As the Trump administration continues its aggressive crackdown on government waste, fraud, and abuse, a senior official at the U.S. Department of Education is naming names—and the results won’t surprise many taxpayers. According to Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent, two deep-blue states, California and Minnesota, have emerged as the worst offenders when it comes to large-scale federal student aid fraud.
In an interview with *Fox News Digital*, Kent laid out a troubling picture of how taxpayer-funded education programs have been exploited, siphoning off money intended for low-income students and families who actually need help getting through college. The Department of Education revealed in 2025 that it stopped more than **$1 billion in fraudulent aid payments**, a staggering figure that underscores just how broken the system had become.
“We talked about California being certainly a hub of fraud, waste, and abuse,” Kent said, “but we also see Minnesota, for example.” He pointed directly at the leadership in those states, noting that recent revelations have exposed “an enormous amount of fraud, waste, and abuse under the governor’s leadership there.”
Kent put the damage into stark, human terms. “That’s 1,700 Pell Grants for low-income students that that money could have gone toward,” he explained. “When we talk about limited resources, this is money being stolen directly from students who are trying to better their lives.”
According to reporting cited by Fox News, scammers stole roughly **$10 million in federal financial aid** from California community colleges in just a 12-month period between 2024 and 2025. Even more alarming, one report found that **34 percent of applications** to California community colleges were likely fraudulent.
At the center of these schemes are what the Department of Education calls “ghost students”—fake enrollees who never intend to earn a degree or even attend class.
“These are students who enroll for the sole purpose of defrauding the federal student aid program,” Kent explained. “They sign up, collect the financial aid, maybe show up once or twice, pocket the money, and disappear.”
Kent warned that the problem has been supercharged by technology. Artificial intelligence, he said, is increasingly being used to flood college systems with fake applications, sometimes enrolling “students” in multiple schools at once. Some fraudsters operate domestically; others are based overseas, draining American taxpayer dollars with alarming ease.
So how is the Trump administration fighting back? With a solution that critics say is common sense—and one the Biden administration inexplicably failed to implement.
Over the summer, the Department of Education rolled out **mandatory identity verification for first-time FAFSA applicants**, requiring students to prove they are real people before federal money goes out the door.
“Every applicant must now prove they’re a real student and not a ghost student or an AI bot,” Kent said. “We’re very excited that we’re able to prevent a substantial amount of fraud from walking out the door.”
Kent didn’t stop there. He also called out colleges themselves, noting that some institutions quietly benefit from inflated enrollment numbers and federal dollars—and therefore have little incentive to look too closely.
“We’re holding institutions accountable,” he said. “If fraud is on your campus, you should know about it. Criminals do not deserve this money.”
The administration, Kent made clear, has no intention of backing down. “We’re going after the bad guys,” he said. “And we’re going to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.”
Predictably, blue-state officials rushed to deflect responsibility. A spokesperson for Minnesota’s Office of Higher Education insisted that FAFSA verification is a federal and institutional responsibility, not the state’s problem, and dismissed criticism as “ill-informed” without reviewing federal data.
California officials, meanwhile, emphasized that they are now implementing identity verification tools—including ID.me and a DMV-linked mobile driver’s license system—along with an AI fraud-detection platform called LightLeap. Notably, many of these measures mirror safeguards the Trump administration has been pushing at the federal level all along.
For conservatives, the takeaway is clear. Once again, lax oversight, bureaucratic complacency, and left-wing governance created a system ripe for abuse—while hardworking Americans paid the price. Under President Trump’s leadership, the message from the Department of Education is unmistakable: taxpayer dollars are not an ATM for scammers, and the era of looking the other way is over.
