Trump and Musk can’t seem to locate much evidence of fraud

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to disrupt the U.S. government and hamstring federal agencies are increasingly predicated on the idea that they’re combating fraud. Trump and Musk used that word more than a dozen times in the Oval Office on Tuesday, and the Trump administration keeps citing fraud in defending itself in court.

“We have massive amounts of fraud that we’ve caught,” Trump said.

Except they seem to be having trouble locating the actual fraud.

They keep saying they’ve uncovered fraud. But when pressed for evidence, they don’t seem to have much or any.

They instead often point to programs that might sound wasteful to some but were congressionally authorized. They have also repeatedly pointed to things that have been known about for years, acting as if they had just uncovered them.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t fraud; a large bureaucracy like the government is prone to it. It’s just that they seem to be using very nonspecific and unsubstantiated allegations of fraud to justify a massive overhaul of specific government agencies.

Let’s run through it.

The first thing to note is that two separate judges have now rebuked the administration for claiming fraud but not producing evidence of it.

“The Defendants now plea that they are just trying to root out fraud,” U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. wrote Monday in finding the administration had violated a court order by failing to unfreeze the many federal grants it blocked. “But the freezes in effect now were a result of the broad categorical order, not a specific finding of possible fraud.”

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols reached a similar conclusion in blocking Trump and Musk’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Nichols noted that he asked the administration what harm would come from blocking its move to place 2,000 agency employees on leave. Nichols, a Trump appointee, wrote that the administration “had no response — beyond asserting without any record support that USAID writ large was possibly engaging in ‘corruption and fraud.’”

By Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was pressed on the supposed evidence of fraud — and seemingly came prepared.

“As for the actual receipts, we are happy to provide them, and I actually brought some today,” Leavitt said, as she waved around printouts.

She proceeded to mention four things:

• A $36,000 contract for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

• A $3.4 million contract for “inclusive innovation” at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

• $57,000 for climate change programs in Sri Lanka.

• A limestone mine in Pennsylvania where federal employee retirements are processed on paper.

“Did anybody know this was even happening in our country before Elon Musk talked about it in the Oval Office yesterday?” Leavitt asked rhetorically about that last item. A day before she had praised the U.S. DOGE Service for “exposing” it.

The first thing to note is that the processing taking place in that mine was actually exposed 11 years ago by The Washington Post, in a story called, “Sinkhole of bureaucracy.”

The second thing is that there remains no evidence that anything about these programs is fraudulent. Even in describing them, she called them as “against the president’s policies” and contrary to “the interests of the American people.” Neither of those things are illegal.

Leavitt was then pressed on whether she was really saying those things were fraud, and she gamely pressed ahead.

“I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent, they are wasteful, and they are an abuse of the American taxpayers’ dollar,” she said.

Former Trump aide Bryan Lanza later acknowledged on CNN that what Leavitt pointed to was not, in fact, fraud — but rather waste.

(And to be clear, this is an important distinction. Even legal and authorized programs can be wasteful in your mind, but that doesn’t mean you can just get rid of them on a whim.)

Later on Wednesday, the White House press office again sought to rescue the point. After the New York Times noted that Musk had failed to provide proof for his sweeping claims of fraud — including claiming that many bureaucrats had net worths in the tens of millions of dollars and that USAID officials took “kickbacks” — the press office issued a brief statement.

But rather than defend those specific claims, it pointed to a 2024 Government Accountability Office estimate that the federal government had broadly lost $233 billion to $521 billion annually to fraud.

But the Times story hadn’t said there was no fraud in the federal government; it said Musk hadn’t provided evidence for his specific claims. And the GAO report is just a modeled estimate, not firm evidence.

(What’s more, it relied in large part on fraud that had already been identified and on findings from inspectors general, many of whom Trump has recently fired.)

This has been the story of Trump’s broader efforts to overhaul the government: big, hyperbolic claims without much to back them up. Even if you expand the money supposedly being rooted out to include fraud and alleged waste, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, notes that DOGE has publicly identified “only about $2 billion in annual savings from specific line items” — a tiny drop in the bucket.

Despite the growing scrutiny of the fraud claims, Trump later Wednesday declined to back down.

“Here’s something where you look at that, and they’re all fraudulent,” he said of the USAID grants. “You know by just looking at the topic — they’re all fraudulent.”

Trump would indeed seem to believe that many things he simply doesn’t like or agree with are fraudulent, which helps explain the White House’s posture right now.

But that doesn’t mean they are fraudulent. And that’s a problem when you’re using that as your justification for dismantling large portions of the government.