Brown joins Democratic bloc declining fraud roundtable — days after Vance held Maryland up as a model for bipartisan cooperation
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Two weeks ago, Vice President JD Vance stood at a White House podium and held Maryland up as proof that fighting Medicaid fraud doesn’t have to be a partisan exercise.
“This does not have to be a red state or a blue state issue,” Vance said at a May 13 press conference. “This is just basic good government.” He praised Ohio — led by a Republican governor — and Maryland, led by a Democrat, as examples of states cooperating with the administration’s fraud crackdown. It was a deliberate signal: Vance was trying to make the case that his Task Force to Eliminate Fraud had cross-aisle credibility.
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown answered that goodwill today by signing a letter refusing to attend a White House roundtable on the same initiative.
Brown was among 24 Democratic attorneys general who signed the letter, alongside Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, New York’s Letitia James, Maine’s Aaron Frey, and North Carolina’s Jeff Jackson, among others. Their stated rationale: “While we would appreciate the opportunity to engage in serious discussions, the invitation was provided with less than one business day’s notice with no agenda. This short notice does not match the spirit of collaboration that has long defined our joint efforts with federal partners.”
The short-notice argument has surface legitimacy — Democratic AGs received their invitations on Friday, while Republican attorneys general were reportedly invited earlier in the month. The disparity in notice is real.
But it doesn’t fully explain Brown’s position. Maryland’s office had already established a working relationship with the task force — one Vance publicly acknowledged by name. Brown didn’t need a last-minute invitation to engage with an initiative his office was already credited for cooperating on. He could have reached out proactively, requested a separate meeting, or sent a representative. Instead, he added his name to a collective letter of refusal coordinated through the Democratic Attorneys General Association — the same organization that endorsed him in 2022 and whose institutional alignment now appears to take precedence over the bipartisan credibility Vance handed him.
The geography compounds the optics. Brown’s office is in Baltimore. The roundtable was held at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington — a 40-minute drive. The distance excuse that might shield attorneys general from Hawaii or California doesn’t apply here.
The Democratic AGs’ letter also argued that recent cuts at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services could interfere with their ability to combat Medicaid fraud — a position that may play well with the Democratic base, but sits uneasily alongside Brown’s office’s prior record of cooperation that Vance cited as a national model.
Vance’s task force has claimed it uncovered billions of dollars in fraud across hospice systems, Medicaid, Medicare, and immigration-related programs since its March launch. Maryland taxpayers fund Medicaid. Maryland taxpayers are among those whose money is at stake. The attorney general was invited to a meeting about it, declined to attend, and offered a procedural complaint as his explanation.
Brown’s office did not respond to a request for comment from MDBayNews prior to publication.
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