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On July 2, 2025, the federal government announced the formation of a new False Claims Act (FCA) enforcement task force aimed at the pharmaceutical, medical device, and health care industries. Attorneys from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) will begin working together immediately to identify enforcement priorities, including whether DOJ should intervene in existing whistleblower (qui tam) suits brought by private parties and whether HHS should suspend payments to providers based on credible allegations of fraud.

The task force will meet monthly and be led by Brenna Jenny, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of commercial litigation for the United States, as well as the acting general counsel of HHS and the acting chief counsel to the HHS Inspector General.[1] Ms. Jenny played a similar role in the first Trump Administration. It remains to be seen whether the task force she leads will hew to the principles she described in a 2021 interview, after her first stint in the role: “There was a desire to make sure that resources were being focused on the bad actors . . . . And then to also make sure that if a qui tam is filed, and it raises a theory of liability that misinterprets an HHS regulation and shouldn’t be going forward, that it could perhaps be flagged more efficiently so that DOJ doesn’t expend resources chasing down a rabbit hole after something that is not going to lead to a viable case.”[2]

The task force will target pharmaceutical, medical device, and health care industries. More specifically, Ms. Jenny described its priorities as the Medicare Advantage (Medicare Part C) program, drug pricing, kickbacks, violations of network adequacy requirements serving as barriers to patient care, defective medical devices, and manipulations of electronic medical records systems leading to inappropriate utilization of Medicare products and services.[3]

This newest announcement of expanded FCA activities by the federal government comes on the heels of similar federal government initiatives in other areas. In mid-May, the Deputy Attorney General issued a memo launching the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative, which directed DOJ’s Civil Fraud Section and Civil Rights Division to work together—in conjunction with the Criminal Division, the Department of Education, HHS, and other federal state entities—to analyze uses of the FCA against use colleges and universities (and other federal grant recipients) that the government believes has falsely certified compliance with federal civil rights laws but that violates those laws by encouraging antisemitism, allowing individuals to use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify, or engaging in certain DEI practices; in that same memo, the Deputy Attorney General also encouraged private whistleblowers (qui tam relators) to file such suits on their own. The government likewise appears to have ramped up the use of FCA actions in connection with alleged customs violations.

Taken together, these steps show a federal government with a rapidly growing appetite to bring homegrown FCA investigations and encourage whistleblowers to file FCA suits against companies and non-profit entities in a wide variety of industries, from health care and finance to education and manufacturing. Companies and non-profit entities receiving federal grants and contracts—or those that have received federal grants and contracts during the FCA limitations period, which can be as long as ten years—should review their policies and procedures governing the application for and receipt of grants and contracts, as well as their ongoing compliance with relevant federal laws, including civil rights laws.

[1]Press Release, DOJ-HHS False Claims Act Working Group (July 2, 2025), https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-doj-false-claims-act-working-group.html.

[2] Jeff Overley, One of Trump Admin.’s Top Health Attys Talks Enforcement, Law360 (Feb 8, 2021), https://www.law360.com/articles/1352025.

[3] Id.; see also supra note 1.