be caught.
12:20And so we want to work with Congress to dramatically increase the sentences associated, even with low-level frauds,
12:27to incent both the Justice Department to prosecute all fraud all the time and to make every fraudster think long
12:34and hard about whether it's worth facing a long time in jail before deciding to rate our programs.
12:39And then the second thing that we need to focus on has to do with another thing that the Vice
12:43President talked about, which is data sharing.
12:46Fraud is easy because data is difficult to get and data is the enemy of fraud.
12:52One of the things that the Vice President has accomplished using this task force is that almost all of the
12:58agencies are now using automated AI-driven tools to find the fraud before the money leaves the agency.
13:04But the only way that works is if we have data.
13:09And right now, data sharing is difficult.
13:10And for a lot of our programs, like SNAP, which is an incredibly important program that we want to protect
13:15in this country, like the Vice President was just explaining,
13:18states don't have to share data with us in order to participate in the program.
13:22Data sharing should be a requirement for participating in these programs because that will unleash the power of American AI
13:30-ingenuity and innovation in these agencies to stop the fraud before it happens.
13:35Because once it goes out the door, it's very difficult to get back.
13:38The pay and chase doesn't work.
13:40And so the way you stop fraud is you keep Americans' hard-earned money in the agencies unless it's going
13:45to someone who actually needs it.
13:47And for that, we need data.
13:49We need data to make sure fraudsters don't get it, non-citizens don't get it, and the only way for
13:54that to happen is if we have data.
13:56And the easiest way for that to happen is not through rulemakings, it's not through guidance, it's Congress stepping up
14:01and saying,
14:02if you want to participate in these programs, if you want access to American taxpayer dollars, you have to share
14:07data so that we can fight fraud.
14:09And any state who doesn't want to share data, we should learn a lot about the leadership of that state.
14:14If they want to protect fraud more than they want to protect ordinary Americans, something really rotten is happening in
14:20that state.
14:20So those are just two of the things that we want to work with Congress to accomplish here under the
14:25Vice President's Task Force.
14:27And with that, I'll turn it over to Stephen Miller.
14:31Thank you very much.
14:33Thank you, Mr. Vice President, for your leadership on this bold and existentially important initiative.
14:41Thank you to Mr. Ferguson for your incredible work and stewardship of this task force.
14:47And, of course, thank you to President Trump for his extraordinary leadership in establishing this task force,
14:54assigning this portfolio to the Vice President, and providing direction, focus, and determination to the whole U.S. government.
15:01It's great to see all of my friends in the House and Senate who are here today who have been
15:07such tremendous allies,
15:08not only on this issue, but so many issues, and in some cases for a very, very long time, since
15:152015 and before.
15:17And so, thank you all.
15:19I want to pick up, because this is something that I've encountered on a daily basis,
15:23on a theme that both the Vice President and Andrew Ferguson have mentioned,
15:27which is the lack of criminal responsibility, the lack of criminal punishment for egregious fraud in this country.
15:36It is, first of all, true, as the Vice President said, as hard as it is to believe,
15:42that for most recent history, which in the case of these programs would be in the history of these programs,
15:47if you committed a million dollars of fraud or less, you were unlikely to ever be criminally punished in any
15:54way at all.
15:55And if, for some strange reason in the past, a bureaucrat had the courage to defy that agency guidance
16:02and actually bring you to trial and put you in front of a jury, you'd be unlikely to do any
16:07real jail time at all.
16:09And this may be hard to believe, that you could steal hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions of dollars
16:15and not do any significant jail time.
16:16Again, you can look at the sentences for the Feeding Our Futures fraud,
16:20which is one of the largest frauds in the history of any country anywhere in Minnesota, to see this.
16:26And there's a lot of reasons for that.
16:28I think probably the simplest, least conspiratorial explanation is that when Congress was drafting these statutes,
16:36they still lived, to use the phrase, in a high trust society, and it eclipsed their imagination,
16:42that there would be systemic, widespread, continual lying, fleecing, and organized crime
16:49to rip off hundreds of billions of dollars from the American taxpayer, which is what has happened.
16:55So there needs to be strict, clear, mandatory minimums.
17:00Because by the time you've been convicted, you have already proven to a jury,
17:04this is not a civil punishment, this is you've proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt
17:09that you deliberately, willfully, maliciously engage in a scheme to steal from the American taxpayer
17:17and from those in genuine need.
17:19And when you've satisfied 12 jurors of that fact and been convicted,
17:23you deserve to have a very substantial prison sentence.
17:27That change alone would be watershed for fighting fraud
17:31because it would mean that the Department of Justice would be able to,
17:35through prosecuting a few hundred or thousand cases in a year,
17:39be able to chill the criminal conduct of millions.
17:42Whereas right now, no matter how many people you prosecute,
17:46you're still left with the criminal element thinking,
17:49I'm willing to risk six months in jail for $5 million in ill-gotten gains.
17:55And we've reached a point, and again, only because of President Trump
17:58and the Vice President's leadership is this happening.
18:00We've reached a point as a country, until we came along, as hard as it is to believe,
18:05where we have federal law enforcement in cities around the country
18:10who have to conduct weeks or months-long investigations of daycares
18:16where there are no children present at all
18:18to be able to then go into a court of law and say,
18:22no kids on Monday, no kids on Tuesday, no kids on Wednesday, no kids on Thursday, right?
