WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s Education Department says it has saved taxpayers roughly $400 million in just four months by restoring anti-fraud measures that were quietly switched off under the Biden administration, The Daily Wire has learned.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Wire, Deputy Under Secretary James Bergeron said the department found that Biden officials had stopped sharing data with other federal agencies — agreements that existed specifically to prevent money from flowing to dead people or to individuals not legally entitled to receive federal student aid.
“We provide about 130 billion dollars a year in federal grants, loans, and what we saw when we came into office is that the previous administration, the Biden administration, had turned off all the protections for our programs,” Bergeron said Wednesday.
Among the safeguards that had been deactivated was a data-sharing agreement with the Social Security Administration designed to keep federal aid from being sent to deceased individuals. The department also discovered that an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security — which was used to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving federal student aid funds — had been terminated during the previous administration.
“They were not requiring institutions to verify identity, so we had a proliferation of bots and foreign international rings that were stealing federal student aid,” Bergeron said. “And so, one of the first things that we did in February 2025 is that we turned all those systems on again.”
Immediate savings from restored safeguards
Turning those systems back on produced immediate results. Bergeron said the department saved roughly $30 million right away, largely because dead individuals were no longer receiving federal aid. An additional $10 million in savings came from preventing overpayments on Pell grants.
The department’s actions are part of a broader push by the Trump administration’s Fraud Task Force, which was launched in March 2026. According to the White House, that task force has since uncovered nearly $230 billion in fraud. It has also stopped $56 billion in payments that were heading to fraudsters and enforced more than $55 billion in recoveries through indictments, settlements, and civil penalties.
New FAFSA technology checks every applicant
In April 2026, the Education Department went a step further by revamping the FAFSA application with new technology that builds fraud detection directly into the forms themselves. For the first time in the department’s history, every single student filling out the FAFSA will have their identity checked to ensure they are a real person.
“So every single student in the country that fills out the FAFSA gets passed through this technology, and we give them a fraud score, a risk assessment score, and then if they fall into a high category, we require that they come on online and show an ID,” Bergeron explained. “Just like you have to present an ID to drive a car or get on a plane.”
Bergeron framed the new requirement as a matter of basic fairness, given the size of the taxpayer-funded awards at stake.
“We think that’s only right that you have to present an ID to access the tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars that we’re getting to fund their education,” he said.
The department is also outright rejecting some applications from individuals who cannot present an ID when asked to do so online, or who otherwise raise a significant number of red flags during the screening process.
A shift in policy direction
The moves represent a sharp reversal from the approach taken during the Biden administration, which Bergeron said had deliberately disabled the anti-fraud mechanisms that were previously in place. The full scope of the problem became apparent only after the new administration took office and began auditing existing practices, he said.
The $400 million in savings over four months is the department’s own calculation of the financial impact of the restored safeguards and the new identity-verification requirements. The figure includes both direct savings from halted improper payments and reductions in overpayments made through programs like Pell grants.
The Education Department’s findings are likely to reignite the broader political debate over fraud prevention versus access to federal aid. Critics of stricter identity requirements have typically argued that such measures can create barriers for legitimate students, while supporters say the scale of fraud — including rings of foreign actors using bots to steal aid — justifies additional scrutiny.
The department’s actions also align with a broader push by the administration to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse across federal programs. The White House has touted the Fraud Task Force’s numbers as evidence that significant taxpayer dollars were being siphoned off by bad actors under the previous administration.
Neither the Biden administration nor former Education Department officials have responded publicly to Bergeron’s characterization of their handling of the data-sharing agreements. The Daily Wire’s reporting is based on interviews with the deputy under secretary as well as documentation provided by the department.
As the new FAFSA technology continues to be rolled out ahead of the next application cycle, the department says it expects the savings to grow. The real-time identity checks are designed to catch fraudulent applicants early — before any money is distributed — rather than attempting to claw back funds after they have already been paid out.
Bergeron said the return of what he called “common-sense detection measures” is already reshaping how the department handles the roughly $130 billion in grants and loans it distributes annually.
“What we saw is that those protections were turned off,” he added. “We turned them back on.”
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-trumps-fraud-team-flips-switch-on-biden-decisions-costing-taxpayers-hundreds-of-millions