The fraud squad

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 24th of June.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

First up, Washington Wednesday. This week, the Trump administration claimed the largest health care fraud bust in American history. Vice President J.D. Vance emerged as the face of both anti-fraud enforcement and high-stakes diplomacy with Iran.

EICHER: Democrats, meanwhile, got a real-time test of how far the party’s socialist wing can extend its influence beyond a single mayoral race in New York. And in Washington, even the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become a political controversy. President Trump painted it blue, and it made Democrats green with algae.

Hunter Baker is here. Good morning.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, the Trump administration announced charges against hundreds of defendants in what officials describe as the largest health care fraud takedown in American history. It involves billions of dollars in allegedly fraudulent claims. So, true or false here: when fraud reaches this kind of scale, the problem is not the crime, it’s the government. True or false, Hunter?

BAKER: I think that both things are true. I think that crime obviously is sort of an eternal problem in human affairs, this side of paradise anyway. And when you have a government that becomes really large, it is going to attract fraud.

In fact, I think the dynamic that people need to understand is that anytime there is an ocean, just a vast ocean of money that is freely available from the government for different kinds of programs and reimbursements, there is a strong incentive to figure out how to extract that money.

Most voters have a diffuse interest in controlling fraud. They’re not thinking about it all the time. They’re not demanding that somebody’s doing it all the time. And the politicians are not thinking about it. So fraud can proliferate fairly easily in a free society with a very large government.

MAST: Well, Hunter, for years conservatives have talked about waste, fraud, and abuse. Does this case suggest they were understating the problem, or they didn’t have the stomach for the fight to come?

BAKER: I think that politicians in the United States have loved to talk about waste, fraud, and abuse in a theoretical sort of a way. When asked how we can afford a certain program, they would always calculate some amount of waste, fraud, and abuse that they would be able to reduce, and we have never really seen that.

So I think we’ve been aware of the problem. I think you said they didn’t have the stomach. I think that’s exactly right—not the stomach or the eye for detail.

This is unglamorous hard work. And then once you do it and you actually catch the wrongdoers, there’s some serious political benefit.

EICHER: All right, prediction for you: does this become one of the administration’s strongest political arguments heading into the midterms? Do they use this?

BAKER: If they’re smart, they will. I mean, I can’t think of anybody—this is not a partisan issue. Voters do not want to see fraud in our country’s major health programs or other programs that are designed to benefit people.

People should understand that every dollar that goes to some thief or swindler is one dollar that does not go to somebody who deserves it. And it also is part of that sort of reckless spending by the government that ends up helping to cause inflation and to add to the deficit, which is growing at a breakneck pace.

So this is a huge issue.

MAST: Well, similar to Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance is now wearing several hats at once. He’s leading the administration’s anti-fraud effort. He’s playing a central role in negotiations with Iran. And he’s released a new memoir that reads, in part, like a statement of political philosophy. Hunter, is J.D. Vance still Trump’s running mate, or is he front-runner to succeed the president?

BAKER: He is occupying a very interesting sort of place in American politics right now.

Yes, he’s the guy who Trump chose. We may all remember that there was quite a sweepstakes. Who was Trump going to choose? Well, he chose J.D. Vance, who was ambitious and who wanted that role.

As we pass the midterms, that sort of lame-duck mantle will settle firmly upon Trump’s shoulders. I think that’s part of why Trump has been more active with endorsements. He’s trying to ensure that he remains relevant instead of sort of fading into the shadow of whoever is going to run next.

I have to note that with this new memoir, he sort of joins the small club with Barack Obama of two politicians who, while still fairly young, had already had two memoirs, so there’s that.

I also can’t help but notice that he bears some similarity to young Richard Nixon. Nixon was in the U.S. Senate for about five minutes before he was tapped to be the vice-presidential nominee for Dwight Eisenhower. And so Vance similarly was chosen very quickly upon his entry into the Senate.

