Democratic AGs' deputies turned away from Vance's White House anti-fraud roundtable

On Tuesday, May 26, 2026, Vice President JD Vance convened a roundtable on government-program fraud in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus, gathering Republican state attorneys general to discuss what the administration describes as a sweeping effort to root out benefits fraud. Vance, who chairs the White House taskforce on the issue, told the assembled officials that combating fraud "should not be — a partisan effort" before the press was ushered out for the working portion of the meeting.

Two dozen Democratic attorneys general had declined to attend, writing to Vance earlier that day that the invitation arrived with "less than one business day's notice with no agenda" and did not match "the spirit of collaboration that has long defined our joint efforts with federal partners." Several of those offices instead dispatched senior deputies to Washington. At a press conference led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and joined by New York's Letitia James, New Jersey's Jennifer Davenport, Hawaii's Anne Lopez, and Wisconsin's Josh Kaul, the Democratic officials said their representatives — including those from New York, California, New Jersey, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Nevada — were denied entry at the door, in some cases after RSVPing days earlier. James said the offered reasons "conflicted" and apparently turned in part on the officials' titles.

The exclusion drew a partisan-access objection from officials who are the principal civil-enforcement officers for fraud in their states. Vance asserted on camera that representatives from Connecticut and Oregon were in attendance, and reporting confirmed that Oregon AG staff did participate; an individual familiar with the event said exceptions to the AG-only invitation were made for chiefs of staff or deputy attorneys general while lower-ranking staff of both parties were excluded under guidelines set in advance. The Democratic attorneys general characterized the late, agenda-less invitation and the turning-away of their senior fraud experts as conditioning access to a nominally bipartisan federal effort on political alignment with the convening administration.