WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today,U.S. Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ), Ranking Member of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Disaster Management, District of Columbia, and Census, led a hearing about protecting Americans from fraud. Recognizing the extensive threat of fraud against Americans, Ranking Member Kim called out the Trump administration for their illegal abuses of executive power and continued attacks on government tools that have successfully and historically protected working Americans from fraud, including the Government Accountability Office and independent Inspectors General.
“I take preventing fraud and prosecuting wrongdoing very seriously. However, we can and should not use fraud to go after political enemies, to militarize American cities, or wield government power in a way that goes after the American people…,” said Senator Kim. “Just last month, we saw another horrific, unnecessary death of an American citizen. This is a moment where many are frightened, and I hear that back in my home state of New Jersey as well. We have a responsibility as we are doing our diligence in terms of governance to make sure, we are not throwing gasoline on the fire.”
Watch Ranking Member Kim’s Complete Hearing Remarks
During the hearing, Ranking Member Kim cited that the GAO has successfully worked as a nonpartisan tool to save the American taxpayer dollars $1.45 trillion since 2002. He called out the current Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought for stating that the GAO should not exist, House Republicans for proposing to cut GAO by 50% last year, and President Trump for immediately coming in and getting rid of 17 Inspectors General who are nonpartisan officials tasked at preventing waste, fraud, and abuse.
Ranking Member Kim continued: “I hope that we can in a bipartisan way think through how we can use these tools and how we can support them going forward in our efforts if we are seriously and earnestly trying to address fraud.”
Ranking Member Kim continued by focusing in on the opportunity to come together to create and improve pragmatic and comprehensive tools that help tackle the level of fraud Americans face. He shared his outrage for the scale of money being defrauded as well as what it is going toward, as someone who used to work counter terrorism at the Pentagon.
“If we’re really serious about this, we need to be taking the tools we have, investing in them to have a greater level of detail and the fidelity to really be able to track.”
Ranking Member Kim continued: “We live in the time of the greatest amount of distrust in government in modern American history. There’s a lot of reasons for that but I think a lot of what we heard today is a big part of that, the sense that we can’t manage our money or in the fact that we’re seeing us taken advantage of by others. I hope we can in a unified way be able to say — enough.”
The subcommittee hearing titled, “Examining Fraud and Foreign Influence in State and Federal Programs”, featured The Honorable Mark Koran, Minnesota State Senator; Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions; Seamus Bruner, Vice President of the Government Accountability Institute; and Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, Acting Vice President of Policy and Governmental Affairs at the Project On Government Oversight.
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