🔥🔥🔥 “Beyond all reckoning, the goofy DOGE geniuses did it! It’s done.
For six years, they guarded this data like the nuclear codes. Yesterday, DOGE slapped it on the internet, ribbon-wrapped for Valentine’s Day. DOGE —whose death was obviously slightly exaggerated— just dropped a tactical nuke on both the vaccine debate and welfare fraud— and launched the biggest crowdsourcing project in human history…
DOGE teams originally accessed the HHS data in February, over the backs of hysterical Democrats and enough lawsuits to keep a medium-sized law firm busy for a decade. Since then— crickets. Until now.
And it was the most Elon solution ever. They open-sourced HHS’s top-secret Medicaid claims database —11 gigabytes worth— and dumped it on the internet before Democrats could even say “injunction.”
The release was framed as an anti-fraud move, surfing a wave of public outrage washing out of Minneapolis and Nick Shirley’s viral video. In making the announcement (on X, of course), DOGE-HHS pointed out, “For example, using this dataset, it would have been possible to easily detect the large-scale autism diagnosis fraud seen in Minnesota.” The space billionaire quickly chimed in. “Medicaid data has been open-sourced, so the level of fraud is easy to identify,” Musk wrote. “DOGE is not a department, it’s a state of mind,” he added…
The 11GB file can be searched or downloaded at OpenData HHS, and includes aggregated provider-level claims data, by billing code, by month, between 2018 and 2024— bookending the whole pandemic period. (Note— It does notcontain patient-level data.) It includes records from all Medicaid claims submitted by providers for reimbursement during that period.
This is clearly not just a DOGE project. It is a coordinated effort across the Trump Administration. For example, timed with the release of the data, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a related new program. Not only have they open-sourced the research, but they have gamified it. Bessent said Treasury was setting up a website for people to report Medicare fraud— and they’ll get up to 30% of whatever’s fined and recovered.
If the $1 trillion fraud estimate is even half right, the government just turned fraud detection into the world’s largest treasure hunt. Some kid in a bedroom with a laptop, a chatbot, and a case of energy drinks might make more money this year than most hedge fund managers. Dog the Bounty Hunter: Fraud Edition is coming soon, to a laptop near you.
Social media quickly began lighting up across the board. Within hours of the data release, citizen analysts had started flagging facilities billing for physically impossible numbers of procedures, clinics with addresses at residential apartments diagnosing hundreds of children with autism per month, and at least one provider that seems to have performed more Medicaid services than there are actual humans in its zip code.
…informatic superheroine DataRepublican quickly noted a bizarre coincidence…
What she was signaling was that HHS lists 184 active Medicaid providers supposedly operating in a small (11,000 sq ft), rundown commercial building at 2614 Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis, not even including fake daycare centers…
In less than 24 hours, here’s what we’ve learned:
1It’s easy to find fraud flags if you are looking for them.
2Simple cross-checking against other publicly available data helps a lot.
3The hardworking federal employees at the big government agencies have been unable to accomplish these trivial tasks, and it’s costing us up to a trillion dollars a year.
4Thanks to Treasury’s bounty, fraud finding is now a well-paying job that anybody can take.
The fraud hunt is on! Uncover a single fraudulent provider, and possibly earn millions! It’s even better than Bitcoin. Stop learning to code right now, and get out there and find Jimmy Buffett’s lost shaker of salt…”
—Jeff Childers,
@jchilders98