So he’s a big deal. He’s front and center right now. And I feel like his fortunes are going to rise and fall with the way the ultimate settlement of affairs in Iran lies.

EICHER: So thinking about 2028 then, Hunter, what about Marco Rubio? What about Ron DeSantis? What about a more traditional Republican and the rest of the field, however it might shake out?

BAKER: I have a real passion for good government, and I think if that’s what people really cared about, then Ron DeSantis’s stock would be really high.

EICHER: But they don’t, is what you’re saying. Right?

BAKER: I suspect (laughing), I suspect that will not be the determining factor.

It looks to me like it’s going to be a slugfest between J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, but it may not be. Rubio has acted like he would defer to Vance, but if things with Iran fall apart, then Rubio’s star may rise.

MAST: All right, Hunter, fill in the blank. If Vance becomes president someday, historians will say his defining idea was—

EICHER: —blank.

BAKER: Anti-war.

He was obviously a veteran in our conflicts earlier in the century. He has been vocal about his desire to keep the United States out of international wars and misadventures. And I think that would be his defining idea.

EICHER: Well, New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani urged voters to support a broader slate of allied candidates in congressional and legislative races in New York. Last night’s results certainly are strong evidence that Mamdani’s movement extends beyond himself.

Hunter, on congressional races, Mamdani’s picks were three for three. In two of the races, socialists knocked off Democrat incumbents. A Democratic Socialists spokesperson in New York specifically called out Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat leader in the U.S. House. She said, “Americans are tired of status quo politics.”

So imagine, Hakeem Jeffries, of all people, called out for not being partisan enough. What an ideological shift last night.

BAKER: It’s pretty shocking if you think about it.

In your narrative there, you talked about socialists defeating Democrat incumbents. More accurately, we would say socialists defeated progressives. The socialists are rooting out the progressives in New York, which is a pretty significant kind of statement.

And of course, to see Hakeem Jeffries, who is maybe the most partisan Democrat in Congress, be called out as too much of a compromiser, as not being partisan enough, is shocking.

Now, what I will say is that the strategy has been brilliant in the United States. We have a two-party binary, and so if you try to start a third party, whether the sort of way that H. Ross Perot did or the way the Green Party did, typically you fail.

What the socialists have done is they have decided to operate within the Democratic Party, so a third party within one of the two parties. And they are winning that fight within the Democratic Party, at least in New York.

MAST: Well, beyond New York, Hunter, I know you were watching the South Carolina GOP governor’s primary with interest. What was important there?

BAKER: We had a runoff between the state’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, and the state’s lieutenant governor, Pam Evette.

And what was interesting is that in the original primary, Trump had endorsed Evette, and so she was going into this runoff with Wilson with that endorsement.

But strangely, a few days before the runoff, Trump basically said that he endorsed both. I suspect that’s because he saw the way the wind was blowing and Wilson was likely to win. And indeed that’s what happened. Wilson did win, which I think is encouraging. He’s arguably the biggest pro-life politician in the state.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, as we go out, Algae Gate. We’ve got to know about this.

When President Trump says that vandalism is responsible for problems at the newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, internal documents, if The New York Times is to be believed, suggest the story may be a bit more complicated, involving equipment failures, algae growth, and peeling sealant after just a couple of weeks, which seems kind of strange.

But what is the lesson of Algae Gate here? Do we have Trump derangement syndrome at its most deranged?

BAKER: I think the lesson is that the Reflecting Pool is a problem. It was a problem addressed by President Bush. It was a problem addressed by President Obama. And now it is being addressed by President Trump.

And here’s what I would say: if any president should be trusted with a project of this type, it maybe is Donald Trump. …

EICHER: … the skating rink.

BAKER: Yes, I have pointed out that he is actually a public administration case study for his work on the New York City skating rink. And I think that he’s probably better set up to deal with a problem like this than almost anybody else.

MAST: Hunter Baker is provost at North Greenville University and our regular Washington Wednesday contributor. Thank you so much, Hunter.

BAKER: Thank you.

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