Unpacking rumors that DOGE and RFK Jr. found 8M people fraudulently enrolled in Medicaid

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In May 2025, a claim spread online that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the U.S. discovered 8 million people fraudulently enrolled in Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income people.
While U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that 8 million people are on Medicaid because of "fraud, waste and abuse," and that DOGE helped determine this, there is no evidence backing up the claim that this number originated from DOGE's work.
However, the Congressional Budget Office did estimate that approximately 7.6 million or 7.7 million people would lose Medicaid coverage under U.S. President Donald Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," which appears to be where Kennedy's numbers come from.
Kennedy also claimed, as did many people online, that of the 8 million, 1 million are enrolled in Medicaid in multiple states, about 1 million enrollees are immigrants in the country illegally and another million are enrolled in plans under both Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
However, there is no publicly available documented proof of the double enrollment numbers — for both multiple states and multiple plans — and the enrollees who do not have legal immigration status are on Medicaid through state-sanctioned and -funded programming, not federal funding.
In mid-2025, a rumor circulated online that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) found 8 million people fraudulently enrolled in Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income people.
The claim spread primarily on Facebook but could also be found on X. Snopes readers also searched the website for information on the claims about Medicaid fraud and DOGE.
"DOGE drops the facts, and RFK Jr. confirms it — 8 million people are on Medicaid who shouldn't be," many of the posts read.
The text from the post above appears to be copypasta, or misinformation in the form of copied and pasted text, as it reads word-for-word the same in many of the claims reviewed by Snopes.
U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did allege that 8 million people on Medicaid would be affected by the administration's efforts to cut "fraud, waste and abuse" in the program. However, there is no evidence that DOGE made this discovery — nor did Kennedy provide any proof for his claim.
In fact, the number appears to come from preliminary estimates by the Congressional Budget Office on how many people may lose health insurance coverage if Trump's massive legislative budget package — called the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" — becomes law without undergoing any changes.
Furthermore, Kennedy's claim that these 8 million people represent "fraud, waste and abuse" is in part a matter of opinion, not fact.
Asked via email whether DOGE could be credited for this, White House spokesperson Harrison Fields requested Snopes provide an example of the claim. Snopes provided this post from a Facebook account titled, "Donald Trump For President," to which Fields said the White House would not comment on unofficial Republican accounts. After clarifying that the claim spread widely online and may have originated from Kennedy, we did not hear back. We also reached out to DOGE and await a response.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not return a request for more information on where Kennedy's numbers came from.
As first reported by The Wall Street Journal and later confirmed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Feb. 5, 2025, officials granted DOGE access to Medicaid systems in its widespread search for fraud.
On May 14, 2025, Kennedy said during a committee hearing that "because of DOGE," the agency found 8 million people on Medicaid who would be affected by cuts made for reasons of "fraud, waste and abuse."
However, if DOGE did make this discovery, they did not appear to make any public announcement about it. The public face of DOGE, tech billionaire Elon Musk, often makes major announcements through his X page — and a search for "Medicaid" on his X profile returned no results concerning 8 million fraudulent enrollees. DOGE similarly uses X for public statements, and a search of its page for "Medicaid" also returned no relevant results as of this writing.
Musk did claim in an X post on Feb. 10, 2025, without providing evidence, that the "magnitude of fraud in federal entitlements," including Medicaid, "exceeds the combined sum of every private scam you've ever heard by FAR." This post did not include hard data or any supposed number of fraudulent enrollees.
DOGE releases dollar amounts of its purported savings on its website, but there was not a section for the number of people that the agency supposedly caught committing fraud as of this writing. No reputable news outlets have credited this supposed discovery to DOGE as of publication, and if the claim were true — or if Musk even claimed it was — it would certainly make news.
Kennedy's comments during the May 14 committee hearing were in reference to cuts that would be made to Medicaid under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Here is the full exchange between Kennedy and Rep. Josh Harder, D-Calif.; see 1:53:00 (emphasis ours):
KENNEDY: The cuts to Medicaid are for fraud, waste and abuse, and I'll tell you what that means. It means because of DOGE — and it's about 8 million people who would be affected — because of DOGE, we were able to determine that there are a million people who are claiming Medicaid from multiple states. That's illegal. It's theft. You're not allowed to do that. There are another million people who are collecting both under Obamacare and —
HARDER: Mr. Secretary. That has nothing to do with the budget that is actually being proposed —
KENNEDY: These are the only cuts that are being made. These are the only cuts that are being made to Medicaid.
HARDER: That's not true.
KENNEDY: Yes it is. There are another million illegal aliens. We announced the law yesterday, we're not going to pay illegal aliens anymore.
The first public reference available of this "8 million" number appears to be a May 11 preliminary estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which found that "at least" 7.7 million people may lose health insurance coverage by 2034 if the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" became law without undergoing any changes.
