As Vance Leads ‘War on Fraud,’ Republican States Follow Suit

Red-state treasurers are not only throwing their support behind the campaign led by Vice President JD Vance to cut wasteful or fraudulent government spending, but they are also cleaning house in their own communities.

The State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a coalition of state finance managers, has already rooted out $5.7 billion in waste and returned $22.3 billion to taxpayers, the organization revealed in its 2025 Oversight Report released in February.

SFOF members, most of whom are from conservative administrations, oversee more than $3 trillion in funds across 28 states.

“We want to work hand-in-glove with the vice president in his war on fraud, and a lot of this is because our folks have been on the battlefield for a while now,” OJ Oleka, the group’s chief executive officer, told The Epoch Times.

“It is their statutory, constitutional responsibility in their states to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.”

This effort comes amid recent discoveries of massive theft and misuse of government unemployment, health care, and social payments, including an estimated misuse of $9 billion in Minnesota and potentially more than $30 billion in California.

Reports increasingly indicate that fraud and waste have proliferated alongside a failure by state and federal officials to control the payment system.

According to a March 4 House Oversight Committee report, based on interviews with Minnesota state officials, “fraud warnings were elevated to senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and payments continued long after credible red flags emerged.”

This report was released concurrent with an Oversight Committee hearing, in which Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were called to testify regarding alleged schemes in their state by Somali immigrants to defraud billions from social support programs.

According to Oleka, the waste discovered so far is probably just the tip of the iceberg, and much of it stems from a lack of proper auditing and tracking.

“You look during the COVID years, where it was so easy to get access to monies, especially during the Biden era, and there was really no check,” Oleka said.

“When you don’t have the incentive, you don’t have the courage, you don’t have the [auditing] position, then you’re going to see the opportunity for a lot of fraud.”

States Stepping Up

Utah, one of the SFOF member states, is among those taking the lead in rooting out wasted public funds.

The state has so far identified more than $500 million in fraud and abuse, ranging from a nonprofit recipient who spent $2.8 million of tax money for personal massages, exercise equipment, and vacations with his wife in Hawaii to $463.7 million misspent by hospitals in the state.

“We’re not getting to the level of California and Minnesota, but to think that the same types of problems that we identified in Utah are not happening in the other states would be wrong,” Tina Cannon, the state auditor, told The Epoch Times.

Most incidents that she has seen involve federal programs in which spending is administered by states, she said.

“I have always found that the closer you are to the tax revenue, where it’s collected, the more careful you are with the money because you know who it came from,” Cannon said.

People are usually more prudent with local or state-level monies but more lax when it comes to federal dollars, she said.

Cannon said that the largest abuses she has found in Utah involved federal programs, particularly those the Health and Human Services Department administers, such as Medicare and Medicaid.

However, on the bright side, she said, even though many states lack the rigorous auditing systems that private companies have, they have chosen to implement stricter tracking systems, making fraud and waste much harder to get away with.

An additional factor that has curtailed fraud in Utah is that the state auditor is independently elected.

“I don’t answer to the state, and I don’t answer to the governor. I answer to the people whose money this is,” Cannon said.

Utah is one of 24 states in which the state auditor is independent from other state officials.

But the federal government is equally culpable in many cases, Cannon said.

State auditors in Utah had previously identified many cases of abuse, “but even when they pointed it out and reported it back to the federal government, nothing seemed to happen,” she said.

Missouri is another state making significant efforts.

In order to prevent situations like the alleged payout of day care support payments in Minnesota to foreign recipients in Somalia, Missouri State Treasurer Vivek Malek is supporting legislation to verify that people making foreign money transfers are legal residents.

“The Show-Me State is well on its way to becoming the first in the nation to establish a clear, enforceable standard that protects taxpayers and strengthens the integrity of our financial system,” Malek stated in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times.

Other SFOF members highlighted in the report for targeting fraud and waste are officials from Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Mississippi, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wyoming, South Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Idaho, West Virginia, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and Arkansas.

Although there are not many SFOF members from blue states, Oleka stresses that the organization, which is dedicated to free markets, accountability, and the rule of law, is nonpartisan and “would certainly welcome them.”