The Department of Government Efficiency has described hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending as fraudulent. Federal law has a precise, adjudicated definition for that word. DOGE’s process does not meet it.
Calling a payment fraudulent is not the same as proving fraud. The distinction matters because one is a political label and the other is a legal finding that requires evidence, intent, and a proceeding with due process. DOGE has conducted none of those proceedings. Courts reviewing its actions are beginning to say so in writing.
I Know What Fraud Looks Like. This Isn’t It.
I have spent a meaningful part of my professional life reading documents that institutions would prefer stayed unread. Court filings. Agency records. Plea agreements. Audit findings. I know what it looks like when someone has actually committed fraud, because fraud leaves a specific kind of record: a knowing misrepresentation, directed at a specific victim, producing a specific loss, charged and adjudicated in a proceeding with due process protections.
What DOGE has been doing is not that. It is something procedurally distinct that has been relabeled fraud for political and rhetorical effect, and the relabeling has worked well enough that the public is largely confused about the difference. The confusion is not accidental.
Let me explain what the record actually shows.
What the Word “Fraud” Requires
Start with the statutory baseline. The Government Accountability Office, which is the federal government’s own auditing authority and the most authoritative source on payment integrity, published a formal distinction between fraud and improper payments in December 2023. The GAO is explicit: while unintentional error may cause improper payments, fraud involves obtaining something of value through willful misrepresentation. And then the GAO adds the sentence that matters most: whether an act is fraudulent is determined through the judicial or other adjudicative system.
Fraud is not a category administrators assign. It is a conclusion reached through a proceeding, with evidence, with an adjudicator, and with due process protections for the accused. The GAO says so. Federal criminal law says so. Every fraud prosecution in federal court says so. DOGE has conducted none of those proceedings.
The GAO separately defines the categories that DOGE keeps collapsing together. Waste is when government resources are spent carelessly, extravagantly, or without purpose. Abuse of federal resources occurs when someone behaves improperly or unreasonably, or misuses a position or authority. Improper payments are payments made in the wrong amount or to the wrong person, for any reason, including clerical error. Fraud requires willful misrepresentation. These are not synonyms. They have different legal standards, different enforcement mechanisms, and different consequences.
When Elon Musk stands in front of a camera and says DOGE has found massive fraud, he is using a word with a precise legal meaning to describe a set of spending decisions that, in most cases, have not been adjudicated by anyone, before any tribunal, under any evidentiary standard. That is not a small distinction. It is the entire ballgame.
The Numbers DOGE Is Using Are Not Its Numbers
In February 2025, social media posts began circulating a specific claim: that a DOGE subcommittee had discovered $2.7 trillion in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid payments sent overseas to people who should not have received them. The claim spread across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads before corrections caught up with it.
PolitiFact rated the viral claim False. The $2.7 trillion figure is a cumulative GAO accounting of improper payments going back to 2003, documented in annual reports under the Improper Payments Information Act, a law that has existed since 2002 and predates DOGE by more than two decades. DOGE did not discover this number. It inherited publicly available government auditing records and repackaged them as its own investigative finding.
The pattern repeats on DOGE’s own website. The “wall of receipts” on doge.gov claims to document billions in savings through, among other categories, fraud and improper payment deletion. But as the New York Times, CBS, and The Intercept each reported, the numbers on that page have been revised, deleted, and corrected multiple times after outlets identified errors. A USAID contract listed as $650 million appeared three times. A Social Security contract listed as $232 million was actually $560,000. An ICE contract listed as $8 billion was $8 million, and the $8 million figure was a credit line, meaning the full amount may never have been drawn.
PBS Newshour reporting from February 2025 found no legitimate evidence of fraud in the spending Musk highlighted, and noted that if the roughly $2 billion in identified savings at that point were distributed to American taxpayers, it would amount to approximately $2.42 per person. That figure does not justify the scale of the institutional disruption, the grant terminations, the workforce reductions, or the access to sensitive Treasury payment data that DOGE used as its rationale.
What DOGE Actually Is, and What It Is Not
DOGE is not a department in the legal sense. It is the renamed United States Digital Service, a tech services office originally founded by Barack Obama in 2014 to modernize government websites. Trump renamed it by executive order on January 20, 2025, with a stated termination date of July 4, 2026. The Supreme Court has exempted it from disclosure requirements. Its status under administrative law has been the subject of ongoing litigation, with courts reaching different conclusions about the scope of its authority.
In March 2026, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a ruling in consolidated cases against DOGE’s authority. She allowed two claims to proceed: an appointments clause challenge arguing that DOGE personnel are exercising significant authority without Senate confirmation, and a Federal Advisory Committee Act claim. She dismissed the Administrative Procedure Act claim, not because DOGE’s actions were lawful, but because the plaintiffs had swept too broadly by challenging actions across sixteen agencies in a single APA claim.
The Yale Journal on Regulation put the core legal problem plainly: DOGE is either an agency or it is not. If it is doing more than advising the President and is instead wielding independent authority, then it faces a more fundamental challenge: no statute created it or vested it with the power it now appears to wield.
This is the institutional forensics problem that the public debate keeps missing. The fraud framing functions as a procedural bypass. If an agency can label spending fraudulent without an adjudicative process, it can justify freezing appropriated funds, terminating grants, and accessing sensitive financial systems without the procedural protections those actions would otherwise require. The fraud label is not incidental to DOGE’s operating method. It is the operating method.
If you have documents, a situation that doesn’t add up, or an institution using procedural claims to avoid scrutiny, a forensic record review produces a written findings memo you can act on.
See Consulting Tracks ?The Fraud Label as a Legal Instrument
Here is what I want you to understand as an institutional matter, because this is the part that the coverage mostly misses.
