Elon Musk took a victory lap Friday as a Department of Government Efficiency team released a huge trove of Medicaid spending data he said the public could use to look for fraud themselves.
The Trump administration often cites waste, fraud and abuse as justification for deep program cuts — including the nearly $1 trillion in reductions to federal Medicaid spending in last year’s Republican budget bill.
- It used Minnesota’s inability to rein in fraud in safety net programs as justification for freezing federal child care funding to the state and launching the ICE enforcement surge that targeted the state’s Somali community.
- DOGE has been working on a large-scale mining of Medicaid records since last year.
The public release could make it possible to identify high-billing Medicaid providers and unusual patterns — including alleged fraudulent autism diagnoses and treatments in Minnesota that were billed by Medicaid providers, the Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial on Friday.
The release drew interest from some journalists. It also raises the prospect of random X users claiming to find fraud after searching the database.
“For the first time, HHS is expanding public access to de-identified, aggregated data to increase transparency and accountability beyond what is currently available,” HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said.
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