Color me shocked. We just got a healthy dose of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, and with an issue that is really important in terms of saving taxpayer dollars and holding people accountable.
The House made the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division permanent this week by a margin of 352 to 72. More than 140 Democrats voted yes, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries among them. Every single vote against it came from the same party. That is not a bipartisan moment. That is a surrender, and the roll call is the receipt.
Understand what these members just conceded. For six years, anyone who pointed at the pandemic money and said out loud that hundreds of billions were being stolen got the full treatment — conspiracy theorist, austerity ghoul, secretly out to gut the safety net. The line was that fraud was a rounding error invented by Republicans who wanted an excuse to cut programs. Then the Government Accountability Office put the number between $233 billion and $521 billion a year. Every year. The low end of that range exceeds the entire federal education budget. And now the same caucus that spent years calling this a right-wing talking point has voted, by a two-to-one margin within its own ranks, to make the office that prosecutes it a permanent fixture of the Justice Department.
Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald: "Today’s record health care fraud charges and arrests makes clear that there is no case too big, no scheme too complex, and no hiding place too remote for our fraud-fighting team. In just 14 days, 455 defendants have been charged across… pic.twitter.com/qRmbso8X5h
— National Fraud Enforcement Division (@DOJFraudDiv) June 23, 2026
They didn’t do it because they changed their minds. They did it because the division started producing, and the production is politically unanswerable. Nearly nine hundred thousand suspect PPP borrowers flagged and suspended. Four hundred fifty-five defendants charged in a single two-week health care sweep. Actual arrests, actual indictments, actual recovered dollars — the kind of thing that fits in a thirty-second ad in a swing district. There is no way to vote against that at home. Ask any member who did and watch him explain it in October.
Which brings us to left-wing Maryland Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin, who managed the rare feat of voting yes while whining about it. He described the bill as roughly the least offensive scrap of legislative driftwood to wash up during what he characterized as Republican chaos. Read that again. A constitutional law professor (sort of), a man who has delivered a thousand sermons about stewardship of public institutions, cannot bring himself to say that prosecuting people who steal from taxpayers is a good thing. He has to sneer his way through the concession. That’s not principle. That’s a man who knows his base will punish him for agreeing with this administration about anything, including theft.
And it clarifies what the 72 holdouts were actually voting on. Not fraud — nobody in that chamber is for fraud. They were voting against the idea that a Republican Justice Department should be the one holding the file, because the file has started to point in uncomfortable directions. When Vice President Vance referred Tim Walz and Keith Ellison to the division over Minnesota’s program scandals, the objection wasn’t that the underlying allegations were fabricated. Minnesota has spent two years cycling through one grift after another, in programs the state was supposed to be watching. The objection was that someone finally looked. That’s the whole disagreement. Democrats are fine with anti-fraud enforcement in the abstract and allergic to it the moment it walks into a blue-state welfare bureaucracy.
This is what limited government actually looks like in practice. Not a speech about spending. Not a doomed amendment. A prosecutor, a case number, and a defendant who took money meant for the elderly and the poor and spent it on himself. Every dollar stolen from a federal program is a dollar that didn’t reach someone who needed it — which is precisely why the people who claim to care most about those programs should have been leading this fight for twenty years. They weren’t. They fought it, until fighting it became untenable, and then they filed in behind it while holding their noses.
Take the win, and remember the number. Three hundred fifty-two to seventy-two. When the other side finally votes your way on something they called a lie for six years, that’s not a compromise. That’s the argument being over.
