EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s Fraud Team Flips Switch On Biden Decisions Costing Taxpayers Hundreds Of Millions
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s Education Department saved $400 million in merely four months through its actions to combat fraud and restore “common-sense detection measures,” The Daily Wire can first report.
Read more EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s Fraud Team Flips Switch On Biden Decisions Costing Taxpayers Hundreds Of Millions
The department found that the Biden administration had ceased data-sharing agreements with other agencies that would prevent money from being sent to invalid recipients. This included an agreement with the Social Security Administration to prevent money from going to dead people, and the Department of Homeland Security to prevent money from going to illegal immigrants.
For the first time in history, the Education Department is now checking the identities of every single student filling out the FAFSA application for financial aid to ensure that they are real people.
“We provide about 130 billion dollars a year in federal grants, loans, and what we saw when we came into office is that the previous administration, the Biden administration, had turned off all the protections for our programs,” Deputy Under Secretary James Bergeron told The Daily Wire on Wednesday.
“They had turned off our agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that illegal aliens weren’t receiving federal student aid funds, they turned that off during the previous administration,” he explained. “They were not requiring institutions to verify identity, so we had a proliferation of bots and foreign international rings that were stealing federal student aid. And so, one of the first things that we did in February 2025 is that we turned all those systems on again.”
The move saved the agency $30 million right off the bat, Bergeron said, particularly since dead individuals were no longer getting federal aid, as well as $10 million from preventing overpayments on Pell grants.
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In April 2026, the Education Department revamped FAFSA with new technology. That new technology has built fraud detection into the FAFSA forms themselves, mandating that every student applicant is evaluated in real time using risk-based identity screening.
“So every single student in the country that fills out the FAFSA gets passed through this technology, and we give them a fraud score, a risk assessment score, and then if they fall into a high category, we require that they come on online and show an ID, just like you have to present an ID to drive a car or get on a plane.”
“We think that’s only right that you have to present an ID to access the tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars that we’re getting to fund their education,” Bergeron added.
The Education Department is also outright rejecting some applications from individuals who can’t present an ID when they come online, or who otherwise raise a significant number of red flags.
Since the administration’s Fraud Task Force was launched in March 2026, it has uncovered almost $230 billion in fraud, according to the White House. It has also stopped $56 billion in payments that were going to fraudsters, and enforced over $55 billion through indictments, settlements, and civil penalties.
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