Education Department Saves Taxpayers $400 Million in 4 Months

In just a few months, the Trump-McMahon administration has saved U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars by fighting fraud.

The White House Fraud Task Force is assisting the Department of Education (ED) to ensure the government isn’t wasting educational funding on nonsense, or letting taxpayer money go to criminals.

Thanks to common-sense reforms led by @WHFraudTF and @EDSecMcMahon, ED has saved American taxpayers more than $400 MILLION by cracking down on fraud, waste, and abuse.

And we’re just getting started. pic.twitter.com/9dzIdgw7UK
— U.S. Department of Education (@usedgov) September 3, 2026

As a victim of federal student loan fraud myself, I particularly appreciate the Trump administration’s crackdown on fraud. It took me a year and a half of fighting with the government and various third parties to prove that I was not the person who took out loans in my name, since the Biden administration deliberately removed guardrails and made it as easy as possible to obtain funding, but as difficult as possible to prove fraud. The Trump administration is reversing that deliberate decline.

In fact, the Daily Wire piece that ED shared had a mention of the fact that the Biden administration stopped data-sharing agreements with other federal agencies that would have assisted in the identification of ineligible or fake recipients. One of the reasons was clearly to ensure illegal aliens could receive student loans, because one terminated partnership was with the Department of Homeland Security.

Now, however, since Donald Trump took office, ED inaugurated a policy of checking every student FAFSA aid applicant's identity to make sure fraudsters aren't demanding money. James Bergeron, ED deputy under secretary, told the Daily Wire, "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.”

He stated that the DHS partnership termination was indeed to funnel money to illegal aliens, but that wasn't all the Biden-era ED did. “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,” Bergeron said.

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.
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… 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.

Just as Democrats don’t want voter ID, they also didn’t want to require IDs to receive federal aid. The same reasoning is behind both decisions. The Trump administration has to correct years of deliberate fraud.

Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to renew America in this 250th birthday year.

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