The Trump administration has added a new fraud-reporting tool to the federal government’s official chatbot.
America.gov launched in September as a centralized online hub for official government information. Created by the National Design Studio, it’s meant to streamline communication for the AI age. The site’s home page has a prompt box that answers questions based on a model trained on government websites and sources. Now, the site’s newest user interface update shows how America.gov is mirroring the administration’s messaging.
Designers added a pill button below the prompt box on America.gov to “Report government fraud” late last month. Click through, and users are taken to a page with two options: to either report benefits fraud for Medicaid, Medicare, unemployment, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, (formerly known as food stamps), or to report voter fraud. The “About” pages for the reporting processes say reports are encrypted and your name is optional, but it offers the possibility of cash rewards for those who include contact information.
America.gov’s new prompt functionality comes amid Trump’s growing focus on fraud, and following the launch of fraud.gov in August, a site that uses inflated figures to claim the Trump administration has uncovered hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud in his second term. (The New York Times found the administration’s figures included temporary funding pauses, cases that predated his second term, and claims that hadn’t been verified.) Trump wrote on his social network Thursday that he was directing Vice President JD Vance to “focus his complete and total attention” on crime and corruption in cities and states controlled by Democrats.
The Trump administration’s approach to fighting fraud targets high volume, low-dollar cases in states that didn’t vote for him or his party. That high volume could make for quick, easy wins that the administration may point to as proof it’s successfully fighting fraud and to build a narrative of poorly run Democrat-led states.
At the same time, it comes as many wealthy and well-connected fraudsters have gotten off the hook in Trump’s second term thanks to his pardons and his administration’s crime-fighting priorities.
Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is bringing fewer white-collar cases forward than his predecessors, according to a review by Justice Connection, a group of former DOJ employees. Meanwhile, Trump’s presidential pardons have cost American taxpayers and crime victims about $1.3 billion in restitution and payments, according to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. House Democrats say they will investigate Trump’s so-called “pardon economy” and possible conflicts of interest when the next Congress begins in 2027.
America.gov’s “Report government fraud” button puts Trump’s fraud-fighting strategy front and center on the government’s chatbot. It was added ahead of other planned updates, like a future integration with Login.gov, a single sign-on service, that the National Design Studio considers part of its phase two for the chatbot.
Early America.gov users found that America.gov correctly answered questions about things like climate change and the 2020 election results, undercutting Trump’s false claims on those topics and passing an early test of the chatbot’s ability to be accurate and neutral. The new button shows, however, that the administration is more than happy to use suggested prompts and user journeys to promote Trump’s priorities and messaging.
