Trump admin freezing over $1 billion in Medicaid payments to two blue states

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is deferring over $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota as part of its ongoing healthcare fraud crackdown, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday.

Kennedy said during a press conference that HHS is “not sending Medicaid or Medicare dollars out the door until we have confidence that they are being spent lawfully and appropriately.” The payment deferrals aim to advance the Trump administration’s ongoing “effort to combat fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid and safeguard federal taxpayer dollars,” HHS said in a news release.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said during the news conference that fraudsters’ “days of stealing from the American taxpayer are over.”

“In Minnesota and California, our reviews are going back to just over the last few years, [turning] up the same recurring theme again and again, every single quarter: claims in the same high-risk categories that the states have not yet been able to document fully,” Oz added.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office wrote in an X post that the move “is the same recycled political stunt we’ve seen before.”

“California isn’t being targeted because Trump has evidence of fraud,” Newsom’s press office said in the social media post. “We are being targeted for political reasons — and because Dr. Oz doesn’t understand that we are *SAVING* taxpayers money by keeping seniors and people with disabilities out of far more expensive nursing homes!”

When reached for comment, Newsom’s office referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to its X post from Tuesday.

Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told the DCNF in a statement that the Trump administration “is cutting more money in healthcare than they’ve prosecuted for fraud.”

“The math doesn’t add up,” Walz continued. “They’re not punishing fraudsters, they’re punishing children, seniors, working families, and people with disabilities. This is about cutting healthcare for people they don’t care about in their campaign of retribution against Minnesota.”

Tuesday’s announcement comes as the Trump administration has been moving to stamp out healthcare fraud across the U.S. in recent months.

In May, the administration announced it was deferring $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California, claiming that the state has failed to do enough to combat healthcare fraud. The administration also announced in April that it was withholding an additional $91 million in Medicaid funds for Minnesota amid concerns over potential fraud, MinnPost reported.

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