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Goldberg Kohn litigator Williams Meyers is quoted throughout the article, “Trump's FCA Expansion Plan Heightens Compliance Risk,” published in the March 4, 2026, edition of Law360. The concluding remarks are from Bill, in which he is quoted as saying corporate America needs to continue to take the FCA very seriously.
The article concerns the Trump administration's record $6.8 billion False Claims Act enforcement haul in the fiscal year that ended September 2025, and an active legal challenge to the whistleblower provisions of the law. It reports that whistleblowers filed a record-breaking 1,297 qui tam suits last year — the most ever in one year. These whistleblowers often share in the recovery of their qui tam cases, receiving cuts in the range of 15 percent to 30 percent.
The article also concerns the Trump administration’s targeting of new areas of potential investigation under the law, such as healthcare for transgender minors and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which the DOJ says are discriminatory.
Historic, Expanding Enforcement
Last year’s major cases included a $949 million judgment against Omnicare and CVS over the submission of millions of false prescription claims for long-term care patients, and Teva's $450 million settlement for allegedly fixing the prices of generic drugs and raising the price of a multiple sclerosis treatment while covering Medicare recipients' copays.
The DOJ also secured a $1.6 billion verdict against Johnson & Johnson's Janssen unit after a New Jersey jury found the company had defrauded Medicare and Medicaid by promoting HIV drugs for unapproved uses.
Government procurement fraud was also an FCA focus area last year, with the DOJ ending its second-largest procurement fraud case in history. In that matter, Raytheon Co. agreed to pay $428 million to resolve allegations that it knowingly provided false cost and pricing data when negotiating with the U.S. Department of Defense for various government contracts and double-billed on a weapons maintenance contract.
Goldberg Kohn’s Bill Meyers told Law360 that the DOJ's enforcement numbers are "sort of a trailing indicator of fraud that was occurring at some point in the past, including during the pandemic." The record numbers are therefore not so surprising, he said, pointing to a pandemic-era increase in available money through initiatives such as the Paycheck Protection Program.
"People like to say that as day follows night, if there's new government money that becomes available, there will be bad actors who will try to get that government money, even if they're not actually entitled to it," Bill is quoted as saying. "And there's a lot of money that was injected into the system during the pandemic."
The article discusses the Trump administration’s moves to expand FCA enforcement to new areas. It cites a memorandum issued by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in April 2025 that directed the DOJ's Civil Division to investigate potential false claims tied to services associated with gender transition for minors. The DOJ subsequently issued subpoenas to healthcare providers, several of which have been challenged in court, though the department hasn't announced any FCA settlements or judgments stemming from Bondi's directive.
The Trump administration has also targeted DEI programs, with the DOJ announcing in May 2025 that it would use the FCA to go after any recipients of federal funds that the agency determines promote DEI policies or allow antisemitism to thrive.
According to Brenna Jenny, deputy assistant attorney general of the DOJ's Commercial Litigation Branch, the department is prioritizing purportedly discriminatory uses of DEI programs. She said that at the top of her list are companies that implemented programs and practices that pressured supervisors and management to make hiring and promotion decisions based on race or sex.
In an interview on Feb. 5, 2026, before Jenny made her remarks, Bill Meyers predicted that the administration's intent to target DEI programs for FCA enforcement would play out in the form of enforcement against discriminatory employment practices.
"I think it's pretty consistent with how other administrations have tried to use the FCA as a fraud enforcement tool and to react to the fraud du jour, and to use it as a way to recover ill-gotten gains," Bill is quoted as saying.
A Looming Legal Challenge
In Zafirov v. Florida Medical Associates, the Eleventh Circuit is weighing a legal challenge to the qui tam, or whistleblower, provisions of the FCA, with the appellate judges grappling, among other things, with a 2023 opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in which he raised "serious constitutional questions" about the qui tam system.
That appellate proceeding centers on a lower court ruling that declared the qui tam action provisions of the False Claims Act unconstitutional, finding they allow self-appointed whistleblowers to usurp executive power by suing on behalf of the government. U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, who issued the first-of-its-kind ruling, is a former clerk for Justice Thomas.
Bill Meyers thinks the Zafirov case will eventually end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. But even if the high court determines there are constitutional weaknesses in parts of the FCA, he also predicts that Congress would remedy the statute in order to preserve the "public-private partnership" that the qui tam system creates.
Despite the change in some priorities dictated by the Trump administration and the eventual outcome of the Zafirov case, Bill says said companies should not assume there's a "get-out-of-jail-free" card coming their way.
"I think the message to corporate America is that you need to continue to take the FCA very seriously, and you need to make sure that you're doing everything you can compliance-wise to not run afoul of the FCA," he is quoted as saying. "It's going to continue to be something that you need to focus on."
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