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Louisville woman sentenced to federal prison after pool business fraud
Tracy Davenport was sentenced to federal prison after facing charges in connection with defrauding customers from her pool installation business.
Reviews clear Telescope Health of fraud allegations; officials encourage Jacksonville residents to use HealthLink JAX
Multiple reviews have found no evidence of fraud, criminal wrongdoing or misuse of taxpayer dollars by Telescope Health, ending months of scrutiny over the Jacksonville company that operates the city’s HealthLink JAX program for uninsured residents.
Alito blasts latest SCOTUS ballot ruling as invitation to ‘voter fraud’ risks
Justice Samuel Alito warns that counting late-arriving mail-in ballots could severely undermine Americans' confidence in election integrity.
Better Business Bureau urges seniors to watch for scams as fraud losses quadruple since 2020
The Better Business Bureau is warning older adults to be more cautious.
About 3 million people have dropped Obamacare health coverage after subsidies expire and costs rise
The Department of Health and Human Services suggests the 13% drop is due to a federal crackdown on fraudulent enrollmentut, but health analysts believe it's more likely related to the Jan. 1 expiration of federal subsidies.
Editorial: Feds find more health care fraud
It shouldn’t be too much to ask that taxpayer-funded social service programs benefit people who actually exist.
Black Canyon City business defrauded by GM
A woman was arrested Tuesday for allegedly stealing $40,000 from the Black Canyon City business for which she was the general manager.
5 million have dropped ACA insurance after Trump and the GOP let prices skyrocket
The number of people who signed up for a health plan and then didn't pay their premium fell much more sharply than it has in years past. Trump officials blame fraud. Health policy experts blame costs.
Former Washington health care executive pleads guilty to $24 million wire fraud scheme
A former health care executive in North Central Washington has pleaded guilty to wire fraud after prosecutors say he siphoned tens of millions of dollars.
‘We don’t see anything that was a problem.’ GOP candidate Steve Hilton reacts to Trump’s claims of election fraud in CA
House Science Republicans Examine Grant Fraud
Committee Democrats argued the hearing was a distraction and an excuse to slash spending.
12 arrested in South Florida in nationwide investigation into $6.5B health care fraud
Investigators say Medicaid and Medicare thieves in South Florida bilked taxpayers for $27 million for everything from fake therapy to medical equipment patients never received. Officials seized the stolen taxpayer money from Key West to Fort Pierce.
5 states targeting Medicaid behavioral health enrollment amid fraud concerns
At least five states have taken steps in 2026 to restrict new Medicaid behavioral health provider enrollments as stakeholders seek to curb fraud, waste and abuse while strengthening oversight of high-risk services. The developments come as the Trump administration aims to crack down on healthcare fraud. On June 25, the Justice Department charged 455 people, […]
Anthropic accused Alibaba of exploiting its AI models
Anthropic said the Chinese company interacted with Claude millions of times through 25,000 fraudulent accounts in recent months.
4 charged in Nebraska as part of DOJ national health care fraud takedown
Criminal charges announced today are tied to alleged schemes to defraud Medicare and Medicaid, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Nebraska.
Louisville doctor, nurse and nonprofit founder charged in federal health care fraud crackdown
Federal prosecutors in the Western District of Kentucky announced charges in four separate cases involving alleged schemes to defraud Medicare and Medicaid, misuse medical credentials and controlled substances, and submit
New fraud charges include woman impersonating health care professionals, man billing for dead patient
Las Vegas woman accused of running illegal multi-million-dollar healthcare scheme in Pearland, prosecutors say
Marizel Yukee is accused of providing medically unnecessary allografts to patients while receiving kickbacks, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Her case is one prosecutors are citing as part of a national crackdown on health care fraud.
Louisville pediatrician, nurse also federally charged in 'healthcare fraud takedown'
More Louisville health professionals have been criminally charged as a part of a federal healthcare fraud crackdown.
Affordability, not fraud, is why fewer Americans have health insurance
The “fraud, waste, and abuse” narrative has been seriously overworked, and does not fit the facts.
10 SoCal residents arrested in health care fraud takedown
The U.S. Department of Justice launched its massive 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown, charging 455 individuals nationwide over $6.5 billion in fraudulent claims.
455 people including doctors charged in historic $6.5B health care schemes
Over 450 people, including 90 medical professionals, are facing charges in global health care fraud schemes totaling $6.5 billion.
