House Republicans have announced they are creating a new oversight task force to launch an investigation into alleged social services fraud happening in Ohio. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) has chosen Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), a member of the oversight panel, to take charge of the Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses, according to new reports from Fox News.
Comer and Gill sent out a letter addressed to the Ohio Department of Medicaid Director Scott Partika on May 12, 2026, requesting documents related to a report released by the Daily Wire that looked into widespread fraud in the state’s Medicaid waiver program for home health and community-based services. The investigative report detailed 288 home health companies located in Columbus, Ohio that all shared the same addresses.
Dozens of these companies were housed in office buildings that looked to be vacant or were in various stages of disrepair. The businesses had billed the federal government for over $250 million in Medicaid spending between 2018 and 2024, though the author of the report stated that it was difficult to confirm if the companies billed Medicaid properly or even provided any services.
According to a report from Fox News, Gill delivered a statement saying, “Americans deserve truth, transparency, and justice. They are sick of being defrauded by government institutions and programs that should have been putting them first, not robbing their tax dollars.” Comer also released a statement concerning the task force and the investigation.
“Under his leadership, we will continue to expose radical ideologies being pushed on Americans and fight to safeguard our freedom that we’ve enjoyed as a nation for 250 years,” Comer went on to say in the statement, going on to add that Gill, a freshman lawmaker, had become a critical component of the Oversight Committee.
The task force will be given a broad purview, which will include launching probes into institutions that have diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, individuals that abuse immigration and social welfare programs, and efforts by foreign actors and dark money groups to censor free speech. The creation of the task force comes as House Oversight Republicans are currently investigation social services fraud in both California and Minnesota.
“The current Medicaid system either does not have sufficient internal controls to prevent and detect fraud or is not conducting proper oversight of these HCBS [Home and Community-Based Services] providers,” Comer and Gill stated in the letter. “As a result, Americans across the country are paying for this fraud while vulnerable patients are being exploited.”
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The task force has been authorized for a period of six months. Gill is then expected to hold hearings related to the findings of its investigations. Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has promised to put the state’s Medicaid program under heavy scrutiny should he become the Buckeye State’s next governor.
“We’re going to have to take a deep, hard look at the way the $40-plus billion in state Medicaid dollars are being spent,” Ramaswamy said during an interview with “Saturday in America” host Kayleigh McEnany. “I think the right answer is any instance of waste, fraud, abuse … deserve[s] to be prosecuted, and we intend to investigate them aggressively, as well as to prosecute aggressively, to send a deterrent signal that our government is not a piggy bank. The taxpayer is not a piggy bank to be bilked.”