An updated May 18, 2025, estimate from CBO, available for download here (go to the "Title IV — Commerce and Energy" tab after downloading and scroll to the very end), said "the number of people without health insurance would increase by 8.6 million in 2034," with 7.6 million of that number attributable to Medicaid cuts and another 1 million attributable to the Affordable Care Act.
CBO cautioned that it has not yet completed "estimates for effects on spending subject to appropriation and estimates of the effects of interactions among titles of the legislation," meaning these numbers are subject to change.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act has also undergone changes since being passed by the House of Representatives on May 22, 2025, and is likely to undergo even more changes once it reaches debate in the Senate. It must pass both chambers and be signed by Trump in order to become law.
Kennedy's explanation as to why the 8 million who would be cut from Medicaid represent "waste, fraud and abuse" largely matches with the text from the copypasta, seen below:
Over 1 million are double-dipping, illegally getting Medicaid from two different states. Another 1.4 million are undocumented immigrants — and they're being handed benefits funded by your tax dollars. On top of that, another million are illegally enrolled in both Medicaid and Obamacare.
Not all of these numbers are available in public documents, making it impossible to check every claim made here, so let's start by looking at the claim that is possible to fact-check.
The claim that 1.4 million immigrants in the country illegally are on Medicaid comes from the May 18, 2025, CBO estimate (emphasis ours):
Included in that 8.6 million total are an estimated 1.4 million people without verified citizenship, nationality, or satisfactory immigration status who, if section 41110 were enacted, would no longer be covered in state-only funded programs in 2034.
While such immigrants are largely ineligible for federal health insurance, Medicaid is a joint state and federal program — and some states offer Medicaid or Medicaid-like benefits to people without legal immigration status using state funds, which is what CBO references. Thus, legally speaking, those immigrants who enroll through state-sanctioned Medicaid programs aren't committing fraud or abuse.
(On the federal spending level, noncitizen immigrants — both with and without legal authorization — can be eligible for emergency Medicaid services, but the government doesn't keep track of an immigrant's legal status when collecting data on emergency Medicaid usage, making it impossible to tell how many undocumented immigrants have benefited from these services, per a 2024 letter sent to U.S. representatives.)
As for the claim that 1 million enrollees are "double-dipping" into Medicaid from two different states, that is both illegal and a legitimate issue, according to a 2022 audit by the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Inspector General. (See Page 2 under "Federal Requirements" for the law on receiving benefits in two different states.)
However, this audit found that the total number of beneficiaries concurrently enrolled in two different states was 327,497 as of August 2020; in August 2019, it was 208,254 (see pages 14 and 15). Thus, the most recent numbers available as of this writing aren't close to 1 million (see the first summary page).
It is possible that the number of "double-dippers" has increased to 1 million, but that number isn't publicly available as of this writing.
Finally, Snopes could not find any data on the number of people who are enrolled in both Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, and Medicaid.
However, in 2016, the federal government did crack down on duplicate enrollments, per a New York Times story; in that report, Judith Solomon, then-vice president of the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said there is not really a benefit to "double-dipping" into both insurance plans.
Eligibility for either ACA plans or Medicaid can change based on a person's or family's income level or other factors, meaning Americans often find themselves swapping between the two types of plans. The federal government provides a guide online for ending one form of coverage or the other, as overlap between the two is common; the IRS also provides tax guidance on overlapping coverage.
Here's the math: According to the copypasta, 8 million people are fraudulently on Medicaid — 1.4 million of whom are immigrants in the country illegally, 1 million who are double-dipping into Medicaid in multiple states and an additional 1 million on plans under both Medicaid and Obamacare. That totals 3.4 million, meaning there are 4.6 million people unaccounted for.
During the May 14 committee hearing, Kennedy said about 4.8 million people cut from Medicaid under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would become ineligible because they aren't employed.
"The last category is adults who are able-bodied, who refuse to look for a job, to volunteer, to get a job or to show — to take a part-time job," Kennedy said (at 1:54:25).
Multiple Republican lawmakers also cited this number during a May 13 House committee hearing; at least one attributed it to CBO — but if this is a CBO estimate, it has not yet been released publicly. Snopes reached out to several Republican lawmakers who shared the number in the hearing to ask for documented proof and await their reply. CBO would not share its estimate or related documents with Snopes.
To summarize, there is no public evidence, aside from Kennedy's claim, that DOGE deserves credit for the alleged discovery of 8 million people fraudulently on Medicaid. The numbers and categories of supposedly fraudulent enrollees from the post come from either Kennedy, who did not provide proof, or estimates by the Congressional Budget Office. While enrollment in multiple states or multiple plans is a legitimate issue, it's unclear if the numbers shared are accurate. Furthermore, the 1.4 million immigrants in the country illegally on Medicaid — as estimated by CBO — are on the program through state funding, not federal.
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