Dozens in Florida among hundreds charged in a DOJ crackdown on healthcare fraud
The two-week operation uncovered more than $6.5 billion in false claims submitted to insurers, according to the Department of Justice. Nearly two dozen arrests were made by state authorities.
Two in Hawaii charged in nationwide health care fraud, opioid crackdown
The Department of Justice charged 455 health care professionals nationwide — including two in Hawaiʻi — in alleged fraud and opioid schemes totaling $6.5 billion.
3 people in Oklahoma indicted in nationwide health care fraud probe
Three people in Oklahoma were indicted in a nationwide health care fraud probe involving nearly 500 people, including dozens of doctors.
Capital Region individuals arrested in connection to nationwide healthcare fraud crackdown
Clarksville former doctor charged in nationwide DOJ healthcare fraud crackdown
A Clarksville former doctor is part of a nationwide healthcare fraud crackdown by the federal government.
Massachusetts man among 455 charged in nationwide crackdown on health care fraud
A Massachusetts man is among 455 people charged in a nationwide crackdown on health care fraud, with the Stoughton man allegedly carrying out an over $5 million Medicare fraud scheme.
455 individuals charged with perpetrating healthcare fraud to the collective tune of $6.5B+
The defendants include 90 physicians and other licensed medical professionals.
5 vulnerable incumbents to watch in tonight’s primaries: From the Politics Desk
Plus, the DOJ’s voter fraud struggles and a Elon Musk-related controversy in Michigan.
DOJ announces $6.5B healthcare fraud takedown with record Medicaid enforcement
The Department of Justice unveiled charges against 455 people, including 90 doctors and other licensed medical professionals, for their alleged participation in healthcare schemes that involved mor | Law enforcement unveiled charges against 455 defendants for their alleged participation in healthcare schemes, among which fraudulent amniotic wound allografts and undelivered Medicaid services were spotlighted.
Justice Department and New York swap suits over state's mask ban
State leaders answered by filing a lawsuit to block the Justice Department's efforts.
Trump administration charges 455 people, including doctors, with $6.5 billion in healthcare fraud
In the Trump administration’s latest effort to crack down on fraud, the Justice Department on Tuesday unveiled charges against 455 people for their alleged participation in healthcare fraud and opioid abuse schemes.
FBI adds 2 fugitives to 'Most Wanted Fraudsters' list amid historic $6.5B healthcare takedown: Patel
FBI adds Khalid Ahmed Satary and Emylee Thai to Most Wanted Fraudsters list as historic healthcare fraud crackdown charges 455 suspects for $6.5B.
DOJ unveils charges for $6.5 billion in health fraud schemes
The Department of Justice (DOJ) unveiled on Tuesday charges against more than 450 defendants for alleged health care fraud totaling over $6.5 billion in false claims, as part of the Trump administr…
DOJ charges 455 defendants with healthcare fraud worth $6.5B
The indictments took place over the last two weeks in 45 states and U.S. territories.
DOJ charges 455 defendants with healthcare fraud worth $6.5B
The indictments took place over the last two weeks in 45 states and U.S. territories.
4 charged in separate health care fraud cases in Michigan, AG announces
Four people are facing charges in separate health care fraud cases, the Michigan Attorney General’s Office announced on Tuesday.
Texas doctor charged in $89M fraud case as administration pushes health care crackdown
The Justice Department has charged a Texas doctor in an $89 million health care fraud scheme, accusing him of billing insurers for medically unnecessary cardiovascular screening tests.
455 people charged in alleged $6.5B health care fraud schemes: DOJ
The DOJ announced criminal charges against 455 people accused of participating in health care fraud schemes involving more than $6.5 billion in false claims.
Texas doctor charged in $89M fraud case as administration pushes healthcare crackdown
The Justice Department says it has charged a Texas doctor in an $89 million healthcare fraud scheme, accusing him of billing insurers for medically unnecessary cardiovascular screening tests for college student-athletes and then rubber-stamping the res...
Exclusive | Justice Department Unveils $6.5 Billion Healthcare Fraud Crackdown
Prosecutors are expected to charge around 450 defendants in alleged fraud spanning Medicaid and hospice care.
Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors
Makers of Chrome, Edge, Firefox back bot-fraud defense called Private Access Control Tokens
Federal jury convicts former owner of chiropractic business in Libertyville of defrauding insurance out of $600K
A former owner of a chiropractic business in Libertyville faces prison after a jury convicted him of defrauding an insurance company out of over $600,000 in non-existent services.
