WASHINGTON – President Trump told his cabinet on Wednesday that next year’s midterm elections will not shape his foreign policy, then spent much of a televised White House meeting elevating Vice President JD Vance’s anti-fraud task force and arguing that its work could save Social Security and balance the federal budget.
The session was the administration’s 12th cabinet meeting and the first since Trump scrapped a planned retreat at Camp David, citing weather. It was billed in advance by a senior White House official as a showcase for economic and small-business wins, the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, and foreign policy. Iran dominated the opening, but the more revealing turn came when Trump pivoted to domestic ground that Republicans see as their best chance to blunt a Democratic affordability message that powered last November’s off-year sweep.
“They thought they were gonna out-wait me. You know, ‘We’ll out-wait him. He’s got the midterms,’” Trump said of Iranian negotiators, as reported by The Associated Press. “I don’t care about the midterms.”
The line was meant for Tehran, but it landed inside a meeting whose stagecraft was unmistakably domestic. Trump told reporters he would limit speaking roles to Vance, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler, then handed the floor to Vance for an extended pitch on the fraud task force he has chaired since March.
Vance told the room that the task force had identified tens of billions of dollars in Medicare and Medicaid fraud and that more cases were coming. Trump congratulated officials and praised the operation, calling it a “tremendous amount of money.” He then made a larger claim. “I think we have a chance to save Social Security without doing anything to it,” the president said, citing “people that are 115 years old, 125 years old, getting payments.” If the initiative succeeds, he added, “we’ll have a balanced budget without having to do anything.”
The numbers cited by the administration do not match the picture drawn by federal auditors. The Social Security Administration’s inspector general found in a July 2024 report that improper payments between fiscal years 2015 and 2022 totaled about $71.8 billion, or roughly 0.84 percent of nearly $8.6 trillion in benefits paid out over that period. Most of those payments were overpayments caused by record-keeping errors, late beneficiary reporting and delays in updating death information, not fraud. A separate Government Accountability Office assessment in March estimated about $162 billion in improper payments across 68 federal programs in fiscal 2024, of which about 84 percent were overpayments.
The trust funds that finance Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance face a different and far larger problem. Social Security trustees have warned for years that the combined OASI and DI trust funds are on track for depletion in the mid-2030s, after which incoming payroll taxes would cover only about 80 percent of scheduled benefits. Eliminating every dollar of improper payments inside the program would not close that gap, and the trustees’ reports do not identify fraud as a leading driver of the shortfall.
The pitch is nonetheless central to the administration’s political project this spring. Republicans were rattled in November when Democrats rode an affordability message to wins in New Jersey, Virginia and Tennessee, and the party has spent the months since trying to rebrand high prices as a Biden-era inheritance that the Trump administration is clearing up. The cabinet meeting placed Vance, Bessent and Loeffler at the center of that effort.
Bessent has been the public face of the affordability rebuttal on Capitol Hill, where Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts pressed him this winter on grocery inflation that has run at multi-year highs. The treasury secretary has argued that the underlying price level reflects what he calls the “Biden-Warren” economy, not Trump’s first year. Democrats counter that core grocery inflation has accelerated under the current administration, and they are building a corruption-and-cost-of-living case for the 2026 midterms.
The fraud task force itself has been a partisan flashpoint. Twenty-four Democratic state attorneys general declined to attend Vance’s anti-fraud roundtable at the White House on Tuesday, telling the vice president in a joint letter that they had been invited with less than a business day’s notice and without an agenda. Republican attorneys general had been invited earlier and attended in force, posing for a group photograph in the Indian Treaty Room.
The cabinet table on Wednesday also marked the final stretch for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who is set to leave her post on June 30 after announcing her resignation last week. Trump thanked Gabbard at the meeting and called her a “terrific person,” saying her recent findings had been “pretty good.” Rubio used his turn at the microphone to argue that “diplomacy is always the first option” on Iran while also praising the anti-fraud task force’s work, a rhetorical bridge between the meeting’s foreign and domestic halves.
Outside the West Wing, Republican primary voters delivered a separate signal the same week. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Senator John Cornyn in a runoff that Trump had endorsed, a result the White House cited inside the cabinet meeting as evidence that Trump’s coalition remains intact heading into November. Polling tells a more uncertain story. A Washington Post analysis published Wednesday described Trump’s approval on both Iran and the economy as sliding, and earlier surveys by CBS News and YouGov found that a majority of Americans believe the administration overstates the strength of the economy.
The president closed his opening remarks with a familiar boast. “This team has achieved more than most other administrations achieve in 8 years,” he said. He then reminded reporters that he had once let every cabinet member speak, and that the meeting had run four or five hours. “It was a little much,” he said, “according to reports.”
Whether the fraud task force becomes the centerpiece of a midterm message or a transition story for an administration absorbing political pressure on prices is a question Wednesday’s meeting did not resolve. What it did establish is that Trump’s team, per news reports, has decided that the answer to declining numbers on the economy is a more aggressive case that the savings are coming, the cheaters are being caught, and the political weather, like the literal one over the Catoctin Mountains, can wait.
