Amid a nationwide reckoning over Medicaid fraud committed largely by “New Americans,” Maine Gov. Janet Mills is taking the unprecedented step of freezing enrollment in four of the most defrauded programs in MaineCare.
“Effective April 13, 2026, the Office of Aging and Disability Services (OADS) is temporarily pausing acceptance and review of initial applications from entities seeking to become OADS-approved waiver providers under MaineCare Benefits Manual (MBM) Sections 18, 20, 21, and 29,” the agency said in the email.
The agency’s stated rationale was bureaucratic in nature: “OADS is implementing this pause to help maintain timely and consistent review of applications, which OADS receives in high volumes, and to prioritize, with OADS’ limited staff resources, quality support and oversight of enrolled providers.”
The move, announced by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Aging and Disability Services in a terse email Thursday, comes after Gov. Mills and her Democratic U.S. Senate campaign have spent weeks denying widespread Medicaid fraud in Maine and attacking the journalists and federal investigators who’ve exposed it.
According to a copy of the email obtained by The Robinson Report, OADS will block new entrants to four MaineCare waiver programs that have been at the center of a sweeping Medicaid fraud allegations, including Section 18, Section 20, Section 21, and Section 29.
Section 21 is the program that funds autism group homes throughout the state and has attracted significant attention due to the proliferation of group home agencies owned by and staffed by Central African migrants. That includes the Portland-based Paradise Residential Services, which DHHS recently de-authorized after its founders managed to bill more than $16 million from 2021 to 2024.
RELATED: Maine Boots Autism Provider After $16M in Medicaid Billing, Allegations of Fraud and Abuse Emerge
The move is yet another indication that while Mills publicly insists there is nothing unusual to see, state bureaucrats are privately scrambling to get ahead of federal investigators who think otherwise.
In addition to probes from the U.S. House Oversight Committee and the federal Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG), Maine has also been named as among the top targets of President Donald Trump’s newly incarnated welfare fraud task force, spearheaded by Vice President J.D. Vance.
A federal audit released in January 2026 found that the federal government made at least $45.6 million in improper MaineCare payments for autism services in 2023 alone. As Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz bluntly noted, “one hundred percent of the claims examined had problems.”
That’s not a rounding error. That’s a systemic failure.
The House Oversight probe is particularly focused on whether Maine illegally caused the federal government to reimburse the state for services provided to non-citizens.
Under Mills, the Democrat-controlled legislature has twice expanded MaineCare — once inline with provisions of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare), which added tens of thousands of childless able-bodied adults to the welfare program, then again in 2022 with legislation that added more non-citizens to MaineCare.
The four sections being frozen are not obscure administrative backwaters. Together, these programs represent the core of Maine’s home and community-based services infrastructure for some of its most vulnerable residents. Section 18 covers home and community-based services for adults with traumatic brain injuries. Section 20 covers services for adults with other related conditions. Section 21 covers home and community benefits for adults with intellectual disabilities or autism spectrum disorder. Section 29 provides support services for adults with intellectual disabilities or autism.
All of these programs have skyrocketed in cost under Mills, especially following the expansion of Medicaid services to a broader class of noncitizens.
In FY 2018, the state spent $122.7 million combined on the four programs, with the federal government covering an additional $233.4 million for a total of $356.1 million. As of the latest numbers for FY2025, the state spent $295.4 million combined on the four programs, while the federal government covered a whopping $562.6 million. That’s a combined $858 million in taxpayer spending on the four programs where Mills has denied fraud is rampant while simultaneously moving to stop the hemorrhaging.
Shameless Plug: I explained all of this and predicted what was coming more than two months ago on the Shawn Ryan Show, which you should watch if you haven’t already…
If you haven’t already, you should sign up for The Robinson Report Substack to get instant updates on new investigations, new multimedia content and podcasts, and — of course — to generously support our efforts to expose fraud and corruption in Maine.
The Mills Two-Step
Here is where it gets politically interesting, because the Mills administration is trying to run two plays simultaneously, and those plays are beginning to contradict each other.
In public, Gov. Janet Mills has been defiant. When Dr. Oz sent his Feb. 6 letter demanding that Maine answer 33 specific questions about its MaineCare program integrity within 30 days, Mills said the state “sent back a comprehensive response” making clear that “the State of Maine is conducting oversight to ensure that MaineCare providers are held to high standards of care.”
When pressed further, Mills accused the Trump administration of weaponizing fraud allegations for political purposes. “Let’s be clear about what this is: Maine is facing a political attack from a president who uses allegations of fraud as a pretense to send ICE and other weaponized federal agents into states led by Democrats with devastating consequences,” Mills said.
In private, however, the picture looks quite different.
