特朗普企图掌控财政大权自3月以来，副总统J.D.万斯一直负责打击针对联邦政府的任何欺诈行为。特朗普总统在宣布成立该特别工作组时说：“这是我们正在开展的一项极其重要的工作。如果我们能够发现该国一半的欺诈行为（我认为这是有可能做到的），那么我们的预算状况将会得到显著改善。”白宫称，迄今为止他们已经“揭露”了数百亿美元的欺诈行为，并“阻止了数十亿美元的欺诈活动”。
Trump Wants to Get His Hands on the Power of the Purse Since March, Vice President JD Vance has been tasked with rooting out any fraud perpetrated against the federal government. “This is a very big thing that we’re doing,” President Trump said when he announced the task force. “If we found half of the fraud that’s taking place in this country — and I think you have a chance of doing that — we would have much more than a balanced budget.”The White House says that since then it has “uncovered” hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and “stopped” tens of billions in ongoing fraud.
然而，正如我的新闻编辑室同事琳达·邱在最近的一份报告中指出的那样：“由于缺乏公开的统计数据，这些数字难以被核实。”尽管欺诈行为确实存在，但政府的说法尚未得到任何独立机构的验证；换句话说，我们只能相信他们的话。
But, as my newsroom colleague Linda Qiu notes in a recent report, “It is difficult to verify those figures because there is no publicly available breakdown of the total.”And while fraud is real, there has been no independent verification of the administration’s claims. They’re asking us, in short, to take their word for it.
新的指控上周，在与医疗保险和医疗补助服务中心负责人梅赫梅特·奥兹的共同记者会上，万斯宣布了新的调查目标：据称有75万人通过《平价医疗法案》虚假注册了医疗保险。万斯表示：“我们国家的制度曾奖励那些为虚假人员办理医疗保险注册手续的中介，这些人因此发了财；这简直就是一场丑闻。”然而，白宫几乎没有提供任何证据来证实这些指控的真实性。我们只能相信，尽管政府试图破坏这些公共医疗项目，但他们仍声称自己是在认真打击其中的欺诈行为。
Last week, in a news conference with Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the vice president announced a new quarry in his hunt: an alleged 750,000 people fraudulently enrolled in health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. “We had a system in this country that rewarded brokers, that made people rich for enrolling fake people in programs that are meant to ensure that our fellow citizens have health care,” Vance said. “This was a scandal.”Again, the White House has given us very little to verify that this was actual fraud. We are supposed to trust that this administration is earnestly looking for fraud in public programs even as it seeks to undermine the programs themselves.
令人怀疑的原因更令人怀疑的是，白宫自身——从最高层开始——一直在积极欺骗美国民众。
But the biggest reason to be skeptical of the administration’s narrative is the fact that it comes as the White House itself, starting from the very top, actively works to defraud the American people.
这件事不像特朗普对美国城市的打压，也不像他那套严苛的驱逐和遣返计划那样受到关注，但总统及其政府正在对国会曾经神圣不可侵犯的财政大权发动一场全面战争。
It does not receive as much attention as Trump’s assault on American cities or his draconian program of deportations and removals, but the president and his administration have been waging an all-out war on Congress’s once-sacrosanct power of the purse.