What’s Missing Is Not Another Task Force

Why directing agencies to stop fraud and giving them the tools to do it are very different things

The Executive Order signed March 16th establishing a Task Force to Eliminate Fraud is built on a familiar fantasy: that the federal government can solve an industrialized systems problem by convening meetings and documenting priorities. It cannot. And the networks exploiting that gap already know it.

Photo by André Ravazzi on Unsplash

The Executive Order is not without specificity. It names nine cabinet departments and four additional agencies. It sets concrete deadlines: 30 days for agencies to identify their most vulnerable transactions, 60 days for the task force to establish minimum anti-fraud requirements, 90 days for each member agency to submit implementation plans. It activates the False Claims Act to enable private civil enforcement. It threatens to withhold federal funds from states that fail to comply.

That coordination architecture is needed. But coordination is not the same as capability. And that distinction is the whole problem.

What this order cannot do— and does not do— is give agencies the tools to act on what they are being told to prioritize. It directs. It does not equip. The gap between those two things is where fraud lives.

The threat has already outgrown the system.

The federal government is no longer dealing with isolated bad actors or marginal abuse. It is up against industrialized fraud—organized networks that treat federal programs as a coordinated revenue stream and operate across programs, states, and borders simultaneously.

They are not guessing. They understand the system’s architecture better than the agencies that built it. They know identity verification is inconsistent across programs. They know data is siloed. They know that even when fraud is detected, enforcement is slow and consequence is rare. So they design around it.

They generate thousands of identities—stolen, synthetic, slightly varied to defeat basic matching. They file claims across unemployment insurance, Medicaid, tax credits, housing assistance, and small business programs in parallel. They probe, learn, and scale what works.

They do not think in terms of programs. They think in terms of access points. The system, as currently designed, rewards that approach. No coordination mandate changes that.

What the order gets right—and why it still falls short.

Section 4 of the order calls for the right things: pre-payment integrity controls, cross-program risk indicators, eligibility verification, provider revalidation, and data-sharing with states. These are not wrong. They are, in fact, exactly what is needed.

The problem is the mechanism. Agencies are being asked to build these capabilities on top of systems that were never designed for real-time analytics, cross-program visibility, or entity resolution at scale. The order does not provide new technology infrastructure. It does not provide new funding—Section 7 explicitly conditions implementation on “the availability of appropriations.” And it does not provide the legal authority to share data across programs that genuine fraud detection requires.

So what happens? Agencies write plans. They add documentation requirements to existing workflows. They tighten rules at the margins. Meanwhile, the adversary is running automated, cross-program campaigns.

That is the technological gap. It will not close through planning.

A note on framing.

The order’s purpose section frames fraud primarily as a problem of immigration, state political noncompliance, and bad faith actors in specific communities. That framing has real policy consequences.

The largest fraud vectors in the federal system—Medicare and Medicaid billing fraud, pandemic-era relief program exploitation, refundable tax credit schemes, and defense contractor overbilling—cut across demographic and political lines. Treating fraud primarily as an immigration problem misdirects enforcement attention and misidentifies the structural vulnerabilities that make large-scale fraud possible. It attributes to politics what is largely a systems failure.

Effective fraud prevention depends on federal-state data-sharing and operational cooperation. An adversarial posture that leads with fund-withholding threats before building shared infrastructure and trust will almost certainly undermine the very partnerships the task force needs to succeed. Leverage is only useful if the underlying relationship can bear it.

The four barriers that won’t move without structural action.

Infrastructure. The federal government does not have a common decision layer for payments. Each agency runs its own systems. Each program evaluates risk in isolation. Even when agencies are directed to adopt pre-disbursement controls, they are doing it without cross-program visibility—detecting only the fraud they can see, while coordinated networks exploit the gaps between programs.

The government needs a centralized operational layer—a shared data analytics and entity resolution platform, with interoperability between federal and state systems, that can see across programs, link identities, and generate risk signals in real time, before funds are disbursed. An executive order cannot build that. It requires sustained technology investment and, in some cases, new legislation.

Legal authority. Section 3(iv) calls for improved information and data sharing between federal agencies and state partners. That is badly needed. But it runs directly into a legal framework that was not built for real-time fraud prevention. Privacy rules, program-specific confidentiality provisions, and statutory restrictions limit how data can be used and shared—even among agencies trying to detect the same fraud network operating across programs.

Fixing this requires clear statutory authority for fraud-prevention data sharing, with strong safeguards and accountability. It requires enabling techniques like privacy-preserving record linkage, so agencies can identify shared entities and risk patterns without exposing underlying personal data. The order cannot grant that authority. Congress can.

Incentives. The federal bureaucratic system is not designed to reward aggressive fraud detection. In many agencies, it actively discourages it. Identifying fraud can attract oversight scrutiny, slow payment timelines, and generate political exposure. The institutional path of least resistance is to do just enough.

An executive order can make fraud a White House priority, but it cannot restructure the performance metrics and accountability frameworks that shape behavior inside agencies. Until fraud prevention becomes a measurable expectation—not an optional enhancement—coordination will coexist with avoidance.

Resources. The order sets deadlines without providing funding. Agencies are being told to strengthen controls, modernize systems, and improve detection—all of which require real investment in technology, data infrastructure, and skilled personnel. The scale of potential savings is enormous. Hundreds of billions of dollars annually. But realizing those savings requires treating prevention as infrastructure, not overhead.

“Subject to availability of appropriations” is not a funding commitment. It is a hedge. And it is the single phrase most likely to determine whether this order produces lasting change.

What forward actually looks like.

The order’s False Claims Act provision directing the Attorney General to promote private civil enforcement is a retrospective mechanism. It recovers losses after fraud has already occurred. Meaningful progress requires the opposite logic: stopping fraud before the payment is made.

That means building what this order points toward but cannot create on its own. A shared operational layer that evaluates identity, eligibility, and risk before funds are disbursed. A privacy-preserving entity resolution platform that generates cross-program risk signals in real time. A consistent, government-wide view of who receives federal funds. Legal authorities that enable responsible data sharing across programs and with states. Performance metrics that hold agencies accountable for fraud prevention outcomes, not just payment speed.

None of this is beyond reach. Several countries have built versions of it. A number of states have moved in this direction on a smaller scale. The technical approaches exist. What has been missing is the political will to fund them and the institutional honesty to treat fraud prevention as an urgent, governmentwide challenge rather than a compliance exercise. This order demonstrates the first without committing to the second.

Congress must provide both statutory authority and sustained appropriations. OMB must establish prevention-based performance standards. And there needs to be a multi-year investment in shared federal infrastructure. The framing must be centered on systems failure, not partisan politics, because that is where the vulnerability actually lives.

The Executive Order opens the door. But it does not build the system.

What’s missing is not another task force. It is a system that can say no before the money goes out.

Until that system exists, the federal government will keep doing what it has always done: paying first and investigating later. The task force will coordinate that process. It will not change it. And the networks running industrialized fraud campaigns against federal programs already know the difference.