AI-powered healthcare fraud has insurers on their toes
Pulling off health insurance fraud used to take time and skill. Until a few years ago, criminals couldn’t fabricate health records without knowing medical terminology and billing codes. If the scheme involved fooling a call center worker, the fraudster would have to pick up the phone and pose as a
L.A. Just Launched a Business Tax Fraud Unit. Its First Arrest? A Famous TV Comedian
The case gives Los Angeles County prosecutors a high-profile opening act for a new unit focused on business tax fraud.
Justice Department sues New York over Medicaid home care ‘fraud scheme’
The Justice Department is suing the New York State Department of Health, the state’s Medicaid director and a company operating a $10 billion home health prog…
Tracy Davenport sentenced to federal prison for defrauding customers of her pool business
Tracy Davenport was sentenced Monday to federal prison after pleading guilty to defrauding more than 50 customers through her pool business.
US Sues New York Health Officials Over Alleged Fraud in Medicaid Homecare Program
By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK, June 16 (Reuters) - The Trump administration sued top New York health officials on Tuesday over an alleged scheme to rig the bidding process for managing the state's estimated $10 billion Medicaid homecare program, harming patients and caregivers as well as ...
There’s one big flaw with the AG’s track record on Hawaii Medicaid fraud
However, $13 million came from a single case that began over a decade ago
Microsoft sued by shareholders over expenses, cloud business, AI
Microsoft has been sued by shareholders who accused the company of defrauding them and inflating its stock price by failing to disclose slowing growth in its Azure cloud business and the need to spend billions of dollars on AI infrastructure.
Microsoft sued by shareholders over expenses, cloud business, AI
Microsoft has been sued by shareholders who accused the company of defrauding them and inflating its stock price by failing to disclose slowing growth in its Azure cloud business and the need to spend billions of dollars on AI infrastructure. The proposed class action led by a Michigan pension fund was filed in Seattle federal court on Friday, after Microsoft shares fell 10% on January 29 in response to its quarterly earnings report a day earlier. About $357 billion of market value was erased, and Microsoft's stock suffered its biggest one-day decline in nearly six years.
Vance’s fraud task force is sweeping up legitimate small businesses
The vice president and other officials have downplayed evidence of collateral damage in their crackdown on fraudulent hospices.
Metro Atlanta business owner pleads guilty to Medicaid Fraud, fake genetic testing services
Now convicted, the business owner will have to pay restitution and serve a 10-year sentence.
U.S. DOJ continues elections investigation, fight to audit California’s voter rolls
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said there is evidence of voter fraud as his office continues its investigation into the state’s election.
As El Niño develops, climate scientists are losing the tools to study it
Post readers on El Niño, ACA enrollment fraud, a rail merger and more.
Blue Earth man accused of $23M fraud scheme defends his business
Prosecutors allege Charles Healey exploited a Medicaid program to buy luxury cars and Rolex watches. But he argues he ran a growing program amid confusing state rules.
Trump prosecutor in L.A. is searching for voter fraud before final count
First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli is waging an unusual campaign to find election fraud in California despite DOJ guidelines saying not to during vote counting.
Xtreme One Entertainment Granted Summary Judgment; Court Orders Williamsburg Venture Holdings to Return 6.6 Million Shares Sold in Alleged Fraudulent Transfer of $XONI Stock
Xtreme One Entertainment, Inc. (OTCQB: XONI) (“Xtreme One”), a diversified media and live-event
From funding to government contracts: Hilton Head free business seminar series launches June 16
Money Talks is a free six-part business seminar series for entrepreneurs, June 16–Aug. 25 on Hilton Head Island. Sessions cover financing, legal, taxes, fraud.
Are GOP California conspiracy theories preparation for November?
Or could Trump’s fraud claims backfire in the midterms?
Ex-Reno business owner indicted for allegedly embezzling $7.8 million from high-speed internet project
“Through multiple fraudulent schemes, the defendant clearly exploited trust to line his pockets,” according to an FBI official.
Fraud detection critical to online health research, study finds
While online research is a useful way to reach people who may not take part in in-person studies, researchers are increasingly concerned that fake, automated, and duplicate survey responses can reduce data quality and compromise findings.