Following The Maine Wire’s viral video exploring “ghost offices” at office buildings in Portland where multiple seemingly vacant home health agencies are headquartered, the Mills admin rushed out letters demanding that the agencies housed in those buildings verify their lists of employees and clients.
While Mills was telling Mainers the Trump administration’s fraud inquiry was “predetermined” and politically motivated, her own DHHS was quietly moving to freeze enrollment in the very programs the feds were asking about.
In Oz’s initial video asking whether Maine would become the next Minnesota, he likened MaineCare to an open and unattended cash register. OADS wouldn’t freeze enrollment in programs if they didn’t have good reason to agree that providers have been picking that register clean with little scrutiny from the sprawling bureaucracy at DHHS.
Meanwhile, top Mills allies have also expressed fear over what outside investigations might turn up — a fact that is known entirely because of Freedom of Access Act requests submitted (and paid for) by The Robinson Report.
DHHS Commissioner Sara Gagné-Holmes has been the public face of the administration’s pushback against federal scrutiny. It was Gagné-Holmes — not Mills — who signed the 47-page letter responding to Oz’s 33 questions, a document that argued Maine’s program integrity controls “exceed federal baseline requirements.”
The $45.6 million in improper autism payments identified by CMS and this new move to freeze enrollment in vulnerable programs suggest it has not been true in practice.
What Gagné-Holmes has not been eager to discuss publicly is her concern about something far more serious than a CMS audit: a congressional subpoena.
RELATED: Maine Officials Fear Congressional Subpoena Amid House Oversight Probe of Medicaid Spending on Illegal Aliens
According to our previous reporting, Gagné-Holmes has privately expressed anxiety about avoiding a congressional subpoena as federal investigators have tightened their focus on Maine’s Medicaid administration. The prospect of DHHS officials testifying under oath before a congressional committee about what they knew and when they knew it is, to put it gently, not something the Mills administration has been enthusiastic about.
That anxiety was preceded by a secret directive Mills’ pet Attorney General delivered to DHHS employee ten days before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term.
RELATED: Maine AG to State Employees: Do Not Cooperate with Justice Department Investigators
On Jan. 10, 2025, then-Attorney General Aaron Frey issued an order to DHHS employees instructing them not to speak with Department of Justice attorneys — a remarkable order that raised immediate questions about what the administration was trying to protect. Frey is now out of office, but the directive stands as a document of an administration that recognized federal legal exposure and moved to limit its employees’ cooperation with federal law enforcement.
While Janet Mills was publicly declaring herself a lifelong fraud fighter — “As District Attorney, Attorney General, and as Governor, I have always cracked down on criminals,” she said in February — her administration’s top lawyer was telling DHHS workers to keep their mouths shut around the feds.
The Freeze in Context
The enrollment freeze comes as Maine finds itself at the center of a rapidly escalating federal-state confrontation over Medicaid fraud. On March 16, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, chaired by Vice President JD Vance. The executive order specifically names Maine as a state where vulnerabilities are believed to exist. CMS has already suspended 70 hospice and home health providers in Los Angeles and withheld $259.5 million in Medicaid funds from Minnesota.
Maine Democrats have pointed to the Minnesota situation as evidence that this is partisan punishment rather than legitimate oversight. But that argument is getting harder to sustain with each new document that comes to light. A March 26 state auditor’s report found that MaineCare’s Program Integrity Unit “may not provide adequate monitoring of all Medicaid services,” a finding that landed while the CMS standoff was already in full swing.
That’s not a Trump administration finding. That’s Maine’s own State Auditor — appointed by Democratic lawmakers.
The Underlying Reality
Sections 18, 20, 21, and 29 are not being frozen because OADS is overwhelmed with legitimate applications from qualified providers. They are being frozen because the state created a regulatory environment in which it was trivially easy to become a MaineCare-enrolled waiver provider, and the results have been predictable to anyone who was paying attention. The Robinson Report has documented dozens of Section 21 providers billing at rates multiple times the national average, often from residential addresses, often under a single billing code, often with no documentation of services actually rendered.
Here’s a look at the fastest growing Medicaid firms formed in Maine since 2021. Nearly all of them are billing under Section 21 or other programs that have now seen new enrollment frozen.
The enrollment freeze is a belated acknowledgment that the state has totally failed to properly verify new Medicaid providers or ensure compliance with state and federal Medicaid rules. It is also, strategically, a preemptive measure: if you can’t stop the fraud that’s already happening, you can at least stop new fraudsters from getting in the door before federal auditors finish counting the bodies.
Janet Mills will continue to call this a political attack. Behind the scenes, her own agency just admitted — with a quiet email to prospective providers — that the situation is serious enough to shut the door. Both things cannot be true at the same time.
But the most important takeaway from the email… is that Steve Robinson has been right all along.
