This week we looked at a lot of numbers. $180 billion stolen in California. $50 billion lost annually to Medi-Cal fraud alone. $32 billion in pandemic unemployment fraud. $24 billion spent on homelessness that made nothing better.

Behind every one of those dollars is a person. A Californian who filed for unemployment during the pandemic and couldn’t get through because criminals had overwhelmed the system. A low-income family whose Medicaid benefits were delayed or denied because phantom patients and fraudulent providers had drained the program. A homeless veteran in Los Angeles whose services were never delivered because the nonprofit that received the funding pocketed the money instead.

Government fraud is not a victimless crime. It is theft from the most vulnerable people in society, carried out by criminals who exploited systems that were deliberately left without oversight.

And for conservatives, this is not just a fiscal issue. It is a moral one.

The Stewardship Argument

Conservative thought, rooted in both biblical tradition and classical political philosophy, takes seriously the concept of stewardship — the idea that we are entrusted with resources that don’t ultimately belong to us, and that we have a responsibility to use them wisely, honestly, and for their intended purpose.

This applies to individuals managing their households. It applies to businesses managing their finances. And it applies, emphatically, to governments managing the public trust.

When a government program designed to feed hungry children is looted by criminals while elected officials look the other way, that is a betrayal of stewardship. When a governor presides over $180 billion in fraud and responds to accountability investigations with lawsuits and press releases, that is a betrayal of the public trust.

Conservatives are sometimes caricatured as indifferent to the poor because they oppose expanding government programs. The California fraud crisis illustrates why that caricature is backwards. Conservatives oppose bloated, unaccountable programs not because they don’t care about the poor — but because they have seen what happens to money that flows into systems without oversight. It doesn’t reach the poor. It reaches the criminals.

What Families Are Owed

Every working family in California pays taxes — often very high taxes — on the promise that those funds will be used to build roads, educate children, support the elderly, and provide a safety net for those who fall on hard times.

That promise has been broken on a massive scale. The money has been stolen, misspent, or allocated to programs that produced no measurable results. And the political class responsible for this failure has responded not with accountability but with deflection.

Families deserve better. They deserve a government that can honestly account for every dollar it collects, that maintains systems capable of detecting fraud before the money is gone, and that prosecutes those who steal from the public with the same rigor it would apply to any other crime.

That is not an unreasonable expectation. It is the minimum standard of honest governance.

What Accountability Looks Like

The Trump administration’s fraud crackdown — imperfect and aggressive as it sometimes is — represents the right instinct. Follow the money. Demand documentation. Freeze funds when accountability cannot be demonstrated. Prosecute fraud when it is found.

Critics say this approach is too harsh, that it puts vulnerable people at risk. But consider the alternative: continuing to send billions of federal dollars into states where the money demonstrably does not reach its intended recipients, where fraud is documented at every level, and where the political leadership has made clear it will resist accountability at every turn.

The vulnerable people in California and Minnesota are not being protected by the current system. They are being harmed by it. Every dollar that goes to a phantom Medicaid patient is a dollar that doesn’t reach a real one. Every dollar that funds a fraudulent homelessness nonprofit is a dollar that doesn’t put a real person in housing.

Real compassion demands real accountability. Not just for the sake of taxpayers — though that matters — but for the sake of the people these programs are supposed to help.

A Conservative Commitment

Conservatives believe in honest government. Not small government for its own sake, but government that does what it says it will do, spends what it is authorized to spend, and is held accountable when it fails.

The fraud crisis in Democrat-governed states is a failure of that standard — not because the programs themselves are wrong, but because the systems meant to protect them have been allowed to rot.

Fix the systems. Prosecute the fraud. Protect the people these programs are meant to serve.

Your tax dollars deserve nothing less.