18:27And this is the real thing.
18:28We have federal law enforcement officers who then they have to issue subpoenas
18:32and search warrants to get phone records, email records, financial records.
18:36And what does it all end up with?
18:37You go to a jury in Minnesota, and you say,
18:40the defendant has collected $7 million for a daycare,
18:45claiming to be taking care of 100 children for six months,
18:47and we found one kid attended in that entire time, and he was the nephew.
18:51So you spent months of federal effort.
18:53When you do that, and you're found guilty, you belong in jail for a very long time.
19:00I'm almost over my own time here, so I'll just add to the other point the Vice President said,
19:04which is on data sharing and technology and integrity.
19:08You can solve 95% of this problem with simple technological verification and data sharing measures
19:17that is in technology that was invented 20 years ago.
19:20Now, the technology today, of course, is even more astonishing.
19:23But if every single person who wanted to enroll in SNAP or enroll in Medicaid or enroll in public housing
19:29was in a shared database that the federal government had access to,
19:33to verify age, citizenship, criminal record, other basic biographic facts,
19:40that single step alone would save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.
19:45And you have to ask yourself, why would any politician oppose something so fundamental?
19:51We're not even debating eligibility rules, an important but separate debate.
19:55We are debating whether or not a person is lying to the government to extract funds
20:00for which they are plainly and clearly ineligible.
20:03The time has come to implement these reforms.
20:05Thank you, Mr. Vice President.
20:07Vince.
20:10Thank you, and good morning, everyone.
20:12We gather today because President Trump has made stopping the fraud and corruption
20:16in our welfare programs a governing priority.
20:19Thank you to Vice President Vance, Chairman Ferguson, Stephen Miller, and Executive Director Brady
20:24for their leadership in carrying out this duty, and to the members of Congress here
20:27for joining in this important work.
20:29In the time I have, I wish to offer 10 very practical, common sense, and likely very popular proposals
20:34to fight fraud in our welfare programs for congressional consideration.
20:38One, all government agencies must verify that every Medicaid provider or SNAP retail store
20:43is actually legitimate and eligible for payment before any payment is issued, rather than paying
20:48first and checking later.
20:50Two, require criminal background checks and fingerprinting for healthcare providers in categories
20:54with high rates of Medicaid fraud, and re-verify provider credentials at least every three years.
21:00Three, require states to verify every welfare applicant through the federal government's free database system
21:05that verifies immigration status in real time before issuing any taxpayer-funded benefits.
21:10Four, require states to compare welfare roles every month against death records, wage records,
21:16and incarceration records.
21:17Five, double the number of welfare fraud investigators so that more fraud and corruption cases
21:22can be aggressively investigated and prosecuted.
21:25Six, upgrade welfare benefit cards used for food and cash assistance to have secure chip technology
21:31with a photo and expiration date.
21:33Seven, prohibit high-risk retailers such as some liquor stores and smoke shops from accepting taxpayer-funded
21:39food stamp benefits.
21:41Eight, end the use of government-issued pre-populated forms to do automatic re-enrollments into Medicaid.
21:47Nine, eliminate so-called self-attestation, which allows applicants to simply report their own income
21:53and household information on welfare applications without providing documentation
21:57and instead requiring proof of income and eligibility before benefits are approved.
22:02Ten, require state taxpayer-funded Medicaid programs that issue payments to health insurance companies
22:08on behalf of people who had already died to stop immediately once a death is recorded
22:13and require those insurance companies to return any money collected after the enrollees' death.
22:18Finally, I suggest that members of Congress call out as corruption the behavior of state and local leaders
22:25who refuse to enforce common-sense fraud controls or purposely embrace loopholes
22:30that avoid individual eligibility validation, allow self-certification of eligibility, expand eligibility
22:36far beyond what Congress intended, and as a result trap millions of able-bodied adults into a life of dependency.
22:42Fraud steals taxpayer dollars, but such corruption steals something even more precious.
22:46It steals the blessings and benefits of work.
22:49The greater injustice is not stealing money from taxpayers.
22:52It is taking purpose from another human being and diverting resources from the truly needy.
22:57Every year an able-bodied person spends trapped in unnecessary dependency
23:01is a year not spent developing skills, earning promotions, providing for a family,
23:05serving a community, or discovering what they are capable of becoming.
23:09This corruption fraud occurs when public officials knowingly tolerate or design systems
23:14that deny people the benefits and blessings of work because dependency serves personal, political,
23:19or institutional interests.
23:20Whenever public officials knowingly preserve systems that deny able-bodied Americans the blessings of work,
23:26whenever they choose to look away because dependency serves such interests, people suffer,
23:31not because they lack talent, not because they lack dignity,
23:34but because those entrusted with public authority failed to act.
23:39Our responsibility is to root out fraud and corruption in our welfare systems,
23:43send people to jail who steal benefits, and make it impossible for public officials to escape their responsibility
23:49to establish systems of accountability and program integrity
23:53so that more Americans will realize the benefits and blessings of work.
23:59Great.
24:00Well, thank you, Vince, and thanks to everybody else for being here.
24:02We are now going to have a conversation about exactly how we can better work together,
24:07about how we can advance some of these legislative priorities.
24:09But we're going to do that conversation without 100 cameras in the room.
24:13So to the press, thank you for being here.
24:14We'll see you soon.
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