Record-Breaking Year for False Claims Act Enforcement Signals Intensifying Scrutiny

The Justice Department has reported a historic $6.8 billion in False Claims Act (FCA) settlements and judgments in 2025, marking the highest recovery total since the government began tracking such data in 1987. This record-setting figure significantly surpasses previous peaks, including the $6.1 billion recovered in 2014, signaling an unprecedented focus on fraud enforcement across healthcare, federal contracting, and other sectors receiving government funds.

The statistics, highlighted in DOJ’s recently released annual FCA report, demonstrate that enforcement enjoys strong bipartisan support and continues to accelerate under the Trump administration. Most notably, whistleblower-initiated cases, known as qui tam lawsuits, generated $5.3 billion of the total recoveries, confirming their critical role in the government’s anti-fraud efforts.

“What we’re seeing is the resolutions in 2025, which tells you that there was a huge ramp up during the Biden administration,” explained Cormac Connor, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney now practicing with Husch Blackwell in Washington, DC. “Everything we were seeing and hearing from DOJ in the past years suggests that there’s more to come.”

Adding to this momentum is the record number of new qui tam cases filed in 2025. Since these cases typically require several years to investigate and resolve, the surge in filings indicates that the current wave of enforcement is likely just beginning.

Enforcement Priorities Taking Shape

Brenna Jenny, Deputy Assistant Attorney General overseeing FCA enforcement at main Justice, recently outlined several priority areas during a legal conference. These include scrutiny of secretive healthcare kickbacks, inflated prescription prices, and substandard care in medical devices and provider services.

Jenny specifically highlighted her personal interest in targeting scenarios where medical products or care delivery not only fail to improve patients’ quality of life but actually make it worse.

Other enforcement priorities include:

• A new task force focused on tariff and trade enforcement, particularly targeting companies that misstate country of origin to evade duties or sanctions, or engage in transshipment schemes
• Cybersecurity compliance violations, where contractors certify data security parameters but fail to implement them
• Civil rights fraud, investigating contractors who certify compliance with federal civil rights laws while engaging in discriminatory hiring, promotion, or pay practices

Jenny also confirmed a significant increase in DOJ-initiated dismissals of qui tam cases, with 25 cases dismissed in 2025 compared to an average of six per year during the Biden administration. This suggests a more assertive approach to managing the government’s caseload and addressing potentially problematic whistleblower cases.

Technology and Resource Challenges

The DOJ is increasingly deploying artificial intelligence tools to identify potential FCA violations, particularly looking for outliers and anomalies in billing patterns or compliance data. This technology-driven approach may help compensate for reported staffing challenges, as the civil division’s attorney headcount is reportedly down approximately 20% from last year.

“If you have fewer attorneys and more cases, it’s going to be harder for those attorneys to get their work done,” Connor noted. This could lead to more declined qui tam cases proceeding without government intervention, creating a different dynamic for defendants.

Constitutional Challenges Loom

In the background of these developments, challenges to the constitutionality of the qui tam provisions themselves continue to work through the courts. At least three Supreme Court justices have signaled openness to arguments that allowing private citizens to initiate enforcement actions may unconstitutionally extend executive authority.

Jenny’s emphasis on the DOJ’s robust dismissal authority may be positioning the government to counter these constitutional challenges by demonstrating that the executive branch maintains ultimate control over these cases.

Implications for Organizations

For companies in FCA-enforced industries, these developments underscore the importance of robust compliance programs and careful attention to government certifications. Whistleblower complaints should be taken extremely seriously, given the DOJ’s explicit invitation for more cases and the financial incentives for potential whistleblowers.

Organizations should pay particular attention to civil rights compliance certifications, cybersecurity requirements, tariff and import documentation, and small business set-aside contract qualifications. The shift of DOJ’s SEAL team prosecutors to tariff enforcement further signals the government’s intensifying focus on international trade compliance.

As one observer noted, “When you’re thinking about FCA enforcement, if you’ve got the SEAL team on the criminal side talking about indicting executives or even a company, suddenly your FCA liability looks a little bit different.”

With record recoveries already achieved and more cases in the pipeline, the message is clear: government contractors and recipients of federal funds face unprecedented scrutiny that shows no signs of abating.