RFKJr. Suspends $1 Billion in Medicaid Payments to California and Minnesota Because Both Failed States Continue to Permit and Encourage Massive Fraud

PJ Media's Catherine Salgado:

The Trump-Kennedy Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has paused over $1 billion in Medicaid funding for California and Minnesota, as the Democrats there have absolutely no intention of truly reforming their systems to root out the rampant fraud.

HHS leadership held a press conference Tuesday regarding the suspension and how the Trump administration is combatting fraud. "If those states want that money, they need to provide documentations that these ⁠payments are legitimate," HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at the press conference where Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), also appeared.

Oz explained why California in particular is raising so many questions. "Another $250 million, a quarter billion dollars, comes from claims tied to high-risk providers, as I explained earlier, those who are billing more than a year after the service is provided, those billing for four or more patients all at the same time -- hard to juggle that many patients."

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Referring to the Democrats in charge of California and Minnesota, "If Gov. Gavin Newsom or Gov. Tim Walz wants this funding released, all they have to do is provide basic documentation, showing that these services are legitimate and not fraudulent. And that's common sense. The Biden administration abandoned that kind of oversight. Instead of protecting your money, they open the floodgates to theft. They dismantled basic program integrity and oversight."

Biden's policy was to send out checks to the fraudsters and then, if someone noticed, fruitlessly attempt to "claw back" the money which was already spirited out of the country.

Blue states' economies run on fraud and plunder from red states.

Education fraud is just as bad.

Jeremy Portnoy at Real Clear Investigations:

Topline: Since 2019, school districts across 24 states and Puerto Rico have lost $225 million to fraud confirmed by the U.S. Department of Education inspector general's semiannual report to Congress. No more than $67 million has been recovered.

Key facts: Open the Books and the State Financial Officers Foundation documented 74 instances of confirmed school fraud, averaging over $3 million each. There are far more that have gone unprosecuted or undetected.

Florida and Illinois schools each had the most instances of fraud with 11.

Indiana lost the most money -- $44 million -- due to inflated attendance numbers that increased state funding to two schools. The schools' founder then allegedly sent the money to companies he owned. The schools closed in 2019, and four alleged conspirators were charged in 2024.

At Broward County Public Schools in Florida, information officer Anthony Hunter allegedly used district funds to buy $17 million worth of school supplies from a friend's business, ignoring the competitive bidding process. In return, the friend hired Hunter and his son to work a security job and sold Hunter a house for $150,000 below market value, state prosecutors claim

Chicago Public Schools received $1 million of federal grants meant for Native American students, using an application that included more than 1,000 students of South Asian descent. The district was unable to verify how many students were actually in the program, and agreed to repay the money.

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Summary: The government loses hundreds of billions of dollars to fraud annually, but redirecting money away from children's education is especially egregious.

Just the News:

Watchdog says as much as 74% of federal grant spending in 2024 was untraceable to local levels

The report released Tuesday revealed that many federal assistance programs didn't accurately track their spending, explain specific uses of funds or report location data in 2024.

A government watchdog group's new report on federal spending found that it's unclear where hundreds of billions of grant dollars go once they reach states.

The Project On Government Oversight downloaded and analyzed data from USAspending.gov that the nonprofit group says in a report released on Tuesday shows over 74% -- $712.6 billion -- of $958.6 billion in domestic grant spending from fiscal 2024 couldn't be tracked to the local level.

The Trump administration confirmed with Just the News that the lack of accountability shown in the report's findings is why new rules have been proposed for federal grantmaking, and they comport with those at the Office of Management and Budget.

Finally, a judge has ruled that Harvard must face a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that scientists made false claims in their NIH grant applications -- and in fact never intended to do the "science" they claimed in the grant application. They just wanted the NIH to give them a pot of money, and decide later how to spend it.

It's just fraud from one end of the government to the other:

A federal judge allowed most of a whistleblower lawsuit against Harvard to proceed Tuesday, letting two claims advance in a case accusing the University and a Harvard Catalyst principal investigator of misusing National Institutes of Health grant funding.

The suit, filed by David S. Zielinski, the former executive director of Harvard Catalyst -- formally the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center -- alleges that the University and the center's founder, Lee M. Nadler, collected $275 million in NIH grants while abandoning or repurposing promised research work in violation of the False Claims Act.

The lawsuit was filed in March 2024 and remained under seal while the Department of Justice reviewed the allegations until November 2025.

U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun rejected most of the University's motion to dismiss in his 28-page order, tossing one count of "reverse false claims" while allowing two claims alleging false claims and false records to advance.

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The University had argued that the court should "be skeptical" that the NIH "somehow missed that two-thirds of the work contemplated was never done," arguing NIH would have been able to make that determination by reviewing the annual reports and choosing whether to renew the grants.

In other words: You can't say we committed fraud because the NIH was in on it and knew we were lying.

Which may well be true. More on that later.

Joun wrote that the University's arguments did not make the allegations "implausible" and that "the very purpose of those statements is to keep NIH in the dark" from the truth. He added that it would be a "futile effort" for the court to immediately compare all the reports with the allegations, noting that Nadler allegedly "used crafty grantsmanship to obscure their true usage of the funds."

Zielinski's attorneys wrote in a statement that Joun's ruling made clear that Zielinski "sufficiently alleged with particularity that Harvard defrauded NIH."

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The suit alleges that Nadler and the University "repeatedly, year after year" submitted falsified reports attesting that progress was made in compliance with the terms of the NIH award.

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Zielinski, a former NIH official, alleged that Nadler told other colleagues in the center that he wrote grants to receive funding and then "decides what to do with the money." Zielinski further alleged that Nadler "was uninterested in modifying his behavior" despite warnings from Zielinski.

Zielinski wrote in the suit that Nadler stated "this is how he handled grants for decades" and "frequently made no effort to perform the work they had certified they would conduct" or change the scope of the grant.

Zielinski alleged that the center repeatedly had no intention to perform "much of the work for which he received hundreds of millions of dollars." He alleged that the center had falsely represented progress since annual reports in 2013. In one instance, he alleged that Harvard Catalyst failed to complete 41 of 56 objectives identified in a $93 million 2018-2023 grant application, 21 of which Zielinski alleged had no work completed.

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Several other whistleblower complaints and lawsuits have applied pressure on the University and its affiliates as of late. In November, the State Department began investigating the Harvard Cognitive Aesthetics Media Lab following a whistleblower complaint that the lab mishandled admissions for its visiting scholars.

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute agreed to pay $15 million in December to settle allegations that a Harvard Medical School affiliate used NIH grant funding to publish studies with manipulated images, after a British biologist raised concerns in a whistleblower lawsuit.

Below: Sabine Hossenfelder says that the NIH doesn't detect this kind of fraud -- which is "common" and "normalized" -- because they're in on the con. They know these applications are fraudulent, they just don't care.

She also says that this might unleash dozens of new lawsuits. This lawsuits is brought under a federal provision that allows a litigant to retain 25% of the money that the government saves if the lawsuit exposes fraud.

Just another data point to consider in the covid-19 mass-murder by Anthony Fauci.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 01:20 PM

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