Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday that he will be working with the Justice and Treasury Departments on the "war on fraud," which President Donald Trump announced during his State of the Union address Tuesday night. 

Trump said he is appointing Vance to lead his administration's nationwide response to public welfare fraud, highlighting recent high-profile revelations of large-scale public fraud linked to the Somali expat community in Minneapolis.

The president did not specify what the scope of Vance's authority or purview was, but the vice president told Fox News' America’s Newsroom that it was a joint operation with the Treasury and Justice Departments.

“The Department of Justice is going to be investigating and, where possible, throwing fraudsters in prison," Vance said. "It’s also going to mean that [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent and some of our friends at the Treasury Department, [are] going to be looking at income tax records.

"We’re going to be trying to understand how it is that the American people have been defrauded, how it is that people have used resources and programs that should go to American citizens, instead have been going to fraudulent uses,” he added.

Vance vowed that his team will work “very aggressively” to combat fraud this year and questioned how many illegal migrants benefited from the fraud in American social programs.

“The story of the American economy in so many ways during the Biden administration … is that the American citizen was ripped off for people who shouldn’t be here and by politicians who should have known better,” he said. “The president has asked me to take a full, whole government approach to trying to understand that.”

Minnesota Democratic Gov. Tim Walz has acknowledged the widespread fraud in his state but said he is working hard to crack down on it.