WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is gearing up for a comprehensive nationwide crackdown on federal benefit fraud, as announced by Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler during the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” released on Wednesday.
Loeffler, who temporarily halted certain SBA loans to Minnesota last year and has been investigating alleged misappropriation of taxpayer funds in California, informed host Miranda Devine that these states are significant offenders. “We’re planning a state-by-state initiative,” she stated. “This extends beyond the COVID era, and we aim to play a substantial role in Vice President JD Vance’s fraud task force, which is crucial for the American populace.”
President Trump appointed Vance to spearhead what he termed a “war on fraud” during his State of the Union address to Congress on February 24.
In January, Vance announced the administration’s decision to appoint a new Justice Department official, referred to as the “fraud czar,” who will have the authority to investigate and prosecute the misuse of federal resources across the country.
Loeffler mentioned she is currently scrutinizing a significant program, valued at nearly $50 billion, which has never undergone an audit and is plagued with inefficiencies and fraudulent activities. “It’s surprising no one considered auditing this program before,” she remarked.
Currently, Loeffler said, she was “investigating a program, an almost $50 billion program that we run, that has never been audited, that is rife with waste and fraud. No one had ever thought to audit the program.”
“[The American people] work so hard, they pay taxes to the federal government, and it’s our job to be a good steward of those taxes,” she stressed. “We have to make sure that we have accountability for those that came here to abuse them, or those that make a living off abusing taxpayer funds.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the SBA disbursed $1.2 trillion, primarily through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL).
According to Loeffler, about $200 billion of that amount went to “fraudulent” uses.
“It just shows when we have these programs, these excessively large, under-scrutinized, unaudited programs, that the government is not a good actor at parsing them out,” she explained.
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Since Loeffler took office in February 2025, SBA has moved to strengthen its oversight of where its money is going, including by getting its own house in order.
“We started cracking down on all of it from the start,” she told Devine. “I mean, let’s just talk about government waste, 90% of our employees had been working from home for four years. So we had to get everyone back to the office and make sure that the taxpayers and small businesses were getting the services that they so badly deserved, and also that the taxpayers’ money was being well-spent.”
When employees made it back into HQ, Loeffler found that the agency was “massively overstaffed.”
Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington on ‘Pod Force One.’ Subscribe here!
“I cut headcount by 54% in the first year, and yet we went on to set record volume for the agency in its 72-year history,” she said. “So that’s a great example right there of just the waste that had happened under the Biden administration. It was really a bureaucracy run amok.”
According to Loeffler, the Biden administration also used the SBA to advance its unconstitutional prerogatives, as with the post-COVID Restaurant Revitalization Fund.
“You didn’t even have to pay the money back,” Loeffler told Devine of the grant program. “And they told males, specifically white males, to get to the back of the line while they took applications only from economically disadvantaged minorities, as they called it. The program essentially ran out of funds on day one.
“It was later deemed obviously unconstitutional,” she added. “But these are the types of things that we saw over and over in the Biden administration.”