The word “fraud” does not just describe a category of conduct. In the context of government spending, it is also a legal instrument. When an executive branch official labels spending as fraudulent, that label justifies a set of procedural moves that would otherwise be unavailable. Appropriated funds cannot simply be impounded or redirected at executive discretion. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 requires the President to spend funds appropriated by Congress, and requires specific procedures for any proposed deferral or rescission. Courts have consistently held that the executive branch cannot simply refuse to disburse legally appropriated funds.
But if the spending is labeled fraudulent, the calculus shifts, at least rhetorically. Fraud suggests that the funds should not have been spent in the first place, which is a different legal posture than a policy disagreement about spending priorities. The fraud label also operates as a pre-adjudicative conclusion that forecloses the procedural protections that would otherwise apply to the recipients of the funds being terminated.
This is how the fraud label functions as procedural cover. It sounds like an investigative conclusion. It is actually a rhetorical move that removes accountability from the actors making the claim and redirects scrutiny toward the recipients of the spending. The people whose grants were terminated, whose agency contracts were cancelled, whose federal jobs were eliminated are put in the position of proving they are not fraudsters, rather than requiring DOGE to prove they are.
That is a procedural inversion. It is not how fraud law works. And courts are starting to document exactly that.
What the Courts Have Actually Said
In May 2026, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon issued a ruling that is worth reading in its entirety if you want to understand how the judicial branch is processing DOGE’s claims. The case involved the termination of grants at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Judge McMahon found that the review process implemented by DOGE did not conform to, or even resemble, NEH’s ordinary grant-review process. She found that DOGE staffers lacked the authority to make those decisions. And she found that DOGE blatantly used protected characteristics, specifically race, gender, and national origin, as criteria for grant termination.
This ruling is not an outlier. A federal judge blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury Department payment systems in February 2025, citing the risk of illegal fund freezes and violations of federal administrative law and the separation of powers doctrine. Separately, the court in the DOGE authority challenge before Judge Chutkan allowed the appointments clause challenge to proceed, which is a recognition that DOGE personnel may be exercising significant federal authority without the constitutional prerequisites for doing so.
The Inspectors General who are the statutory front line for fraud investigation in federal agencies were largely sidelined during this period. Trump fired or demoted twenty Inspectors General in January 2025. Those IGs had collectively identified more than $50 billion in waste and abuse in FY2024. Eliminating the institutional fraud investigators while simultaneously claiming to be conducting fraud investigations is a procedural contradiction the record documents clearly.
The Improper Payment Problem Is Real. The Fraud Framing Is Not.
Here is where I want to be precise, because precision matters and because the honest read of the record is not flattering to anyone.
The improper payment problem in federal spending is real and has been real for a long time. The GAO reported $186 billion in payment errors in FY2025 alone. Over the two decades since the Improper Payments Information Act became law in 2002, cumulative improper payments across all federal programs total approximately $2.7 to $2.8 trillion. These numbers are not fabricated. They are the government’s own auditing records, produced by statutory obligation, available to the public.
Some portion of those improper payments does involve fraud, meaning actual willful misrepresentation by actual bad actors who were eventually charged, prosecuted, and adjudicated. COVID-era relief fraud is the most widely prosecuted recent example: the DOJ and SBA documented billions in fraudulent pandemic loan applications, pursued criminal referrals, and obtained convictions. That is what fraud investigation actually looks like. It produces docket numbers. It produces plea agreements. It produces criminal records.
DOGE’s fraud claims produce press releases and a website with entries that get quietly deleted when reporters catch arithmetic errors. Those are not the same thing, and treating them as equivalent is not honest analysis.
What DOGE has done is take a documented, pre-existing administrative problem, the improper payment problem that Congress has been legislating around since 2002, and repackage it as a novel investigative discovery to justify a set of executive actions that would not withstand procedural scrutiny if examined on their actual merits. The fraud label is doing the procedural work that evidence and adjudication would otherwise have to do. That is how institutional fraud claims function as legal instruments. That is what this piece is about.
The DOGE fraud narrative works because most people, understandably, do not know the difference between an improper payment and a fraudulent one. They hear a large number and a serious-sounding word and assume the serious-sounding word has been earned. It has not. No adjudicative process has been conducted. No due process has been afforded to the entities whose funding was terminated. No evidentiary standard has been applied. The fraud label was applied first, and the evidence was not required to follow.
I have been doing this work long enough to recognize the pattern. When an institution uses a legal conclusion as a rhetorical instrument, bypassing the process that would ordinarily produce that conclusion, you are looking at a procedural abuse. The conclusion is being used to do the work that evidence was supposed to do. The courts are beginning to name it. The record already shows it. The only thing left is to decide whether you are going to read the record, or trust the press release.
Read the record.
Bluebook: Rita Williams, DOGE Is Not Doing Fraud Investigations. Here Is What Fraud Actually Requires., Clutch Justice (May 13, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/2026/05/13/doge-fraud-definition-administrative-law/.
APA 7: Williams, R. (2026, May 13). DOGE is not doing fraud investigations. Here is what fraud actually requires. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/05/13/doge-fraud-definition-administrative-law/
MLA 9: Williams, Rita. “DOGE Is Not Doing Fraud Investigations. Here Is What Fraud Actually Requires.” Clutch Justice, 13 May 2026, clutchjustice.com/2026/05/13/doge-fraud-definition-administrative-law/.
Chicago: Williams, Rita. “DOGE Is Not Doing Fraud Investigations. Here Is What Fraud Actually Requires.” Clutch Justice, May 13, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/05/13/doge-fraud-definition-administrative-law/.
I map how institutions use procedural language to bypass accountability. If you have documents and a situation that does not add up, a forensic record review identifies the contradictions, maps the gaps, and produces a written findings memo you can act on.
