I'm Stuart Vonney. I'm Martha McCallum. I'm Jason Chaffetz. And this is the Fox News Rundown. Wednesday, February 11th, 2026. I'm Jessica Rosenthal. Billions of taxpayer dollars aren't just lost to fraud, but improper payments as well. And lawmakers say they want to do something about it. But will they? We have literally hundreds of billions of dollars going out that may be fraud, may not be fraud. We just don't know. And GAO looks at it and goes, we don't know what these are going to. We speak with Oklahoma Senator James Lankford. I'm Dave Anthony. There is more pushback against transgender treatments for children. A plastic surgeons group opposes operations that alter the bodies of minors. And I'll tell you, this has become so politically and ideologically driven. Medicine should not be politically or ideologically driven. And I'm Howard Kurtz. I've got the final word on the Fox News Rundown. This week, two men from Pennsylvania with no connection to Minnesota pled guilty to defrauding Minnesota's housing stabilization services of about $3.5 million. Fox's Steve Harrigan in Minneapolis reported they used AI to create fake records as part of their scheme. We're hearing a lot of a new phrase out here, fraud tourism. That might be new to you, but we're hearing a lot here. Things so bad for fraud in Minnesota and Minneapolis, as people actually coming here from other states to defraud the city and the state. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said federal prosecutors have already convicted 66 people and counting in Minnesota fraud schemes. After finding widespread hospice fraud in Southern California and Nevada, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Director Dr. Mehmet Oz says a new HHS report identified $45 million in improper payments in the state of Maine's autism program. They reviewed paperwork that was missing crucial information, like whether the kids receiving these services had been properly diagnosed with autism in the first place. 100% of the claims they examined had problems. Lawmakers held two fraud-related hearings on Capitol Hill Tuesday. At one Judiciary Subcommittee hearing, Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn pointed to the findings of a 2024 report. Recently, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually due to fraud and improper payments. At a Homeland Security subcommittee hearing, Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley began his remarks by saying, If you are a hardworking American taxpayer, if you're somebody who wakes up every morning, goes to your job, plays by the rules, pays your taxes, you must feel like such an idiot. I mean, you must feel so taken advantage of. That government accountability report found that going back to 2003, improper government payments amounted to an estimated $2.8 trillion. The most impacted programs were Medicare, Medicaid, earned income tax credits, and SNAP. The reason this is out in public is because I actually called in the director of the GAO to be able to talk about it in a public hearing. Oklahoma Republican Senator James Lankford. And to walk through what they're actually seeing because they see it, they see it, they see it. And I'm trying to be able to raise the volume and to say we have literally hundreds of billions of dollars going out that may be fraud, may not be fraud. We just don't know. And GAO looks at it and goes, we don't know what these are going to. They're considered improper payments that they're going out. Maybe it's correct. Maybe it's not correct. We don't have documentation. So first things first, let's actually have a system in place so we can document this. I don't know many businesses that say I have money moving out of my checking account that I don't even know where it's going and going to the right spot. But the federal government does and has this happening over and over again. So this is the importance of having new accounting systems put in place. This is something Russ Vogt is focused on from Office of Management and Budget. This is the importance of AI, getting some checks to be able to say, does this smell right in the system? Is this consistent how we typically do it? And then to be able to take on areas. We took on some of these dealing with SNAP last year in the working families tax cut bill. We said to every state, you're getting SNAP funding that's coming to your state. That's all federal dollars, but the state actually runs the program. If you have an error rate higher than 6 percent, and that's pretty generous, But if you have an error rate higher than 6% that you can't document if people are getting the right money or not, then the state has to cover the cost of that. That's putting a lot of states, including my own, actually engaging in a different level and saying, OK, when it's other people's money, you're not worried about waste and fraud. But when it's your own money, you're going to pay attention on it. The GAO's chief scientist, Thomas Sterling, said, as you know, there should be the creation of like some sort of AI based analytics center. But we need a federal workforce that's trained on AI to basically run that. He cited and others have as well the Treasury Department's use of the Do Not Pay program, a type of pre-verification system where you can check out a business or agency before you issue payments. are these things that you are encouraging to expand either the do not pay program or the creation of some analytics center or department sure yeah those are easy ways to do it the simplest way to be able to identify this if if folks say oh my gosh that seems like some kind of weird intrusion if i use my credit card in one town in my fabulous hometown in oklahoma city if i use my credit card there and then 30 seconds later somebody else is using the same card somewhere else, immediately my credit card company texts me and says, hey, is