The White House held a roundtable on government fraud and waste this week, inviting state attorneys general from both parties to sit down and talk about how to stop people from stealing taxpayer money. Democrats refused to show up. Not because they were blocked. Not because they were excluded. They just didn't want to come.
Apparently fighting fraud is partisan now. Good to know.
The roundtable was part of President Trump's fraud elimination task force, which he announced in February during his State of the Union address and placed under the leadership of Vice President JD Vance. The effort has been co-chaired by Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, with Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller serving as senior adviser. The initiative has specifically targeted welfare fraud and Medicaid abuse — programs hemorrhaging billions of dollars a year to scam artists.
Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz has been a key figure in the push, spotlighting the staggering scale of Medicaid fraud nationwide. The roundtable was designed to bring state-level law enforcement into the fold. Bipartisan cooperation on catching thieves. Sounds pretty reasonable, right?
Not to the Democrats. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, New York Attorney General Letitia James, New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, and Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez all declined the invitation.
Bonta's excuse? He called it a "clearly disingenuous last-minute invitation," claiming the invite came Friday afternoon for a Tuesday event. He added that "either way, it doesn't match the spirit of collaboration that has long defined our state and federal partnerships." Translation: we won't collaborate because you didn't give us enough time to prepare talking points about how we're already doing a great job.
And look — Bonta does have numbers. California's DOJ says it has recovered $2.8 billion in fraud cases over the past 10 years, conducted 2,300 criminal fraud investigations, charged 958 individuals with fraud-related crimes, and run 1,121 civil investigations. Since Bonta took office in 2021, California claims to have secured $1.2 billion from Medi-Cal fraud cases alone. They've launched 294 hospice fraud investigations, filed 109 hospice criminal cases, and secured 51 convictions.
Just this past April, California announced the takedown of a Los Angeles County hospice ring that defrauded taxpayers of $267 million, resulting in 5 arrests and 21 suspects charged with felonies. So yes, California catches some fraudsters.
But here's the thing — if your state is recovering billions in fraud, wouldn't you want to sit at the table and share how you're doing it? Wouldn't you want to coordinate with federal authorities to catch even more? New York's Letitia James even admitted that "fraud happens in all states across the nation." Correct, Tish. So why aren't you at the meeting about it?
The answer is obvious. They didn't skip because of scheduling. They skipped because showing up at a Trump White House event — even one about catching criminals stealing from Medicaid patients — would be a political sin in their base's eyes. The optics of cooperating with this administration are worse, in their calculation, than the optics of refusing to fight fraud.
Let that math settle in. Democrat attorneys general would rather be seen boycotting a fraud meeting than sitting next to JD Vance to protect taxpayer dollars. That's not governance. That's a tantrum.
As reported by Just The News, the invitation was open and bipartisan. Nobody was excluded. Nobody was set up. The door was open, the chairs were empty, and the Democrats chose to stay home. Next time they lecture you about protecting the vulnerable, remember this: they were invited to do exactly that, and they couldn't be bothered.