First Draft: 🤦🏻‍♂️ The New... DOGE?

JD Vance ridiculously suggests no one’s ever looked for government fraud before, as if DOGE never happened. Plus, a Trump official pinky-promises the president won’t send ICE to the polls.

🚨 Imran Khan’s sister, Aleema Khan, joins Mehdi in a Zeteo town hall TODAY at 9:30am ET (6:30am PT / 2:30pm GMT / 7:30pm PKT), to discuss the former prime minister’s health condition in prison after recently losing 85% of vision in his right eye. Paid subscribers can find the link to register here. There’s still time for free subscribers to upgrade today and join the live conversation.

Good morning! Andrew here. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that for many of you, Donald Trump’s second administration has often felt like a horrible nightmare that you wish you could wake up from.

On Wednesday, JD Vance said something that made me wonder if it really has been a bad dream the whole time. Did our president actually hire Elon Musk, the world’s richest and most compulsively annoying man, to lead a fake whole-of-government campaign to eliminate fraud? Or did I, like Musk (reportedly!), take too much horse tranquilizer?

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we examine Trump’s new “war on fraud” and look back at his last one, Republicans try to blow past a jarring scandal that clearly should have resulted in a resignation by now, and UK voters go to the polls in a crucial parliamentary by-election as Keir Starmer faces yet another test of his dwindling authority.

Trump and Vance’s Fake War on Fraud

Vice President JD Vance on Feb. 25, 2026. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

In a Fox interview on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance spoke about his role leading Trump’s new “war on fraud.” Vance claimed that “nobody has ever tried to take a systematic look at how much fraud there is in the federal government,” calling it “unfortunate.”

Didn’t Donald Trump last year hire his former buddy and biggest campaign donor, Elon Musk, to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and root out “fraud, waste, and abuse”?

Musk, via DOGE, oversaw the firing of tens of thousands of government workers. He fed USAID, America’s foreign aid bureau, “into the wood chipper,” risking 14 million new deaths around the globe. The Tesla CEO hired an army of young, inexperienced staffers – some teens, one guy nicknamed “Big Balls” – to bully their way into federal agencies, gain control over essential systems, and hoover up Americans’ sensitive personal data. Its work canceling congressionally appropriated spending was, on its face, flagrantly unconstitutional – though the far-right Supreme Court has blessed some of it. Musk was smug and annoying the whole time, using Twitter to threaten to fire any workers who failed to respond to his email demanding they summarize what they did that week.

DOGE was a complete and utter failure. It didn’t lead to any major fraud prosecutions. The Social Security Administration, where DOGE made so many disruptive changes, ended up finding virtually no fraud, before quickly ending those changes. Musk and Trump spoke about sending Americans “DOGE dividends” from all the money they saved. That never happened. Despite regularly posting “receipts” of all the supposed waste that DOGE canceled, the project never saved much money – and it certainly didn’t come close to cutting the “$2 trillion” Musk pledged. On Wednesday, we learned a DC-area wonk bet his life savings, on a prediction market, that DOGE wouldn’t successfully cut federal spending – and won big.

While DOGE, as an entity, no longer exists, its work has continued in every corner of Trump’s administration. And now it has a rebrand: the “war on fraud.”