(California Globe) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered a blistering indictment of his predecessor, Xavier Becerra, on Tuesday, accusing the former Biden administration official of systematically dismantling the agency’s program integrity staff and opening the floodgates to massive taxpayer fraud.
Speaking at a White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud press conference in Los Angeles focused on the city’s homelessness response, Kennedy detailed how Becerra reduced the number of personnel overseeing HHS’s $2.2 trillion in annual payments from 80 to just six.
“When I came in, there’s only six people who are in charge of all program integrity for my department!” Kennedy said. “My predecessor, Xavier Becerra, when he came into my agency, there were only 80 people in program integrity, 80 people. This is for 50 states and five territories.These are the people who are monitoring $2.2 trillion dollars in payments annually from my agency!”
Kennedy emphasized the scale of the responsibility those few staffers carried. “We do four million transactions a day. There’s only 80 people looking at those. Xavier Becerra came in and transferred 76 of them out.”