this you? Because this doesn't look like you. And everybody has seen that, but we don't do that in government. We still have a situation in government that I've been calling out over and over again, where we have companies that have been suspended because they didn't actually follow through and do right accounting last time. Then they get hired again to do a different project for government. A do not pay list and a suspension, what's called a debarment list. That should be common across government that everybody can see it. So if this one company has defrauded the government before and we've seen it, they've got a black mark on them before we actually hire them to do something with a different agency. Somebody should have to be able to verify to be able to make sure the previous time has been fixed. That's not rocket science. That's basic good business. You know, a lot of the current fraud investigation we're seeing publicly right now is through Dr. Oz, the head of CMS. And with good reason, right? A lot of these improper payments we see are in the healthcare area. Do we need other agency heads to be sort of acting like Dr. Oz? And if not, do we need those inspector generals back? Yeah, the inspector generals need to be there. They're very, very important role. They're eyes and ears within the agency running analysis and poking agency heads from inside the machine to say, you don't have accurate numbers from this. Every insurance company that's out there can track exactly what spending is being done, how certifications are done, but the federal government can't do that with Medicaid and Medicare. That's a problem. That's what Dr. Oz is trying to be able to push to say, if we're going to do this well and to make sure that healthcare dollars are getting to actually people that need help rather than some fraudster out there, then let's actually just run the analytics to be able to do it well. But healthcare, you're correct, is the largest area of improper payments that's out there. Then after that, you've got things like SNAP and everybody can tell stories about a time that they're going to the line at the grocery store. They're careful on what they're and somebody right next to them is using a Snapcard they like why are they getting into a Mercedes using a Snapcard to be able to buy their food What am I missing here on it And everybody seen that kind of thing before And they know there should be some kind of system to be able to check and verify this We're working to be able to get that in place so that we can actually verify dollars. So the help is getting to the place that need to get help to. And it's not getting to people ripping off the American taxpayer. So this is all on your radar. And we know it is because you put out annually, the federal fumbles report right around the time of the big game, the big football game we all watch every year. You talk about waste, fraud and abuse and government spending in this ninth edition. But I wanted to just leave it open to you. What in particular did you find to be sort of the most egregious or frustrating spending that's maybe under our radars? Yeah, we look at areas of waste or just improper use of government power and authority or bad regulations every single year. We do it. This is our ninth year in a row to be able to do this and lay it out. The biggest area that people missed probably is the government shutdown. The government shutdown last year was 43 days. It was the longest government shutdown in American history where Democrats just drugged out. They hate Trump so much. They're just trying to be able to drag out in protest. I get the protest part of it, but most people don't know is we lost $85 billion, billion with a B, $85 billion around that government shutdown. So government shutdowns are not just annoying, that cost the taxpayer dollars. So it's significant what we actually lose during that time period. So we track those issues. We track smaller ones. There was a grant that was given to a Chinese lab to be able to do research on beagles. Five years after COVID is over, we were still throwing money out to be able to study the effects of COVID on fish. Not sure why on that one. We had a study that was done was a quarter billion dollar study on studying how to transition mice and rats and monkeys from one sex to another. Okay, so that's wasteful spending. We also had areas that we identified and were able to get solved. For instance, the Veterans Administration, if a veteran calls them or contacts them and says, hey, I need to get my medical record sent to me, they are sent to them on a CD-ROM. Now, most Americans don't have a CD-ROM anymore. They might as well send it to them on a floppy disk. I mean, no one has that anymore to be able to even open it. So we work with the VA and said, okay, veterans are calling our office saying, hey, will you print off my medical records for me? And we have to say that we don't have a CD-ROM either in our office. Who has that? So we work with VA to be able to say, we've got to address this. You've got to admit this is an out-of-date system to be able to do it. By the way, it's $15 per disc to be able to send out to people that they can't even open. So do the math on the thousands of veterans that were contacted, shipped to CD-ROM they couldn't have used. So we were able to get that solved. But it's just looking for the inefficiencies that are there or areas of fraud and waste. One of the things that caught my attention was when it comes to the Affordable Care Act, you highlight a government accountability office experiment in which they signed up for the ACA to have, I guess, fictitious names of 20 people are submitted to receive these health care subsidies. What did that find? My understanding is 18 of those 20 were paid and are still being paid? Still being paid. Yeah, so this is a GAO study as well where they very cleverly