House Oversight to examine Medicare fraud, Smithsonian, DEI policies

By Morgan Sweeney
The Center Square

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is set to host three hearings on issues that have been ongoing priorities for the Trump administration.

Medicare fraud

At 2 p.m. Tuesday , the Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services will hold a roundtable on Medicare fraud involving skin-substitute spending.

GOP-led congressional committees have held numerous hearings on fraud during the second Trump administration, especially since the roughly $9 billion of fraud, waste and abuse in Minnesota Medicaid and other government assistance programs came to light.

The administration has created several task forces on fraud, including the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which President Donald Trump commissioned in March via executive order as an inter-departmental team leading a government-wide approach to combat fraud in federal benefits programs. The Treasury Department announced earlier this year that the IRS was planning to launch a task force focusing on fraud in 501-c3s.

In September 2025, the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General issued a report titled “Medicare Part B Payment Trends for Skin Substitutes Raise Major Concerns About Fraud, Waste, and Abuse.”

“Part B expenditures for skin substitutes provided in non-institutional settings have skyrocketed over the last 2 years, surpassing $10 billion annually by the end of 2024,” the report reads.

In the third quarter of 2024, Part B spending on skin substitutes reached $2.88 billion.

Skin substitutes are a type of wound care product covered by Medicare Part B and reimbursed in some cases at 106% of the average sales price. The inspector general also released a 2023 report identifying gaps in manufacturers’ compliance with reporting requirements for skin substitutes, and spending has only continued to climb since then.

Smithsonian presentations of history

Earlier on Tuesday, the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency will hold a hearing on

The “Smithsonian’s efforts to reshape the past” through “rewriting American history.”

Early in Trump’s second term, he issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” in which he directed Vice President JD Vance, a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, “to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.”

It also directed the administration to work with Congress to ensure that Smithsonian appropriations no longer went toward “exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values.”

The hearing follows a report the White House Domestic Policy Council released on July 4 that focused on “extensive left-wing biases” within the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

DEI in the legal profession

The committee’s final hearing of the week will focus on “The Future of DEI in Law School Accreditation and the Legal Profession.”

Within the first 100 days of his second term, Trump issued multiple executive orders attempting to root out diversity, equity and inclusion policies within the federal government and challenge them in the private sector.

One of those orders was called “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education.” It targeted DEI policies and practices in the most prominent medical and law school accreditors.

“A group of higher education accreditors are the gatekeepers that decide which colleges and universities American students can spend the more than $100 billion in Federal student loans and Pell Grants dispersed each year,” the order read.

It said that ideology had interfered with accreditors’ primary task of identifying excellent schools worthy of accreditation and directed the Education Department to withhold accreditation recognitions from accrediting bodies who “engage in unlawful discrimination… under the guise of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ initiatives.’”

The committee’s Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses will gather Wednesday to explore ways Congress can play a role in ridding American institutions of DEI policies.