Dem
47
GOP
53
Unless the Senate is tied 50-50, the veep doesn't have a lot of work to do after calling the White House every day at 8 a.m. to see if the president is still alive. If a veep is lucky, the president might give him or her something to do. If the veep is very lucky, it might even be something that can be done, rather than just wasting the veep's time.
Donald Trump has just given J.D. a job: Rooting out fraud—but only in blue states.
There is probably not a lot of fraud going on. In fact, it is so rare that when a case of it comes up, it makes the news. Crimes that are common don't make the news unless there was something unusual in some case. There was a case of fraud discovered in February in Minnesota and there is now one in Los Angeles. Vance's job will be to root it out and expose it.
Good luck with that. How is he going to do it? Detecting fraud requires painstaking work going over accounting ledgers to see if something looks odd, like certain entries being exceptionally high. Maybe AI could do that, but Vance certainly can't. He's not an accountant and even given access to state records of funds received from the federal government and how it was spent, how is he going to do that? Maybe a Medicaid program has recorded that it sent $20 million for patient care at General Hospital in East Cupcake—but there is no hospital in East Cupcake. Vance isn't going to know that. Rooting out fraud requires a detailed examination of expenditures line by line and verifying them against facts on the ground. That requires teams of subject-matter experts, not a politician who wants to hold a press conference.
Oh, wait. What Vance is actually going to do is form a task force (i.e., a committee) to do the rooting. But what is the task force going to do that the states are not already doing? After all, states pay part of the cost of Medicaid and other programs and don't like being defrauded. They don't need Vance to tell them that.
Since this whole stunt is overtly political, we wonder how much cooperation Vance will actually get from states, especially blue states that don't want him to look good. One thing they can do when he asks for data is to give him dozens or hundreds of spreadsheets with tens of thousands of lines of incomprehensible individual transactions and say: "Mr. Vice President, if you can find the fraud here, we would be eternally grateful for your help."
If a state does discover some fraud, it is unlikely that the governor is going to want Vance to get any credit for it. Most likely a mayor or the governor will hold a press conference to announce it and not give Vance a heads up or invite him to it. Then he will look foolish. It is doubtful he is going to discover enough fraud on his own to make it look like he did a good job. He is probably going to end up like Kamala Harris, to whom Joe Biden assigned the job of being the border czar. She accomplished basically nothing, and when she ran for president and reporters asked her what she had accomplished after months of work, she had nothing to say. Vance is probably going to suffer the same fate. And what's with this "czar" business, anyway? Even Vladimir Putin doesn't call himself a "czar"—and he really is one. (V)