just said, okay, we're going to go ahead and sign up for Obamacare. We're going to go into the marketplace. We're going to do this through the normal system, but we're going to make up a name. We're going to make up a Social Security number. We're going to make up fake data, or we're not going to give them a name that's complete or not give them whatever it may be, or give them multiple Social Security numbers for different names and different addresses and just see if we can sign up. Well, they did it 20 different times, and 18 of them got through the system. And by the way, it's been in the system for a year. It still hasn't been caught. Those 18 are still there, still getting paid, which means an insurance company is getting money for a fictitious name that still doesn't exist. This is all an experiment to be able to say, is the system up to speed enough that it can catch something that is blatantly false? And the current answer is no. it's still not up to a system to be able to do that. So we highlight that to say we still have a long way to go. And everybody remembers the Obamacare launch that happened and how horrible that was when it was actually launched. Not only the program is bad, but the launch and the computer system was bad. Well, the computer system is still bad in the process that it's taken on, obviously, fake information and still allowing it to get through. Finally, I know in the report you praise the working families tax cut in this report. but we know that for many conservatives, the goal is really to reduce overall spending, right? And I understand with inflation, that may not look the way many want it to look. But will we ever actually tackle this growing $38 trillion in debt in a meaningful way? I always ask this, like periodically throughout the year, I'm always like, gee, look at that $34 trillion, now $38 trillion. When are we going to deal with that? Yeah, there are folks that say to me, there's just nowhere to cut in government. There's nowhere to cut. And I am identifying billions and billions of dollars saying with a cursory look, we can identify billions of dollars that we can actually reduce spending. Some of that was taken on the Working Families Tax Cut Act. The primary thing that we did last year was keep tax rates the same for every American. We started there in Washington speak that would say then, okay, then you did this massive cut. We actually just kept it the same. And then we started targeting where are the folks that need the most help? Working seniors that are paying taxes on Social Security. It's very hard for them. People to work on tips or on overtime, not paying taxes on that, trying to incentivize. And then we looked at other areas to say, where can we save money to the same amount that we're actually giving tax breaks to some, but then also saying, where can we save money? Why don't we actually target the tax relief to the places that need tax relief the most, those working families, and to be able to dramatically reduce the fraud that's out there as well. The two things that got to happen to be able to reduce your debt, you got to control spending and you got to have a growing economy. If you don't have a growing economy and you don't control spending, you never get on top of it. Senator Lankford, thank you so much for your time. You bet. Glad to be able to do it. I'm Emily Campagno, and this is the Fox True Crime Podcast, bringing you closer to the story than you ever thought possible. Subscribe at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts. These are the stories that keep you up at night. This is Howard Kurtz with your Fox News commentary coming up. It's a hands-off approach to gender-affirming treatments for children. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons is recommending against gender-related operations for anyone under the age of 19. And the American Medical Association has similarly come out that surgical interventions for minors should usually be deferred to adulthood. The last week has just been an incredible way to start off the month and perhaps one of the most successful of this movement against this mutilation so far. Chloe Cole is now detransitioning and also tells Fox a recent court victory in New York for somebody else who had sued and won a malpractice case over a transgender surgery as a child is also a big deal. It's essentially a universal experience for us to not only be doxed, physically threatened, and to be shamed by the transgender community for speaking up about detransitioning, but also to feel as though there no way out for us So this gives me a lot of hope moving forward for my own case moving forward The American Academy of Pediatrics stands by surgery for transgender minors as an option that patients and families and doctors can make not politicians And a transgender health group says there is no one-size-fits-all approach, but plastic surgeons stick by their age limit. It is irreversible, and it's, you know, something that the majority of these kids grow out of, this gender dysphoria. Dr. Sheila Nazarian is a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, California, and a member of the society who also has a Netflix show, Skin Decision, Before and After. Furthermore, depending on different studies that you look at, 30%, 60%, 85% of these kids have a concurrent mental illness like depression, like anxiety, or even a mental diagnosis like autism. and instead of treating these kids mental illnesses and telling them that they're loved and they're perfect just the way they are instead they are thrown into this mill of gender affirmation telling them yes you know you're in the wrong body if you just removed your breasts you know all of your problems would go away if you just have surgery on your genitals all of your problems will go away. And we all know, looking at history, that the knife is not