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When President Donald Trump announced he’ll award federal bounties to tipster foot soldiers in the War on Fraud, he opened a whole new battlefield in his anti-scam crackdown.
The proposed purses for citizen whistleblowers are rich, with payouts of up to $30,000 plus 1% of recouped stolen funds.
Getting paid for doing necessary work is great.
But it’s impossible to put a price tag on the real value of this initiative: rebuilding trust in institutions, and in each other, in a country where both have cratered.
There’s no simple way to turn this around; it’s a many-headed, polycausal crisis.
America watched the media shred its credibility with Russiagate, saw our scientific establishment implode during COVID, and must still put up with members of Congress making impossibly lucky market moves.
But reassuring taxpayers that their hard-earned money won’t be stolen must arguably come before every other task of reputational repair.
Especially when fraud has become almost a byword within federal programs meant to help the most vulnerable.
Look at the Paycheck Protection Program, the marquee COVID-era money pot.
It had a noble purpose: It was meant to help businesses stay afloat during lockdowns by keeping employee pay flowing.
But it had zero meaningful oversight, and the results were predictable — an estimated $64 billion, almost 10% of the total fund, was obtained fraudulently and spent on fancy cars and vacation homes.
One especially egregious case: Sharhabeel Shreiteh, busted in March for running a $14 million operation that helped more than 1,000 small-timers scam the slush fund.
The thefts he enabled did significant quantitative damage.
But they inflicted even deeper qualitative harm, screaming to everyone whose taxes went to fund the PPP that they were being fleeced.
Or how about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the federal government’s main anti-hunger effort.
Again, as a society we absolutely have an interest in feeding the needy.
But SNAP is rife with fraud, too.
Look at Mercedes New, an Atlanta musician who performs as Shawty Dred,busted this week in a $4 million SNAP scheme that left him so flush he was literally setting money on fire and taunting “broke motherf–kers” online.
Imagine how that looks to a struggling family that earns too much to qualify for SNAP (the cutoff threshold is $2,680 a month in net income for a four-person household)but is nonetheless utterly slammed by inflation.
Whatever bounty anyone collects on miscreants like Shreiteh and New going forward will pale in comparison to the growing knowledge that the government will no longer let fraudsters abuse the American taxpayer.
Which itself points to a renewal of the social contract: As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once memorably put it, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
Holmes was wrong on the First Amendment and forced sterilizations, but on this he was correct.
Defrauding taxpayers is not merely criminal, it’s anti-civilizational.
That Trump has taken a whole-of-government approach to this fight — with his Cabinet members across Treasury, Housing and other departments taking the lead within their domains, and his vice president leading the charge — is itself a pro-civilizational posture.
It tells Americans that ending crime of this kind matters in every aspect of governance.
A victory here will have powerful downstream effects.
It will show average Americans that they are not powerless against the crooked hospice doctor with a Bentley and an address on North Doheny Drive.
That the empty daycares with misspelled signage in Minneapolis aren’t some natural inevitability.
That people who spent their PPP bucks on tropical vacations can’t hide forever.
In turn, it will mean we can all relax a little, breathe easier around strangers, stop worrying who’s got his hand in our pockets.
That’s called a high-trust society, and it’s eminently possible to achieve even in the tech-saturated, atomized modern world (look at Japan).
War on Fraud bounties won’t fix everything, by any means.
But they will begin to address the paralyzing rage that law-abiding people feel in the face of these crimes — and demolish one obvious answer to the question Why don’t you trust the people in charge?
Dr. Mehmet Oz, who as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has played an ultra-visible role in this fight, put it bluntly.
“Fraudsters and criminals don’t give a s–t about you,” he said this week.
“They want your money, and they will walk all over your health, sacrifice your life and betray society’s trust” to take it.
He gets the connection between the quantitative and qualitative damage fraud does.
If Trump’s campaign succeeds, the rest of the country will grasp it soon, too.
Sam Munson’s most recent novel is “The Sofa” (2025).