All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Vice President JD Vance estimated that federal fraud could be on the scale of hundreds of billions of dollars, potentially as high as 20% of federal spending as suggested by Elon. He specifically pointed to Medicare fraud in California and widespread fraud within the SNAP program as major concerns, noting a lack of state cooperation.
“Yeah, so, so two quick things on that. First of all, Elon during the height of the DOJ said that it was 20%. That's $1.4 trillion. Uh, whether it's 10% or 20%, you're talking about something on the scale of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.”
“The biggest problem with finding fraud is actually the states where it's worst are also the states that have the least willingness to cooperate with what we're doing. And when you look at some of the bigger ticket items for fraud, you know, you're looking at Medicare fraud in California. People who are illegal aliens, people who aren't even human beings, they're just like a completely made up shell of a person.”
“But that program is rife with fraud. In part because the way it works is, you know, California bills us once a month for the cost of their SNAP program. It's 7 or 8 or 9 billion dollars depending on the month that we're talking about.”