On February 14, 2026, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency released what it called the largest Medicaid dataset in agency history—millions of claims records covering medical procedures and payments from January 2018 through December 2024—and made it publicly available online. Musk posted on X: “Medicaid data has been open sourced, so the level of fraud is easy to identify. @DOGE is not a department, it's a state of mind.”
The goal was to crowdsource fraud detection by encouraging random internet users to comb through healthcare claims data. DOGE cited the Minnesota autism diagnosis fraud as an example of what could be found, claiming “Using this dataset, it would have been possible to easily detect the large-scale autism diagnosis fraud seen in Minnesota.”
While the dataset applies “cell suppression” (dropping rows with fewer than 12 claims) for stated privacy purposes, releasing millions of healthcare claims records to the general public raises serious questions about patient privacy, data security, and whether internet vigilante fraud-hunting is an appropriate substitute for professional federal auditing.
Meanwhile, DOGE's broader mission appears to be fizzling. Trump administration officials acknowledged DOGE is no longer operating as a “centralized” organization, and the cost-cutting crusade is “largely seen as over”—having achieved only $9 billion in cuts against Musk's original $2 trillion target. Senator Elizabeth Warren's office revealed that DOGE had previously lied about Social Security fraud claims. Musk himself admitted DOGE was “only somewhat successful” and that he wouldn't do it again.