going to solve mental problems. We did hysterectomies for hysteria. There's lobotomies. There's a vast history of trying to do surgical procedures to alleviate mental illness, and it hasn't worked out so great in the past. And on top of everything else, these are kids. I'm a mom. I'm a mom of three teenagers right now, and just it breaks my heart what's happening. And in the beginning, you know, I used to think, oh, these, you know, my colleagues who are doing these procedures, they're good people. They're just misinformed, or they're good people. I do believe they actually think that they're doing something good for these kids. When the long-term data started coming out, mainly out of Europe, they were completely ignoring it. So, doctor, what long-term negative effects are these studies showing? Well, basically, they're showing that there's no long-term benefit. So the things that were being promised to these kids and mainly to their parents was that if you don't do these surgeries, your child will commit suicide. I have a parent in my kid's old school that went through this whole thing with her daughter who believes she's a boy. And, you know, they were told that if you don't remove your daughter's breasts, she'll kill herself. And I don't doubt that she was suicidal at the time, whether it's from depression or whatever. I don't doubt that she was suicidal. But to promise these parents that either you can have a transgender child or a dead child is just not, it hasn't been brought out in the data. And so basically, these parents were not given true informed consent. The informed consent would have been, we have no data showing that the benefits outweigh the harm of these surgeries. And so let's go. Let's go in the operating room. Imagine I came to you and I was like, listen, I have this great surgery for your child. And I don't know if it's going to prevent them from killing themselves. In fact, I don't even know if it's going to help them. Sign here. Let's go. I mean, you would never sign such a thing. But that's what the informed consent would have said if they were basing it on data. Okay. I read a story, didn't name this person, parents of a 15-year-old who wanted to transition from girl to boy and had been wearing, it flatens the chest. Right. So they talked about the difficulty of the chest binder, and it made the mental health of their child even worse. And they went through more counseling and sessions and then finally decided to do the surgery and then said by the age of 17, the child was doing great, that the surgery helped bring about the change in everything that was positive for their child. So that's the other side. But how far out did they ask that question? I guess only a couple of years. Yeah, that's right. That's the key. So when I asked my colleagues here, what about the 12-year data? What about the 14-year data coming out of Europe? They looked to me and they said, what long-term data? So what would you do as a doctor for someone who's 19, someone who's 20, comes in and says, I want to have this surgery? Right now, actually, in Europe, because they're not doing the studies here. In Europe, they're actually studying 19 to 25 years old to see if the long-term data bears out benefit. And I don't see this any differently than diabetes research, blood pressure research. If the data shows that there's a benefit, great. If the data shows that there's no benefit, stop. so what about other gender affirming treatments or therapies do you or your society have opinions formally on those or just on the surgery um i personally believe that the last looking at the last hundred years of research gender dysphoria was happening in three to five year old boys mainly in the last hundred years of gender dysphoria research okay yeah only in the last 10 to 15 years has it switched to 13 to 15 year old girls being the majority undergoing gender dysphoria why why what what what has changed social media social contagion and social media that's what's changed. So we don't want to do long-term therapies. And in my opinion, that includes hormone therapy because preventing a girl from undergoing normal growth can affect their bones. It can affect their IQ. It can affect their mental health. It affects their voice forever. So why are we letting them remove their healthy breasts? Why are we letting them change their genitals and there's complications from these surgeries you know you look at chloe cole and she talks about how she still has wounds that haven't healed years later will they ever heal i mean you talk about irreversible what does let's say a double mastectomy for some what what does that do permanently i mean if they decide to detransition able to breastfeed that's what i was going to say you could never get that back right no it's a mastectomy it's like having breast cancer and getting all of your breast tissue removed. Furthermore, they take the nipple off of the breast tissue and put it on like a skin graft. So it's insensate. So these are irreversible changes. And you know, I'll tell you something very disturbing. One of the heads of the hospitals doing these surgeries on children, the head of that department said, well, if they change their mind, they can just go get breast implants. Wow. Wow. That is not what some of them certainly want to hear Correct There was an unempathetic thing to say There was recently in New York a malpractice suit that was victorious Someone who had gone under breast removal who was sued. What does that mean? That person won. What does it mean for plastic surgeons and other doctors for the future? It means that there's a precedent set. And she won due to the informed consent issue. She came out, she's 22 years old now. She said, I was a teenager. I was mentally ill. I was very unwell. And my psychologist and plastic surgeon pushed me towards this instead of just taking care of my mental