Local business warns others to be wary of check fraud
Local residents and business owners are urged to be vigilant of check fraud, following one recent example which was preempted, thanks to the work of keen bankers. Attorney Caryn Brzykcy, of Harbinson Brzykcy Attorneys At Law in Taylorsville, explained that a $32,000 fraud was attempted against their firm’s checking account recently. “We had no problem…
Sarcone Leads Revival of NDNY Health Care Fraud Task Force
The task force will focus on identifying emerging fraud trends, coordinating investigations among partner agencies, sharing intelligence, and pursuing both criminal and civil enforcement actions against individuals and organizations engaged in fraudulent conduct involving federal and state health care programs.
Business Restructuring Review Vol. 25 No. 3 May-June 2026
In This Issue Texas Bankruptcy Court Adopts Barnet Rule Requiring Foreign Debtor to Have U.S. Assets to Be Eligible for Chapter 15 Relief In In re Siu-Fung Ceramics Holdings Limited, No. 24-33299, 2026 WL 382424 (Bankr. S.D. Tex. Feb. 10, 2026), the court denied petitions for chapter 15 recognition of Hong Kong bankruptcy and liquidation proceedings commenced on behalf of an individual debtor and a group of companies that he owned or controlled. According to the court: (i) the corporate debtors' Hong Kong liquidation proceeding was not eligible for chapter 15 recognition because the attorney retainer upon which such relief was based was not funded until nine months after the chapter 15 petition date; and (ii) the individual debtor's Hong Kong bankruptcy case could not be recognized because the debtor's "center of main interests" on the chapter 15 petition date was not in Hong Kong, and he did not even maintain an "establishment" there. [read more …] Southern District of Texas Clarifies Post-Purdue Course for Consensual Third-Party Releases and Gatekeeping Provisions In In re Container Store Group, Inc., 676 B.R. 356 (S.D. Tex. 2026), appeal filed, No. 26-20166 (5th Cir. Apr. 14, 2026), cross appeal filed, No. 26-20166 (5th Cir. Apr. 24, 2026), the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas addressed consensual third-party releases and gatekeeping provisions in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P., 603 U.S. 204 (2024). Consistent with existing Fifth Circuit precedent, the court confirmed that, in appropriate circumstances, consent for third-party releases may be obtained through a creditor's failure to opt out of granting that consent. But, the court ruled, consent through an opt-out mechanism essentially can never be inferred for creditor classes that stand to receive no recovery under a chapter 11 plan and that are deemed to reject the plan by operation of applicable bankruptcy law. Instead, those classes must affirmatively opt in to any release. The court also narrowed and remanded the bankruptcy court's acceptance of a broad gatekeeping provision, ruling that such provisions must correspond to the restrictions established by Fifth Circuit precedent. [read more …] Delaware Bankruptcy Court: Initial Transferee Need Not Be Defendant in Fraudulent Transfer Avoidance and Recovery Litigation The Bankruptcy Code gives a bankruptcy trustee the power to avoid asset transfers that are either made with the intent to defraud creditors or that are "constructively" fraudulent because an insolvent debtor did not receive adequate value in exchange. The Bankruptcy Code also permits recovery of an avoided transfer from not only the initial recipient, but also from subsequent transferees. Courts disagree over whether a transfer must actually be avoided before the trustee can seek recovery from a subsequent transferee and whether the initial transferee must also be a defendant in the recovery litigation against a subsequent transferee. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware weighed in on this debate in Phillips v. SS Associates LLC (In re ONH AFC CS Investors, LLC), No. 23-10931 (CTG), 2026 WL 312892 (Bankr. D. Del. Feb. 4, 2026). The court adopted the majority view, ruling that the initial transferee need not be a defendant in avoidance and recovery litigation against a subsequent transferee, but that the trustee must establish the elements necessary to avoid the initial transfer as part of the recovery litigation. [read more …] New York Bankruptcy Court Weighs In on Adequate Assurance of Future Performance under Assigned Leases and Chapter 11 Plan Exculpation Provisions In order to assume and assign an executory contract or unexpired lease, a bankruptcy trustee must cure most defaults under the agreement and provide "adequate assurance" of the assignee's future performance. However, the Bankruptcy Code provides no guidance as to the meaning of "adequate assurance" other than with respect to shopping center leases. In In re Broadway Realty I Co. LLC, No. 25-11050, 2026 WL 147505 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Jan. 19, 2026), the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York examined