The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to find health care fraudsters bilking the system for millions of dollars.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched investigations April 7 into dozens of Medicaid providers in the state using data acquired through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Home health providers, occupational therapy providers, and entities that may have committed fraud related to COVID-19 treatments will be targeted in the investigation, according to Paxton.
The attorney general said he “will not tolerate the abuse of taxpayer funded programs in Texas.”
“My office has already recovered over $1 billion from Medicaid fraud alone since 2020, and I will continue to pursue any fraudster who attempts to cheat Texans out of money by exploiting our health care system,” Paxton said in a statement.
DOGE launched a public portal on Feb. 13 of the largest Medicaid dataset in U.S. Department of Health and Human Services history, billing it as a way for the public to help the team detect fraud.
The dataset contains aggregated, provider-level claims data for specific billing codes over time and can be accessed by anyone in the general public, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Paxton has created a Healthcare Program Enforcement Division, which recently filed a number of cases against entities, including Children’s Health, Eli Lilly, Sonofi, and others.
The Texas probe follows a similar investigation that netted several arrests in California last week involving an estimated $60 million in hospice care fraud, authorities announced on April 2.
The Trump administration granted the DOGE team access to information at HHS in the effort to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government.
HHS gave access to data containing Medicare beneficiaries, providers, and health plans, according to court documents. It also contained patient names and other sensitive data.
An executive order signed March 20, 2025, allowed federal agencies to remove internal barriers and gain access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems, according to court records.
DOGE’s expanding access prompted national labor unions to sue the U.S. Labor Department in federal court to block the release of information, but that was denied. The case is still pending. U.S. District Judge John Bates denied the union’s latest request for a summary judgement on March 31.
