More fraud ran rampant under the Biden Admin — surprised?
A top Trump administration Education Department official says two blue states are among the biggest hot spots for federal student aid fraud — as Washington cracks down on scammers gaming taxpayer-funded programs.
The Education Department says it prevented $1 billion in fraud in aid programs in 2025.
Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent warned that the schemes aren’t just a money pit — they hit the very students these programs are supposed to help.
“We talked about California being certainly a hub of fraud, waste and abuse, but we also see Minnesota, for example,” Kent told Fox News Digital. “You know, one of the things that has been brought to light over the course of the last couple of weeks is the enormous amount of fraud, waste and abuse under the governor’s leadership there, and this is something that the federal Department of Education had lifted up and highlighted months ago.”
“And to kind of put that into perspective, that’s 1,700 Pell Grants for low-income students that that money could have gone toward,” Kent continued. “So when we think about limited resources, we think about taking away these things that low-income and middle-income students really need in order to get in and through their educational journey.”
In California, the problem has been especially ugly.
During a 12-month period between 2024 and 2025, scammers stole at least $10 million in federal financial aid from community colleges, the report said. One report also claimed 34% of community college applications in the state last year were likely fake.
Kent says the culprits are often what the Department calls “ghost students.”
“What we see often in terms of financial aid fraud are what we call ghost students, and these are students who really never intend to enroll in post-secondary education,” he said. “They never intend to take classes and to graduate. They enroll for the sole purpose of defrauding the federal student aid program.”
Kent said the play is simple: sign up, grab the aid, show up once or twice — then disappear with the money.
Kent said these scams could multiply with AI, allowing swindlers to enroll in multiple programs at once — with some thieves operating from inside the U.S. and others from overseas.
So what’s the Trump administration’s first move? ID checks.
“And so, over the summer, we implemented very strict fraud controls on the FAFSA, the form that students use to apply for federal student aid, including mandatory identification checks for first-time student aid applicants, to ensure that every applicant is a real student and not a ghost student or an AI bot.”
Kent called it “inconceivable” that the Biden administration didn’t have that safeguard.
“And so we’re very excited that, you know, we are able to prevent a substantial amount of fraud from walking out the door,” he said.
Watch the clip above.
[h/t Fox News]
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