Salutations, Gunny, from a couple of mountain ranges east of the WV line.
As a fraud lawyer of sorts, I couldn't help but be intrigued that you've been more or less talking to yourself about this topic for the last few months.
A few observations ...
1. It does make some directional sense to be consolidating this sort of enforcement within DOJ. The historic dynamic there was that the Main Justice lawyers were the type who confused the mere exercise of leverage with great lawyering, and of course they tended to try to leverage people they didn't like, since the main justice guys were Ivy league types while the line prosecutors in the UsAOs were more rough-and-tumble. Consolidation may help a bit in terms of improving coherence on what is "fraud" across divergent programs.
2. There is little doubt in my mind that many programs are massively fraudulent -- Covid relief, PPP, and Medicaid/Medicare to name a few. I recently had a Medicaid matter with a manufacturer where the NY G was billing them for rebates for pharmacy claims, and when we dug into it, the claims were coming from Brooklyn storefronts that did not even have records of purchasing the products. But the NY G wanted its money from the manufacturer more than pursuing the bogus pharmacy claims.
3. That raises a double edged sword. It is absolutely the case that the DOJ is very interested in blue state fraud, and not so much in red state fraud, in practice. The reality of course is that fraud is an equal opportunity practice across the political spectrum.
4. The new "bounty" program announced yesterday could actually work to the disadvantage of people trying to recover under the false claims act whistleblower provisions, which offer even bigger bounties, since they will have made a public disclosure of the underlying fraud. And, of course, their (likely) disaggregation of fraud reports in the hope of getting more bounties may itself be fraudulent.
5. Finally one important side note. Just as the DOJ is ramping up certain enforcement, they've also issued directives to the effect that the department should be more aggressive in actively dismissing (as opposed to simply not intervening in ) certain whistleblower cases under the fca.