JD Vance’s vaunted task force, focused on uncovering fraudulent federal spending, is off to a rough start, and this week’s meeting added to the project’s troubles. Nearly two dozen state attorneys general skipped the latest gathering because they were invited on Friday — and given a deadline to RSVP by Saturday.
It probably wasn’t a coincidence that all of these state attorneys general are Democrats. Indeed, the result was an all-Republican meeting, which likely suited the White House just fine, given that Vance’s endeavor has been brazen in its partisan intentions.
Nevertheless, the meeting on Tuesday proceeded as planned, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller took the opportunity to share a claim that warranted a closer look.
“Based on what I’ve heard, we could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the treasury went to individuals who were properly, lawfully, correctly eligible to receive them,” Miller said.
Roughly a day later, at a White House Cabinet meeting, his boss made the same point.
If Vance’s task force roots out enough fraud, Donald Trump declared, “we’ll have a balanced budget without having to do anything.”
Notwithstanding what Miller has “heard” from unnamed sources, this entire argument is ludicrous. The budget deficit in 2025 was $1.8 trillion, and every independent estimate suggests that fraud, while a problem worth taking seriously, is nowhere near that total.
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When the White House doesn’t even understand the nature of the problem it’s trying to address, success is unlikely.
But there’s another element to this that bears repeating. The New York Times’ David French wrote online, in response to Miller’s claim, “This is wildly false, and it breeds a dangerous level of ignorance and wishful thinking in the American public. We’d have to make some hard choices (including making some very tough trade-offs) to come close to balancing the budget. Saying anything else is irresponsible.”
Nearly a month ago, the U.S. national debt exceeded 100% of the nation’s gross domestic product, crossing what The Wall Street Journal described as “a once-unthinkable threshold.” The news, dealing with an issue Republicans used to pretend to care about, went largely ignored in GOP circles.
Now, however, the Trump White House, which is responsible for adding more than $9 trillion (and counting) to the debt, expects the public to believe it can balance the budget by doing nothing more than addressing fraudulent payments that don’t appear to exist.
If the president and his team want to present a credible plan to address the nation’s fiscal challenges, complete with inevitable hard choices, that’d be great. But pretending that a single hapless task force can magically make the problem go away is emblematic of the White House’s inability to think seriously about governing.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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