this issue in connection with a proposed assignment of thousands of residential leases as part of a free-and-clear sale of debtors' properties. The court held that "adequate assurance" does not mean a guarantee of the assignee's future performance, but merely demonstration that the assignee has the ability to satisfy the underlying obligations. The bankruptcy court also ruled that an exculpation provision in the debtors' chapter 11 plan exonerating non-estate fiduciaries from liability for actions taken in connection with the chapter 11 case was unobjectionable, provided it was limited in scope to postpetition conduct and actions taken in connection with implementation of the plan after its effective date. [read more …] Newsworthy Corinne Ball (New York) (Hall of Fame), Bruce Bennett (Los Angeles), Carl E. Black (Cleveland), Jeffrey B. Ellman (Atlanta), Brad B. Erens (Chicago), Gregory M. Gordon (Dallas), Heather Lennox (Cleveland/New York), Joshua M. Mester (Los Angeles), and Kevyn D. Orr (Washington) were included in the 2026 edition of Lawdragon 500 Leading Bankruptcy and Restructuring Lawyers. The Daily Business Review selected Isel M. Perez (Miami) as an "On the Rise" winner for the Florida Legal Awards. The Florida Legal Awards annually recognize those who have made significant contributions to the legal industry in Florida. Dan T. Moss (Washington/New York) was inducted as a Fellow in the 37th Class of the American College of Bankruptcy at its Annual Meeting in March 2026 in San Antonio, Texas. Christine Borries (Munich) was ranked in the practice area Restructuring/Insolvency in the 2026 edition of Chambers Germany. The 2027 edition of The Best Lawyers in Singapore™ recognized Sushma Jobanputra (Singapore) in the practice area Insolvency & Reorganization. The restructuring transaction involving Eissmann Automotive North America, Inc. received the "2025 Turnaround of the Year (Large Company)" at the Turnaround Management Association (Detroit) Annual Awards Reception. T. Daniel Reynolds (Cleveland) and Nick Buchta (Cleveland) represented subsidiaries of Eissmann Group Automotive in connection with the parent company's German insolvency proceedings. Roger Dobson (Sydney) is among 40 Jones Day lawyers recognized by The Best Lawyers in Australia 2027 for his contributions in Banking and Finance Law; Distressed Investing & Debt Trading; Insolvency and Reorganization Law; Litigation. An article written by Corinne Ball (New York) titled "Ard Finance—A Global Enterprise Combining an LME With a Foreign Insolvency Proceeding and Chapter 15" was published in the April 21, 2026, edition of the New York Law Journal. An article written by Alex Sapp (New York) titled "Recent Developments in Section 510—Subordination" was published in the 2025 edition of the Norton Annual Survey on Bankruptcy Law. An article written by Brad B. Erens (Chicago) titled "New York Bankruptcy Court Approves Insider DIP Litigation Financing" was published on April 6, 2026, by Lexis Practical Guidance. An article written by Corinne Ball (New York), Dan T. Moss (Washington/New York), David S. Torborg (Washington), and Isel M. Perez (Miami) titled "New York District Court Affirms Narrow Scope of 'Public Policy Exception' in Chapter 15 Cases" was published on April 6, 2026, by Lexis Practical Guidance. An article written by Jeffrey B. Ellman (Atlanta) titled "Statutory Cap on Lease Rejection Damage Claims in Bankruptcy Applies to Solvent Debtors" was published on April 6, 2026, by Lexis Practical Guidance. An article written by Trisha L. Mowbray (Real Estate; Chicago) and Ryan Sims (Washington) titled "Chapter 11 Plan that Abridged Non-Debtor Lessee's Rights to Remain in Possession After Rejection Unconfirmable as Having Been Proposed in Bad Faith" was published on April 6, 2026, by Lexis Practical Guidance. Lawyer Spotlight: Ben Rosenblum Ben Rosenblum, a partner in the New York Office, represents debtors, creditors, and other parties in out-of-court restructurings and court-supervised proceedings, including chapter 11 cases, municipal bankruptcies, international insolvency matters, and stockbroker liquidations. His experience spans industries such as manufacturing, shipping, mining, aviation, energy, real estate, and telecommunications. Ben's notable debtor representations include Peabody Energy, the City of Detroit, Chrysler LLC, Spansion Japan, and Dana Corporation. Significant creditor representations include General Maritime Corporation, Calpine Corporation, American Home Mortgage, and Murray Energy. He currently represents creditors in Puerto Rico's restructuring. He also has extensive experience advising financial institutions on bankruptcy law as applied to derivatives.
Scientists, higher ed alarmed by federal 'power grab' over research funding
The Trump administration has proposed regulations to control billions of dollars in federal research funding, which it says will reduce "fraud and abuse." Scientists in Massachusetts and beyond say they could set back research in the U.S. by decades.
