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.
Why it matters: 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.
Driving the news: Musk took to X on Friday to celebrate the release of Medicaid data on claims, medical procedures and payments from January 2018 through December 2024.
- "Medicaid data has been open sourced, so the level of fraud is easy to identify," Musk wrote. "DOGE is not a department, it's a state of mind."
- The Department of Health and Human Services collects Medicaid claims data from states that administer the program. Until now, much of the information has been fragmented and difficult to access.
What they're saying: 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.
- "All data will comply with federal privacy laws. The goal is to support program integrity."
The other side: "A serious attempt to root out fraud in Medicaid would involve working with states rather than continuing the Trump administration's attack on Minnesota," said Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families and a research professor at Georgetown University,
- "I expect more of the same between now and the election to divert voters' attention from historic cuts to Medicaid that were made in last year's budget bill."
Under Musk, DOGE gained access to the inner workings of HHS last February, including data systems that manage a nearly $2 trillion budget.
- At the time, it said it was looking for examples of waste, fraud and abuse, but didn't elaborate on how wide a net it was casting or how it was defining those words.
- DOGE said it wanted to save $2 trillion in government spending, a virtually impossible task without making cuts to health spending.
Editor's note: This story has been updated with a comment from HHS.
