Trump Announces Program To Pay Whistleblowers For Finding Fraud, Starting With Nick Shirley

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced the federal government will compensate whistleblowers who report people defrauding the U.S. government and taxpayers. 

Now, a Trump supporter is going to look at this move and say, “There goes my president; he’s going to get those fraudsters out of this country!” But those of us who know things and are capable of pattern recognition will see this for exactly what it is: the president is soliciting fraud claims because he just can’t seem to find much of the fraud he claims is rampant and widespread on his own.

“If you turn somebody in and you, let’s say, report, and you find $1 billion, we are giving a commission to that person of 1%. It’s a lot of money,” Trump said in the Oval Office.

As usual, Trump is taking a snake oil salesman approach to explaining his program, leaving out all of the if, ands and buts, while promising to make it rain on people’s bank accounts.

From CBS News:

Through the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program, Mr. Trump said whistleblowers, who can be ordinary citizens, will be eligible to receive 1% of the amount of fraud they report, even if the reported fraud is $100 billion. America.gov/fraud, however, says successful whistleblowers will be paid up to $30,000, dependent upon the report resulting in criminal charges. Asked by CBS News for clarification, Mr. Trump said there is no limit to whistleblower compensation, and criminal charges aren’t necessary. 

So, predictably, Trump says one thing while his website says something else. Of course, according to the president, it doesn’t matter who said what, because he’s the only one deciding who gets paid.

“I will be the arbitrator of all of these decisions,” he said. “In other words, I’ll determine whether or not the person is deserving and I’ll determine — and I will be very generous, believe me.”

“You’ll get your money immediately, but I’ll make the determination,” he continued. “So if two people are fighting over it, maybe they’ll split it or maybe whatever, but I’ll make that determination.”

This man is about to livestream fraud-whistleblower cage matches and treat the so-called compensation as prize money; I just know it.

Now, to be fair, Trump may have been telling the truth when he says criminal charges aren’t required for a whistleblower to get paid. The problem is that the evidence he might be telling the truth in that instance also shows the whole fraud-finding compensation program is a fraud in itself: the first person to benefit from the program is Nick Shirley.

For those unfamiliar with Shirley—who was presented with a $10,000 check for his efforts in, well, pretending to find fraud—I’ve written about him, his big, fat MAGA grift, and all the reasons he’s a stupid person’s idea of a journalist.

From our previous report:

Remember when President Donald Trump and his administration of fellow xenophobic bigots capitalized on the massive fraud scandal in Minnesota, taking their cues from right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley, who brought national MAGA attention to the scandal by filming himself trying to infiltrate Somali-run daycare centers in the state last year? Remember how Trump got his supporters all riled up by using the scandal, which involved dozens of Somali migrants, as an excuse to escalate his immigration crackdown in Minnesota, withhold federal funding from the state, and disparage the entire Somali ethnicity numerous times, including during his State of the Union address, where he generalized them as “Somali pirates,” who are “plundering America” with zero citation?

Well, the whole thing was much ado about MAGA nonsense for at least two reasons. First, Trump and Shirley were fooling racist idiots into believing the Minnesota fraud scandal was a recent thing in 2025, when, actually, it had already been thoroughly investigated since 2021, resulting in the convictions of more than 60 suspects by 2022. Secondly, while most of the people convicted were Somali, the person named by the government as the mastermind behind the fraud scheme was Aimee Bock, a white woman and U.S. citizen. Well, on Thursday (May 21), roughly a year after the Feeding Our Future founder was convicted of wire fraud and bribery, Bock was sentenced to 500 months—or just over 41 years—in prison and ordered to pay $243 million to the federal government.

Shirley has traveled the country running the same grift: he harasses workers, immigrants and community businesses, conjuring conspiracy theories that only really expose the fact that he doesn’t understand how anything works. None of his “journalism” and so-called fraud exposure has even come anywhere near the vicinity of resulting in criminal charges for anyone, because his reporting is never fact-based or evidence-based; it’s always heavily reliant on absurd speculation in lieu of facts or evidence.

But this has been Trump’s MO for as long as he’s been in office. Whether we’re talking about elections, federal employees or welfare benefits, Trump and his administration have made a habit of claiming there’s widespread fraud, putting together departments and task forces to find said fraud, and then continuing to lie about the non-existent fraud after said task forces are unable to find anything.

For example, Trump put Elon Musk and a bunch of barely-out-of-school dude-bros with no experience in fraud or government in charge of finding fraud in the government, but DOGE got dismantled after it became clear that it was a useless department that had to massively inflate its numbers to cover up the fact that it was finding next to nothing, and firing people the government needed to run based on those inflated numbers.

And, again, if the fraud was so rampant, he wouldn’t need to solicit civilians to find it. Of course, this is the same administration that had its Equal Employment Opportunity Commission put out a video advertisement, soliciting white men to come forward with their reverse-racism claims in order to back the erroneous MAGA fiction that white men are the ones who are truly victims of systemic racism.

And, of course, if we really want to keep everything a buck, if Trump was really interested in finding fraud, he should check his own pardon list as well as his own profiteering presidency.

“If the president is truly interested in rooting out wrongdoing, Whistleblower Aid invites him to start by examining the violations perpetrated by his own administration, including senior officials,” Naomi Seligman, president of nonprofit Whistleblower Aid, told CBS. “We would happily work with him on this vital accountability effort to help save our democracy.”

However, as far as Seligman is concerned, Trump “is more interested in hunting down whistleblowers” than enriching them in exchange for fraud claims that may or may not result in criminal prosecutions.

Either way, this whole whistleblowing-for-cash program is clearly just more political theater aimed at legitimizing propaganda by pinning an official government policy to it.

We can be snarky and ask this president, “Is the fraud in the room with us?” but, truthfully, if he’s in the room, then it’s there, staring right at us, lying through its teeth.

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