Barack Obama loved to give taxpayer money away.
He created one disaster that still haunts the country.
And an Obama phone scam put California in this war with Trump.
The FCC just caught California funding 95,000 phones for dead people
The Federal Communications Commission dropped an audit that should make every taxpayer's blood boil.
Phone companies pocketed nearly $5 million from the federal government to provide service to 116,000 dead people over the past five years.
California accounted for 95,000 of them.
At least 16,774 corpses were enrolled in the program after they died.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr minced no words about what investigators discovered.
"It should go without saying that only beneficiaries that are both living and here legally should qualify for benefits under this program," Carr stated.
The program — nicknamed "Obama phones" after a viral video showed a woman thanking the president — has been a fraud factory since Obama expanded it in 2012.
Remember that infamous YouTube clip from the 2012 campaign?
"Everybody in Cleveland low minority got an Obamaphone," the woman declared while explaining why she'd vote for Obama.
Turns out she wasn't wrong about the giveaway part.
A 2017 Government Accountability Office investigation couldn't verify eligibility for 36% of recipients.
Undercover GAO investigators submitted 19 fake applications and got approved 12 times — a 63% success rate for fraud.
The scam worked because Obama's FCC let phone companies verify eligibility themselves instead of checking government databases.
Phone companies had every incentive to sign up as many bodies as possible since they collected federal subsidies for each subscriber.
TracFone signed up more than 175,000 ineligible customers between 2012 and 2015.
The company's CEO's wife was a mega-fundraiser for Obama.
TracFone finally paid $13.4 million to settle fraud charges in 2022 — a slap on the wrist for bilking taxpayers.
California could have stopped this by using federal verification but opted out of requirements that would have caught the fraud.
Gavin Newsom doubled down by opening the program to illegal immigrants
Governor Gavin Newsom made the fraud worse last November when he signed a bill eliminating Social Security number requirements for California applicants.
The law was designed specifically to make it easier for illegal immigrants to receive free phones.
It also blocked federal immigration enforcement from accessing information about who's enrolled in California's program.
Translation: California wanted to hide illegal immigrants receiving federal benefits from Trump's deportation teams.
FCC Chairman Carr shut down California's verification scam.
"California is all for sending your taxpayers dollars to people here illegally," Carr said.
Trump's FCC is now forcing California residents to apply through the federal system and provide a Social Security number like everyone else.
Newsom's press team had a meltdown.
"We take program integrity seriously. But it's misleading — and political — to single out California," his team whined.
The audit numbers tell you everything you need to know about California's "program integrity."
Texas had 20,000 dead subscribers.
Oregon had 2,200.
California had 95,000 — nearly five times Texas and Oregon combined.
Only three states opted out of federal verification: California, Texas, and Oregon.
California accounted for more fraud than the other two states put together times four.
The audit also caught more than 270,000 instances where someone enrolled in multiple states using identical names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers.
In September 2025 alone, more than 11,000 dead people were enrolled in the program in the three opt-out states.
That's $100,000 per month going to corpses.
California sweetened the pot by adding an extra $16.50 in state funds on top of the federal $9.25 monthly subsidy.
Recipients got unlimited talk and text plus monthly data allowances — all funded by fees tacked onto every American's phone bill.
Newsom's sanctuary state policies turned Obama's mess into a nightmare
This is the same Gavin Newsom who spent the past decade expanding benefits to illegal immigrants while California citizens struggled.
California gave illegal aliens driver's licenses, college scholarships, low-income tax credits, and direct cash payments during the pandemic.
By 2024, the state expanded Medi-Cal to cover every illegal alien who met income requirements — billions in taxpayer-funded healthcare for people who broke federal law to get here.
Citizens struggled with medical bills while Newsom called universal healthcare a "moral imperative."
Then California's budget imploded and Newsom suddenly proposed cutting benefits for illegal aliens — but still fought Trump's reforms on Obama phones.
The FCC will vote February 18 on rules restricting the benefit to U.S. citizens and qualified legal immigrants.
The changes include enhanced verification procedures and banning any state from opting out.
Carr is implementing exactly the kind of reforms Trump campaigned on.
The DOGE initiative already saved taxpayers billions by exposing ridiculous spending like $2 million to Guatemala for sex changes.
Now Trump's FCC is exposing how California turned a Reagan-era program for low-income landline service into a billion-dollar smartphone giveaway for dead people and illegal aliens.
Obama expanded the program in 2012 and enrollment exploded from 7 million to 17.6 million subscribers.
The budget doubled from $1 billion to $2.2 billion.
After basic anti-fraud measures were finally implemented, the program shrank by a third and monthly payments dropped $40 million.
That tells you everything about how much fraud Obama's expansion enabled.
California fought every reform and made fraud easier by eliminating verification requirements and protecting illegal immigrants.
Newsom can cry about being "politically targeted" all he wants.
The audit caught California red-handed funding phones for 95,000 dead people while blocking Trump's immigration enforcement from finding illegal aliens collecting benefits.
Taxpayers are paying for California's sanctuary state ideology and Obama's legacy of turning welfare programs into fraud factories.
Trump and Carr are finally cleaning up the mess.
Sources:
- Susan Ferrechio, "FCC battles California, Newsom over free-phone fraud," Washington Times, February 2, 2026.
- Luke Rosiak, "Obamaphone Fraud as High as 65%," Daily Signal, October 26, 2025.
- "Changes Coming to 'Obama Phone' Program After Government Reports Fraud," InsideSources, July 5, 2017.
- Stephen Dinan, "'Obamaphone' program riddled with fraud: Audit," Washington Times, December 27, 2017.
- Luke Mullins, "After promising universal health care, California Gov. Gavin Newsom must reconsider immigrant coverage," CBS News, May 14, 2025.
- "Gavin Newsom Proposes Scaling Back Medi-Cal Benefits for Illegal Aliens," FAIR, May 23, 2025.