New OMB rule could break science in the United States
The drug that saved your mother. The treatment your doctor recommended. The clinical trial that bought someone you love more time. None of it was inevitable. It required a system built to operate outside politics and sustained over decades, because science doesn’t operate on the timeline of a politician. That system is now under direct threat. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed a new rule to regulate all federal grants, not just science, but housing, education, defense, NASA and everything in between, that would fundamentally change how research is conducted in the United States. There have been a lot of fires in the past 16 months, and if everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. But this is a very big deal. These rules would strip away the independence that has kept science from becoming a political tool. The good news is there’s still something we can all do. How the grant system was designed to work When I was a new faculty member, I was full of millions of ideas, so I sat down and wrote an NIH proposal. I worked on it for months and thought it was so good. Then I sent it to my mentor. It came back covered in comments. Places where my reasoning wasn’t as airtight as I’d thought, methods that could be stronger, gaps in my thinking that I had been too close to the work to see. It stung, as honest feedback always does, but peer review almost always makes the work better. In fact, it’s the backbone of how American science has functioned for generations. At NIH, submitted proposals go to a panel of scientists who have experience in the field. These are the people who can read research methods and spot their weaknesses, who understand when an experiment is designed well and when it isn’t. Applications are scored rigorously, and often only the top 3-20% of proposals receive funding. The people making funding decisions are required to justify them based on these reviews. To be clear: this is not a perfect system, and good science still goes unfunded more often than any of us would like due to limited resources. There is also criticism that peer review may undervalue bold ideas that are risky but could have high payoffs. But the peer review system is nonetheless a meaningful part of the grant selection process. While thoughtful and careful changes could improve the system, the changes being proposed by OMB will not make things better. The rule that could change everything Through this OMB proposal, the system that helps decide what gets funded is being dismantled. There are many troubling elements buried in this proposal, but three provisions stand out in particular. Each would be damaging alone. Together, they would change what kind of science gets done in America, and who it serves. 1. Political appointees would decide which science gets funded, and peer review would be explicitly sidelined or ignored. The guidelines your doctor follows, the standards that determine what’s in your air and water, the drugs that get approved for your family: all of it starts with a funding decision. Right now, that decision is made by scientists who can evaluate whether the work is actually sound and whether it could move the needle forward. Under this proposal, funding decisions could be made by political appointees. The careful, expertise-driven review process that shapes grant funding would be effectively sidelined. That means that a poorly designed study could get funded simply because someone in a political office liked the sound of it, while rigorous, important work doesn’t get funded because it no longer aligns with the administration’s priorities. In other words, critical work that benefits all of us could now be missed just because it has become politically inconvenient. 2. Grants could be canceled at any point, without warning, in the middle of ongoing work. Say your tax dollars have been paying for a cancer study for two years. The grant was awarded for five years, so the team is mid-experiment. There are three additional years’ worth of answers that could change how the disease is treated for hundreds of thousands of people. With this new rule, the federal government could cancel the remaining funding tomorrow, walk away from the commitment it made with your money, and have no legal obligation to finish what it started. This is a huge waste of money. There are rarely other sources of funding for this work, which means the team, the graduate students, postdocs, and research staff who have dedicated years of their careers to this project could lose their jobs. Patients who have contributed their time to studies may not see it turn into useful learnings for others. Every hour of work already completed could result in nothing useful. Science can take decades to get to tangible outcomes. It needs a stable funding system to flourish. 3. Researchers would have a harder time communicating their findings without pre-approval from the federal government. There is a saying from Sir Mark Walport: “Science isn’t finished until it’s communicated.” Science is no use to anyone if it is kept locked away in the labs that produced the data. The proposed rule could make communicating research findings harder in a number of ways: Make it harder for scientists to widely share their findings in scientific journals. Publication costs, including journal fees that allow for broad public access, could not be paid for by federal funds which is often how scientists pay these costs. Restrict researchers from engaging publicly about how their findings should inform policy or public health guidelines. This would restrict scientists from doing the work that transforms years of lab work into decisions that actually affect people’s lives. Make it harder for scientists to attend conferences. Conferences would now need to be approved by the federal agency at the time of grant award. This disadvantages conferences or publications that are not politically aligned. Conferences are a key way in which scientists learn about work happening in their field so they can collaborate and build on each other’s findings. What