DOGE Releases Medicaid Spending Data

The Department of Government Efficiency released large amounts of Medicaid spending data, allowing the public to see for themselves the level of fraud in the program.

"Today the HHS [Health and Human Services] DOGE team open sourced the largest Medicaid dataset in department history," DOGE wrote on social media.

"This dataset contains aggregated, provider-level claims data for a specific billing code over time," DOGE added. "For example, using this dataset, it would have been possible to easily detect the large-scale autism diagnosis fraud seen in Minnesota."

Elon Musk, the tech mogul who oversaw DOGE, cheered the release of the data.

"Medicaid data has been open sourced, so the level of fraud is easy to identify," Musk wrote on social media. "@DOGE is not a department, it's a state of mind."

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut nearly $1 trillion in federal Medicaid spending, with Republicans decrying that waste, fraud, and abuse was rampant in the program.

DOGE has been working on a large-scale mining of Medicaid records since last year, Axios reported.

"For the first time, HHS is expanding public access to de-identified, aggregated data to increase transparency and accountability beyond what is currently available," HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement.

"All data will comply with federal privacy laws," Nixon added. "The goal is to support program integrity."

Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families and a research professor at Georgetown University, criticized using fraud to justify Medicaid cuts.

"A serious attempt to root out fraud in Medicaid would involve working with states rather than continuing the Trump administration's attack on Minnesota," Alker told Axios.

"I expect more of the same between now and the election to divert voters' attention from historic cuts to Medicaid that were made in last year's budget bill," Alker added.

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