If you know where the fraud is, President Trump’s team wants to hear from you, and it will pay you for it. Speaking in Minnesota on Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “The next phase of this fight will make it easier than ever for whistleblowers who know where the fraud is to help lead us to it.”
Until now, Bessent said, tipsters had to work through “a maze of tip lines scattered across law enforcement agencies. No more. For the first time, we’ve created a single centralized portal at America.gov/fraud.” Treasury is seeding a new $25 million fraud whistleblower incentive program, and anyone whose information leads to a conviction or enforcement action may be eligible for a $30,000 reward.
“Speaking up has long carried a cost for whistleblowers,” Bessent said. “Under President Trump, it can offer a reward.”
He did not spare Minnesota’s governor. “The industrial-scale fraud that Tim Walz shamefully and perhaps knowingly allowed to fester is the defining legacy of his administration,” Bessent said. “The days of indifference are over, and under this President’s leadership, wherever the money leads, the full weight of government will follow.”
The results are already piling up. Bessent said Treasury returned $175 million in payments that would have gone to dead people, and that since January 2025 the Trump administration has uncovered more than $260 billion in fraud. At the same event, a top Justice Department official said 14 Minnesota fraud defendants have been sentenced to a combined 988 months in prison in roughly 115 days: “That is the new normal, and fraudsters here should know it.”