good is science with a muzzle? The long-term impact These changes could (and hopefully would) be reversed under the next administration. But by then, damage has been done. Once projects are halted or denied funding by political appointees, people leave their science careers for other paths or even leave the country to do their amazing science elsewhere. You cannot pause a scientific study the way you pause a subscription you decided isn’t useful anymore. You cannot freeze a research team that depends on salaries to feed their families, causing a scramble for replacement funding that, in most cases, simply does not exist. When the money stops, everything stops, and all the work in progress and its potential are lost. Despite all of the language about reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, this new proposed rule increases the administrative burden tremendously. Every researcher watching this unfold will make a rational decision: don’t start anything that will take a decade to finish. This includes not building a team around funding that could vanish, or asking the big questions that need patience and stability to answer. The most consequential science, the kind that produces the treatments and the breakthroughs that reach your doctor’s office twenty years from now, is exactly the science that would be abandoned first. This is still a proposal, so we can all do something Some worry this rule is already a done deal. But by law, OMB is required to open a public comment period. Those comments matter because they inform members of Congress, they can be used in litigation, and they create a public record. So here’s what you can do: Submit a public comment. The public comment period on this proposed change is open until July 13. Anyone can submit a comment, and OMB is required to respond to substantial ones. Each comment must be different to count as distinct; identical comments will be counted only once. Comment as an individual, not on behalf of your organization. Here’s a full resource to help you, with useful examples, but in general: Share a story about how science or federal funding has benefitted you or is involved in your work. Are you or someone you loved a cancer survivor? Do you know someone with Alzheimer’s? Have you received NIH/NSF or other federal funding? All of these can be stories you use to highlight why you care. Explain why you’re worried about these proposed changes. You can use the wording found here or in other resources to help you. Ask them to withdraw this proposed rule. Contact your elected representatives. Congress allocates money to federal agencies to spend, and it has oversight of how that process works. You can let your representatives know this proposed change concerns you and ask them to intervene. There are levers they can push that can help at this moment. Let others know why federal funding matters. This isn’t just about science, but ALL federal grants, including for education systems, defense projects, and more. The process, including the importance of federal funding, is invisible to many. We can all make it more visible by sharing how science benefits us and why we value it. You can also share this article, or any of the resources linked here, to help spread awareness! Bottom line We are quickly losing ground in scientific research in the U.S. More changes, like the proposed rule by OMB, would decimate our ability to conduct research here, leaving us all worse off: fewer treatments for pancreatic cancer, less research on pollution impacts, fewer answers for patients with rare disease, and more unaddressed health needs. The impact will be very real for all of us, regardless of where we stand politically. Using our voices for science is more important than ever. Love, LM Big thanks to Dr. Megan Ranney for reading this over and providing brilliant insights, as always. Dr. Liz Marnik, PhD, is Executive Director of The Evidence Collective at YLE and a science communicator and immunologist working at the intersection of public trust, science, and public health. You can find her on Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram and Threads. Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) comprises a team of experts, ranging from physicians to immunologists to epidemiologists to nutritionists, working together with one goal: to “Translate” ever-evolving public health science so that people are well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. The YLE suite of newsletters reaches over 475,000 people across more than 132 countries. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below: Subscribe
Iowa's STOP Fraud Act targets fake business addresses
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate says the "STOP Fraud Act" is a key step in fighting business fraud, though more work is needed to address its root causes.
Homeland Security Task Force secures clinic owner’s conviction for $52M health care fraud, illegal narcotics distribution and kickback scheme
Tony Brown-Arkah, 78, of New York, was the owner of American Medical Centers, a medical clinic in Brooklyn that purported to provide substance abuse treatment.
New Iowa law first step in efforts to combat fraudulent businesses, Iowa secretary of state says
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate said he is working with organizations like the Better Business Bureau to help address fraud in the state.
Why Graham Platner’s margin matters in the Maine: From the Politics Desk
Plus, how California emerged as a target for unfounded election fraud claims.
Why the GOP’s voter fraud theories in California don’t make sense
The last week has brought the largest resurgence of election denialism since the aftermath of the 2020 election. Many on the right have cried foul over late shifts toward Democrats in results from California’s June 2 primary.
Vance demands DOJ probe of Minnesota officials as White House presses 'war on fraud'
Vice President JD Vance is pressing federal prosecutors to investigate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison over allegations they failed to stop widespread social services fraud.
