When the White House’s anti-fraud task force, led by JD Vance, got to work roughly six months ago, there was ample reason for skepticism. Not only was the vice president unqualified for such a task, but the administration made little effort to hide its partisan political motivations, which meant it was eager to target blue states.

What’s more, this was probably a topic Donald Trump and his team should have tried to avoid, given the president’s unfortunate record on committing fraud and on issuing pardons to those who have been convicted of fraud.

Vance and company nevertheless proceeded with their efforts, and they not only claimed to have had great success in “fighting fraudsters,” they even unveiled an online “fraud ledger” to chronicle the task force’s successes. At the heart of the resource is an implicit boast: The White House isn’t just making outlandish claims; it’s actually keeping the receipts.

At least, that was the idea. The Washington Sun reported:

The Washington Sun’s review of the ledger found that it includes misleading and unsubstantiated claims, and the White House has not provided details about how the administration crunched its fraud numbers. […]

The absence of details, and the apparent inconsistencies in the numbers, have oversight experts both inside and outside the government questioning the veracity of the White House’s work.

Linda Miller, the president of the government integrity-focused Program Integrity Alliance, who worked at the Government Accountability Office for a decade, told the Sun, “The fraud ledger appears to be primarily a piece of propaganda that provides very little, if any, meaningful information.”

The New York Times published a related report, noting that some of the numbers Vance and his task force have promoted “are overstated or lack specificity, and rely on temporary pauses in funding as well as cases and actions that long predated President Trump’s second term.” The article added, “The task force also appears to be relying on claims of fraud that could not be verified or leaning on allegations of fraud that are being prematurely included.”

The point isn’t that fraud is somehow a nonissue. The opposite is true: Independent estimates show billions of dollars are lost every year to fraud and abuse. If the vice president believes he can help address the problem, more power to him.

The trouble is, Vance claims he has already made extraordinary headway in uncovering fraud — to the tune of more than $260 billion — but those boasts aren’t standing up well to scrutiny.

If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because a similar story unfolded last year: Republican megadonor Elon Musk was put in charge of the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, known as DOGE, and it too created an online resource that purported to show all of the billions of dollars the endeavor was saving American taxpayers.

This too invited scrutiny, which proved unwise: Journalists found that DOGE pointed to savings that were illusory, misleading or both, and the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional agency that conducts federal audits for lawmakers, similarly concluded that DOGE repeatedly misled the public with its online database.

To be sure, the underlying point of these resources sounds great. The anti-fraud task force and DOGE both tried to tell the public, “Look, we’re not just making this stuff up. We kept the receipts!”

The trouble is, both initiatives seemed wholly unprepared for what might happen when people who know what they’re talking about bothered to review their work.

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