When the Trump Administration issues a press release about regulation, it is usually to boast about the number of rules it is trying to abolish or to announce a reduction in a corporate penalty imposed during the Biden Administration.
That’s why it was surprising recently to see a release from the Justice Department bragging that it collected more than $6.8 billion in settlements and judgments under the False Claims Act during the 2025 fiscal year, an amount it claimed was the highest annual total in the history of the FCA, which covers cases of fraud by government contractors.
To make sense of this announcement, we first need to recognize that it has no basis in fact. According to data collected for Violation Tracker, the FCA collections during FY 2025 were actually $2.06 billion, far less than the amount claimed by DOJ.
Admittedly, Violation Tracker covers only those cases brought against corporations and other business entities, both for-profit and non-profit, while excluding cases brought against individuals. Yet it is highly unlikely that cases against individuals would bring in more than twice the amount recovered from companies.
The DOJ may also be including cases that are still under appeal, whereas Violation Tracker covers only matters that are fully resolved.
The $2 billion total is far from the largest annual FCA figure in Violation Tracker. It is slightly above the average of the annual totals going back to FY 2001, which is earliest full year of coverage in the database, and well below the annual average of $2.6 billion for the past ten fiscal years. Putting aside those fiscal years overlapping presidential administrations, the FY2025 total is lower than the amounts during the last few years of the Obama Administration and each of those during the Biden era. It is also below the annual totals during all but one of the years of Trump’s first term.
It is far from surprising to see a branch of the Trump Administration play fast and loose with the facts. Yet it is unclear why a regulation-bashing, corporate-friendly administration would distort the truth to depict itself as more aggressive on enforcement than it actually is.
I can think of two reasons. The first is that False Claims Act cases fit neatly with the MAGA notion that the U.S. government is being taken advantage of. The contractors cheating federal agencies are seen as the domestic counterpart to the NATO countries that are supposedly mooching off Uncle Sam to cover their defense costs.
Even if the DOJ’s claim about FCA collections is highly inflated, it is true that the administration has been pursuing such cases aggressively at a time when many other regulatory agencies have been neutered. For example, the DOJ recently announced that Kaiser Permanente will pay $556 million to settle an FCA case alleging it engaged in a scheme to inflate its Medicare Advantage reimbursements by pressuring physicians to add invalid diagnoses to their records of patient visits. This is among the half dozen largest FCA settlements of the past decade.
A focus on FCA cases would be far from the worst thing to come from the MAGA grievance worldview. Corrupt contractors are, in fact, cheating the federal government and deserve to be prosecuted.
It is also possible, however, that the administration is setting the stage for a less palatable use of the FCA. In recent weeks there have been reports that DOJ is planning to use the FCA as the legal justification for bringing cases against contractors which do not completely conform with the administration’s position on diversity and inclusion. In other words, a company that retains any vestige of DEI while doing business with a federal agency would be considered to have cheated the government.
The FCA has a long history of serving as the key legal mechanism by which the federal government deals with corrupt contractors. Using false claims cases to attack DEI rather than financial fraud would be a betrayal of that history.
As with many other Trump policies, it is difficult to discern the administration’s real motivation in its FCA practices. We can only hope the DOJ focuses on the real culprits.
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