Vice President JD Vance travelled to Bangor, Maine on Thursday, May 14, to deliver remarks to a capacity crowd of approximately 400 supporters at Bangor International Airport, accusing the state of having a “festering problem” with Medicaid fraud and blaming Democratic Governor Janet Mills for failing to cooperate with federal anti-fraud efforts.
The visit was arranged as part of the Trump administration’s broader anti-fraud campaign, with Vance having been tapped by President Donald Trump to chair a task force targeting Medicaid fraud in Maine, Minnesota, Massachusetts, California, and other Democratic-led states.
Vance centred his remarks on a federal audit released in January 2026 that identified approximately $46 million in improper Medicaid payments made by Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services for community support services provided to children diagnosed with autism, a figure he described as “the tip of the iceberg.”
The audit did not allege intentional fraud but identified problems with documentation and compliance, a distinction that state officials and independent policy analysts noted but that Vance did not emphasise during his address.
“What you have in Maine is a festering problem where people have been taken advantage of and they’ve been stolen from and your government hasn’t done anything about it,” Vance told the cheering crowd, describing Maine as “one of the worst states in the union” in managing its Medicaid programme.
He repeatedly blamed Mills for what he described as her refusal to work with federal authorities to identify fraud in social service programmes, and also broadly accused undocumented immigrants of fuelling fraud schemes, drawing on similar rhetoric the Trump administration has used to target states like Minnesota.
Mills’ office did not respond to requests for comment following the speech, and a spokeswoman for the Maine DHHS also declined to respond, while independent fact-checkers noted that Maine’s most recent federal Medicaid payment error rate of 2.4% was actually below the national average of 3.2%.
The Maine Center for Economic Policy published an analysis on the same day arguing that the biggest threat to MaineCare is not isolated fraud cases but the effort to use those cases to weaken public support for health programmes that hundreds of thousands of Mainers rely on.
Vance used the Bangor event to endorse former Republican Governor Paul LePage, the GOP nominee to fill Maine’s 2nd Congressional District seat ahead of November’s midterm elections, signalling the clear dual political purpose of the visit.
Senator Susan Collins was not present at the event, remaining in Washington to maintain her streak of consecutive votes that is approaching 10,000, and Democrats responded with a statement accusing Vance of using the Medicaid fraud narrative to distract from what they called Republicans’ efforts to gut the health care system in order to fund tax breaks for billionaires.
