RFK Jr Accuses Former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra of Gutting Fraud Oversight, Enabling Billions in Theft

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.”

The result, according to the secretary, was predictable. “And it was an invitation for the fraudsters to come in and steal everything!” Kennedy pointed to concrete examples uncovered in Los Angeles County. “And that’s why we have this hospice program! We’ve closed thousands of hospices here in Los Angeles because they didn’t have patients. They were just billing us $6,000 a month for phony accounts!”

He further cited “the durable medical equipment fraud, tens of billions of dollars here in Los Angeles County. Autism services, tens of billions of dollars all stolen because nobody was minding the store.” Kennedy also criticized a “pay and chase” approach he attributed to Becerra’s tenure, under which the agency would pay invoices first—even those flagged as high-risk by algorithms—and attempt recovery later, a process that rarely succeeded. “This was an insane policy,” Kennedy charged.

Secretary Kennedy’s full remarks begin at the 8:50 mark:

Under the current administration, Kennedy said HHS has shifted to proactive prevention. “We’ve stopped billions and billions of dollars worth of fraud,” he declared. The agency now deploys artificial intelligence, machine counting systems, and other algorithms to flag suspected fraud before payments go out. “We now don’t pay anything that we suspect to be fraudulent.” “He let the people steal the money,” Kennedy said of Becerra.

The remarks come as Becerra, who previously served as California Attorney General and then as Biden’s HHS Secretary, is the Democratic nominee for governor of California. He advanced from the June primary and faces Republican Steve Hilton in the November general election. Becerra has positioned himself as an experienced steward of government programs and a seasoned fighter against the Trump administratio,  but Kennedy’s charges revive long-standing criticisms of oversight failures during the Biden years, including losing track of hundreds-of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children, which Steve Hilton has highlighted through a series of videos with survivors of human trafficking under Becerra’s reign. 

Kennedy framed the fraud as money diverted from legitimate healthcare and recovery efforts for the homeless and addicted—precisely the populations the Los Angeles event with HUD Secretary Scott Turner addressed. 

Kenney and Turner stressed that every dollar stopped from fraudsters is a dollar preserved for its intended purpose to assist the most vulnerable and needy or returned to taxpayers. California Globe has previously documented patterns of waste and weak accountability in state and federal programs flowing into the once-Golden State. Kennedy’s disclosures add  federal oversight and accountability to those concerns, particularly as Californians weigh leadership choices amid persistent homelessness, high healthcare costs, and ongoing, yet unanswered questions about how public funds are managed. 

Becerra’s campaign has not yet issued a detailed response to the specific staffing and fraud allegations as of this writing.