illness. But where they win is because they weren't given informed consent. Informed consent, like the beginning of our conversation would have said, we do not have long-term evidence that these procedures help. Sign here. And I'll tell you, this has become so politically and ideologically driven. Medicine should not be politically or ideologically driven. I'll give you an example. About a year ago, when the first statement came out from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, me and a colleague of mine put together a literature review of all of the long-term data out of Europe, which led to many of these progressive countries in Europe stopping these procedures or greatly limiting them. I cannot get it published anywhere. No one will publish it here. I had to reach out to HHS to see if they'll publish it because no one wants to touch it. God forbid a board member of one of these journals gets upset, you know, because it doesn't go along with their politics or what they believe to be true instead of what the evidence shows to be true. in this day and age aren't people afraid of being labeled a hater if they go against absolutely they're terrified they're terrified they're terrified of speaking up and you know when i go on you know shows like this i get tons of emails from the giants of our society giants of plastic surgery saying i totally agree with you i'm so glad you're speaking up and i'm like well Why aren't you speaking up? What is your message? If you had someone who was a parent and was like, please help me with surgery, my 16 year old, I'm desperate. We've done everything and nothing's helping their mental health and they really need this to transition. What would you tell them? I would tell them that this is not going to help and the data doesn't show that it's going to help. And I'm never as a mother. if your child was my child, I would never do something to them that the evidence shows doesn't help them and can actually harm them. So I know you're in a bad place now. I don't want to put you into a worse place. So let's go back. Let's see. Let's review what you've tried. You know, a lot of times I get people in my office for issues that they have. Then they say, I've tried everything. And then when we actually go through what they've done, they haven't tried everything. So I would really try to get them real help with things that evidence shows do help, not put them, give them what they want just because they're asking for it or they're waving money in the air, which is unfortunately what my colleagues have fallen victim to. Dr. Sheila Nazarian, plastic surgeon, member of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and her program on Netflix, Skin Decision Before and After. Doctor, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me. Howard Kurtz. What's on your mind? The first time I spoke to Jeff Bezos, he had founded Amazon as an online bookstore and made himself available to all kinds of journalists. In 1999, having blown past the naysayers who scoffed at the strange notion of online retailing, the 35-year-old businessman was named Time's Person of the Year. Nearly a decade and a half later, as one of the world's richest men, Bezos spent $250 million of his personal fortune to buy the Washington Post from Catherine Graham's family. And now he should fold his cards and sell it. While management has made more than its share of mistakes, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say Bezos has destroyed what was once one of America's great newspapers. When Bezos fired 300 journalists the other day, He completed the wave of destruction that had already left the post a shell of its former self. And this wrecking ball followed several earlier rounds of layoffs. Bezos doesn't care. I think he's just bored with the property he once believed would bring him instant credibility. He's more interested in his rocket company. The post is a blip on his global radar. I'm not in the camp that says Bezos should subsidize the paper forever. just because he's uber rich. With The Post losing $100 million last year, he's entitled to look for a path to profitability. But Bezos is getting absolutely hammered by the media. In fairness, many newspapers have struggled. More than a quarter of American newspapers have folded in the past two decades. But The Post is a classic case study of failure to adapt to the digital age. In the Bezos era, the crashing waves of cutbacks meant asking readers to keep paying for a product that grew increasingly diminished over time. At first, Bezos took a hands-off approach, seemingly in sync with the newsroom culture. During Trump's first term, he coined the slogan, democracy dies in darkness. But there was a drastic shift in 2024. When the editorial board drafted an endorsement of Kamala Harris, Bezos killed it, which, as the owner, he has every right to do. Had he decided on a non-endorsement earlier, few would have cared. But Bezos wielded the axe a week before the election, and the furor was deafening. As the Post itself reported, more than 250,000 people canceled their subscriptions. Peter Baker, a Post alumnus who is now chief warehouse correspondent at the New York Times and an MSNOW analyst, reports that Bezos' net worth is up $224 billion since buying the Washington paper. So why does Bezos need the headache? He should unload this distressed asset to someone who would have a fresh shot at resuscitating the Washington Post from its near-death experience. though in all candor it's probably too late howard kurtz fox news and host of the media buzz meter podcast you've been listening to the fox news rundown and now stay up to date by subscribing to this podcast at foxnewspodcasts.com listen ad-free on fox news podcasts plus on apple podcasts and prime members can listen to the show ad-free on amazon music and for up to the Minute News, go to foxnews.com.
