AXIOS (Adriel Bettelheim) - Elon Musk declares victory with Medicaid data release
Elon Musk took a victory lap Friday as a Department of Government Efficiency team released a huge trove of Medicaid spending data he said the public could use to look for fraud themselves. Why it matters: The Trump administration often cites waste, fraud and abuse as justification for deep program cuts — including the nearly $1 trillion in reductions to federal Medicaid spending in last year's Republican budget bill. - It used Minnesota's inability to rein in fraud in safety net programs as justification for freezing federal child care funding to the state and launching the ICE enforcement surge that targeted the state's Somali community. - DOGE has been working on a large-scale mining of Medicaid records since last year. Driving…