Fraudsters are robbing America blind. The federal government estimates fraud costs a family of four roughly $4,000 each year.

Fraud is the inevitable byproduct of a bloated bureaucracy that spends $11 trillion annually at the federal, state, and local levels. To conduct an audit, we would need an army of indefatigable accountants. In the past, we couldn’t raise such an army, but now we can. We simply need competent leadership in Congress to deploy it.

This system could have saved billions in Minnesota alone. Instead of sending millions in taxpayer dollars to the 400 supposed healthcare providers huddled in an industrial building in St. Paul, Minnesota, our government could have sent an FBI team. They would have stopped payments to “Feeding Our Future,” where fraudsters faked child rosters, randomly assigned ages, and reported meal volumes wildly inconsistent with site capacity — the kind of fraud that is easy for an AI to catch.

The technical solution is to use AI to spot and block fraudulent government payments, such as those to fake daycares in Minnesota. Your bank already does it. If you live in Minneapolis and your card is used in Florida, your bank will deny the transaction and call you within minutes. By contrast, the government’s optional payment screening service has been branded a failure.

Modern AI tools can detect fraud patterns that fool humans, such as multiple nonprofits with the same address, beneficiaries, board members, and employees. These tools automatically flag anomalies like spikes in billing and implausible service delivery. When something is suspicious, these tools can stop the payment for further investigation by a human team.

Congress should require all agencies to run any payment over $10,000 through a fraud detection system and change the law to allow the government to pause suspicious payments. AI can adjudicate most cases quickly. Narrow exceptions should be made for cases where immediate payments are critical to national security. The system can exist within the Treasury, Government Accountability Office, or even report directly to Congress. Regardless of where it lives, we need an elite team of data scientists, engineers, and investigators who oversee our all-important tax dollars competently and ethically.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and state Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) testify on alleged misuse of federal funds in Minnesota at @GOPoversight @OversightDems – LIVE on C-SPAN3 https://t.co/LkMJ0ZVExm

— CSPAN (@cspan) March 4, 2026

Source: @cspan/X.com

But tech is not enough. We need the legal tools to stop fraudulent payments immediately. Would you keep paying the bill on a stolen credit card for years? That’s what the government does. When agencies suspect fraud, they often continue paying fraudsters until a court declares the “vendor” to be violating their contract. “Feeding Our Future” received $250 million of taxpayer money for years after the first allegations of fraud. When Minnesota’s Department of Education slowed the payments on its suspicions, “Feeding Our Future” sued; the judge questioned whether the agency had followed the required administrative procedures, and payments to fraudsters resumed. This illustrates a general point — fraudsters know that even credible red flags rarely trigger an immediate stop-pay and criminal prosecution, because agencies lack investigatory tools and fear losing in court.

Congress, however, lacks technical competence and leadership. While half of all senators are lawyers by training, there is only one senator with an engineering degree. The Senate is not representative of America’s immense economic growth, driven in large part by technologists. It’s time for us to harness that technology to make the government serve us better.

Our prosperity and freedom are at stake. Polarization and growing mistrust in our institutions, coupled with enormous peacetime deficits, are a combustible mix. We can quell it with technology and competent leadership. Stamping out large-scale fraud could cut our deficit by as much as a quarter. Addressing waste as well could eliminate our deficit entirely. Only when families feel the benefits of our prosperity in their own budgets — through lower taxes, cheaper childcare, and healthcare — will the political pressure cool and give us space to confront our most serious challenges as a nation.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Americans laid the foundation of the most successful democratic government in the world. Our government grew with our prosperity — eventually making full oversight impossible by human effort alone. Today, we have the technology to make our government the most upright and efficient in the world. We need leaders who are capable and willing to use it to protect our taxes, our freedoms, and our future.

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Mark York is a Harvard-trained computer scientist and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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America Is Bleeding Billions To Fraud — How AI Could Shut It Down