If they combined proposals, the parties could go after welfare fraud and tax cheats in one go.
A pair of House Republicans has introduced a bill, the Anti-Fraud Fund Act of 2026, to crack down on pervasive fraud in federal health-care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. It would allocate $28 billion to the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program, a joint initiative between agencies, over the next four years. The program, which already investigates fraud in health-care spending, currently receives less than $3 billion a year.
As an anti-fraud measure, the Anti-Fraud Fund Act is one of the vanishingly few spending bills projected to save the government money. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that it would cut fraudulent outlays by $196 billion and reduce the deficit, on net, by $168 billion. Granted, that estimate is preliminary, and the assumed return on investment is higher than usual, but the bill would almost certainly save a lot more than it costs if enacted.
Meanwhile, in the upper chamber and across the aisle, there’s another bill that conservatives will receive a lot less warmly. The Stop CHEATERS Act from Senator Angus King (I., Maine) would provide the IRS with an additional $84 billion over six years — mostly to fund greater enforcement and with a mandate to focus on high-income individuals and larger corporations. That would mean a whole lot more bothersome tax collectors and auditors unleashed on the American economy.
Such beefed-up enforcement was once already the policy, however. The woefully misnamed Inflation Reduction Act included an $80 billion infusion for the IRS in 2022, most of which was rescinded once Republicans retook Congress. That extra spending was considered an offset under the original law, as it was projected to result in much higher tax collections. Likewise, the CBO has scored all subsequent cuts to the IRS as costing the government money.
Projected savings from Senator King’s bill range from $100 billion or $200 billion to nearly $1 trillion over a decade. It’s impossible to know what the exact number would be; any supplemental enforcement would seek to tackle an estimated “tax gap” between money legally owed and actually paid of around $700 billion each year. The bulk of the gap is from underreported business and self-employment income, not workers’ paychecks. More audits could uncover some of that money, but the real bucks would flow from incentivizing more people to accurately report their income in the first place. As conservatives understand with urban policing, the mere risk of enforcement is a solid deterrent.
I know Congress isn’t doing much these days, but what if members used the lame-duck session to combine these two anti-fraud bills and saved a few hundred billion dollars for once? Republicans could say they went after welfare fraud; Democrats could go after tax cheats. All the savings from both ends would represent money transferred from people who don’t follow the law to everyone who does.