DOGE open-sourced the largest Medicaid dataset in history. Within hours, one analyst found $90 billion in likely fraud from just 0.16% of providers. The open-source ethos meets government accountability.
Sup, freaks.
Yesterday's CPI print at 2.4% got all the attention, but I want to talk about something more important that happened while everyone was staring at inflation charts.
The HHS DOGE team did something the federal government has never done — they open-sourced the largest Medicaid dataset in department history. Provider-level claims data from 2018 through 2024, organized by billing code, available for free download at opendata.hhs.gov.
Within hours, the internet went to work. One data analyst scanning just 0.16% of the providers in the dataset found roughly $90 billion in likely fraudulent payments. New York state appears to be the worst offender. Let that sink in — $90 billion from a fraction of a percent of the data.
Medicaid covers over 90 million Americans and costs taxpayers north of $800 billion a year. For decades, fraud detection has been left to inspector general reports and congressional hearings that move at glacial speed. Meanwhile, providers have exploited complex billing codes — particularly high-reimbursement categories like autism spectrum disorder therapies — to extract millions in payments for services that were either never delivered or wildly exaggerated. The Minnesota autism diagnosis fraud scheme, which the DOGE team explicitly referenced, is a case study: a network of providers systematically billing for fabricated therapies, laundering the money through shell companies, and sending it overseas.
What makes this release powerful is the approach. Rather than relying on a small team of government auditors to catch needle-in-a-haystack anomalies, they're crowdsourcing fraud detection to millions of people with laptops and basic data skills. A provider billing an anomalous number of autism evaluations relative to peers in the same geography stands out immediately. Modern data analytics tools can identify these patterns in minutes — something the traditional auditing infrastructure has failed to do for decades.
This is the open-source ethos applied to government accountability. Sunlight as a disinfectant at scale. And the early results suggest the fraud is not a rounding error — it may be one of the largest ongoing thefts of public money in American history.
The implications for the broader fiscal picture are staggering. If $90 billion in likely fraud comes from 0.16% of providers, what does the full picture look like? This is happening across a program that already consumes a massive chunk of the federal budget, in a fiscal environment where deficits are running over $1.8 trillion a year and the national debt just crossed $36 trillion.
The people who have been screaming about government waste weren't exaggerating. If anything, they were understating the problem. And this is exactly why bitcoin matters — a monetary system that can't be debased to paper over fraud, waste, and incompetence at this scale. Sound money forces accountability because there's no printing press to hide behind.
CPI came in at 2.4% year-over-year, beating the 2.5% consensus. Energy prices dropped 1.5% month-over-month. Bitcoin responded with a ~6% spike off the lows, reclaiming the $69K handle. Traders are front-running rate cuts again, pricing in a potential March move. Whether the Fed delivers is another story — core CPI is still sticky, and they've been burned before by declaring victory too early.
My read: they'll talk tough for another meeting or two, but the path of least resistance is lower rates by summer. Bitcoin benefits either way — either they cut and liquidity flows, or they don't cut and the economy weakens enough that they're forced to cut harder later. The destination is the same.
Coinbase dropped a rough Q4 — $667 million net loss driven by a $718 million unrealized decline in their investment portfolio. Another reminder that the exchange model is brutally cyclical. Another argument for owning the asset, not the casino.
Cake Wallet — Lightning integration delayed to the week of Feb 23rd. They shipped v5.9.0 but the Lightning feature is getting final polish. Cake is one of the best non-custodial wallets out there, and Lightning support makes it a daily driver. Keep an eye on that release.
X Money — Elon confirmed during an xAI "All Hands" that X Money is in internal beta testing among X employees. External beta expected in 1-2 months. The platform plans to support crypto and stock trading for X's 1 billion+ users. If X ships native bitcoin buying for a billion people, it's the largest distribution event in bitcoin's history. The question is whether it'll be real bitcoin or paper bitcoin.
The DOJ handed down a 20-year sentence to the CEO of PGI Global over a $200 million Bitcoin Ponzi scheme. The pattern is clear: if you're running a Ponzi and denominating it in bitcoin, the DOJ is coming for you. Good. The space needs this.
Brian Armstrong went on Fox News alleging major banks are "working behind the scenes to push back against the President's pro-crypto agenda." Take it with a grain of salt — Coinbase has incentive to play the underdog. But the claim isn't implausible. Banks have spent decades building a regulatory moat, and bitcoin threatens to drain it.
Fees are on the floor. If you've been waiting to consolidate UTXOs or open Lightning channels — this is your window. Sub-2 sat/vB is a gift. Use it.
That's all for today, freaks. Stack sats. Hold your keys. And keep your eyes on that Medicaid dataset — what the crowd finds in the coming weeks might be the most damning indictment of government spending in modern history.
TFTC 🫡
Bitcoin Brief is a daily email from TFTC. Forward this to a friend who needs to hear it.