Vance demands Justice Department probe of Minnesota officials as White House presses 'war on fraud'
Vice President JD Vance is pressing federal prosecutors to investigate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and state Attorney General Keith Ellison over allegations they failed to stop widespread social services fraud, amplifying concerns the White House will use a new Justice Department division to target political rivals
Lawsuit targets Chicago broadcasters over ads for financial planner accused of fraud
Three Chicago broadcasters have been accused of fraudulently lending their institutional credibility to a man running what state officials called a “Ponzi-like scheme.”
Vance recommends DOJ criminal investigation into Tim Walz and Minnesota AG over state’s fraud scandal
Vice President JD Vance, who leads the White House anti-fraud task force, has referred allegations of complicity surrounding fraud in Minnesota, including against Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation.
Trump Previews Fall Strategy With Baseless Claims of California Vote Fraud
The president is using the slow count of mail ballots in California to renew his effort to cast doubt on election outcomes he doesn’t like, despite a lack of evidence of any widespread fraud.
We can create the future of science right now
Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.
California, and the dangerous sudden resurgence of GOP voter fraud fever
Even Republicans who previously kept such voter-fraud claims at arm’s length are embracing theories that something is off in California, despite zero evidence.
Trump walks out of interview with NBC while being pressed on election fraud claims
Trump quits NBC interview after pushback to claims
Trump made unfounded assertions of election fraud and incorrectly said he had never promised peace
A dropout-turned-influencer shakes up Chinese science
Fraud is rampant—but his videos mean everyone is now talking about it
Nintendo hit with €35 million fine over Switch Joy-Con drift
Following a French investigation the Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF), Nintendo will be forced to pay €35 million over Switch Joy-Con drift. This all started following a complaint from UFC-Que Choisir in September 2020. The National Investigation Service (SNE) of the DGCCRF determined that Nintendo of Europe had committed a misleading commercial practice from 2018...
2 more people, a business plead guilty to defrauding Tickets for Kids charity, officials say
Based in Blawnox, Tickets for Kids gives kids free access to arts, cultural, educational and athletic experiences.
Christine Hunsicker, CaaStle CEO, Confessed to Fraud. The Board Let Her Stay in Charge.
The final months of the fashion tech start-up CaaStle included fake audits, stock buybacks and a damage control strategy led by the chief executive who defrauded it.
Why California is taking so long to count votes in key primary races
The state is an outlier in taking days to count most votes, but supporters of the system say it is designed to enfranchise more people while protecting against fraud.
Nevada proposes pausing licensing for new hospice and home-health providers while it probes possible fraud
Nevada is proposing a months-long moratorium on new licenses for hospice and home-health providers as well as a pause of new enrollments into the state’s Medicaid program while the authoritie...
Business owner fined: Collier, Naples and Marco Island projects impacted
Naples business owner has agreed to pay a $100,000 fine for using a retired architect's seal on building plans.
Ohio Medicaid Program Suspends 49 Home Health Providers Amid National Fraud Crackdown
As federal officials intensify scrutiny of Medicaid-funded home-based care, Ohio has become the latest state to take aggressive enforcement action against
Readers Write: Immigration, fraud, science funding, ‘Nuclear Family Month,’ the GOP, Target
This is home. We’re staying put.
Citing fraud worries, Nevada pauses hospice and home health licensing, Medicaid enrollment
Nevada is putting a pause on licensing for hospice and home-health providers and new Nevada Medicaid enrollments, citing worries about fraud.
Trump’s Fraud Claims in California Could Undermine Confidence in November Result
The president is claiming without evidence that the lengthy counting process in California, which could help determine control of Congress, means Democrats are stealing the election.
Eastern Kentucky addiction, behavior health center owner indicted on federal charges in fraud scheme
Timmy G. Robinson Jr. faces one count of wire fraud and two counts of money laundering in a scheme to allegedly defraud two potential buyers of a multi-million dollar Employee Retention Credit offered to certain employers by the Internal Revenue Service, who paid workers qualified wages during and were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eastern Kentucky addiction, behavior health center owner indicted on federal charges in fraud scheme
Timmy G. Robinson Jr. faces one count of wire fraud and two counts of money laundering in a scheme to allegedly defraud two potential buyers of a multi-million dollar Employee Retention Credit offered to certain employers by the Internal Revenue Service, who paid workers qualified wages during and were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Feds charge Ohio fraudsters with stealing $30M meant for behavioral health program to buy luxury cars
How small businesses are reading the economy right now
Tariffs, fraud, and cautious optimism.