Last October, President Donald Trump nominated nursing home owner Benjamin Landa to be the next ambassador to Hungary, an important post that would place him in a country with an active conservative movement. President Trump has endorsed Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a longtime ally, for re-election, saying he is doing an “incredible job.”
A month after Mr. Landa’s appointment, President Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services inspector general conducted a revealing audit estimating that a nursing home co-owned by Mr. Landa had received at least $31.2 million in Medicare overpayments and recommended that the government recoup the money.
Now, that facility, Pinnacle Multicare Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, is suing the very government that appointed Landa to the diplomatic post. The lawsuit, filed Feb. 26 in federal district court in New York, asks the court to halt the government’s collection efforts and names HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, HHS Inspector General Thomas March Bell, and Medicare contractors as defendants. A federal district court denied Pinnacle’s request for a temporary restraining order.
As of March, Landa held ownership stakes in more than 100 nursing homes in eight states, according to CMS data. Landa is also a donor to Republican causes, but his largest donation to date was $5 million to MAGA, a pro-Trump super PAC, in August 2025, two months before his nomination.
Critics of Mr. Landa’s record cite the audit results and other legal actions against families connected to him as reasons why his nomination should be subject to further scrutiny.
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee that oversees Medicare and Medicaid, described Randa as an example of “big corporate health care interests preying on vulnerable people and using clever tricks to exploit loopholes at taxpayer expense.”
“It’s no surprise that these companies and their executives are friendly to President Trump,” Wyden said in a statement. “They have been rewarded in exchange for their responsibilities, including political appointments and ambassadorships in Europe.”
The White House and State Department did not respond to requests for comment on Landa’s nomination status. In a statement, Landa’s lawyers denied any wrongdoing and said the problems identified in the audit occurred at a time when nursing homes were in the midst of a crisis during the coronavirus pandemic.
“At Pinnacle MultiCare, patient care comes first. From top to bottom,” attorney Alyssa Friedman wrote in an email to ProPublica. “This commitment drove every decision we made during the pandemic and continues to define how we operate today.
“To be clear, this is about decisive actions taken at the height of COVID-19 that prioritized patients and saved lives in one of the epicenters of the pandemic, decisions that will be second-guessed years later by absurdly flawed audits of billing documents and retrospective reinterpretation of rules by government bureaucrats,” she added.
The inspector general’s audit and resulting lawsuit are the latest controversies involving Landa.
In November 2022, New York State Attorney General Letitia James filed charges against Villages of Orleans Health and Rehabilitation Center and others, including Landa, who she claims are the owners of the facility. A press release announcing the lawsuit alleges that “years of financial fraud have resulted in significant neglect and harm to our residents.” According to James’ lawsuit, Landa earned at least $1.49 million from the facility from 2015 to 2022 through what James called “looting.” Meanwhile, Landa “contributed nothing and failed to prevent the abuse and neglect,” the lawsuit alleges. Ms. James said her lawsuit was due in part to “systemic understaffing and cost-cutting,” and described a pattern of harm to the home’s residents, including delays in treating wounds and preventable resident deaths by suicide.
The home and the defendants named as owners are contesting the lawsuit. In 2024, a state Supreme Court judge allowed several claims in the case to proceed. In 2025, Landa appealed that decision. The case is ongoing.
Ms. Landa’s attorney said her client “only owns a minority interest in the company that owned the property and served as the landlord of the building in which the facility operated. He has no interest in the facility’s licensed operator and is not involved in the operation of the facility. The attorney general’s allegations against Mr. Landa are baseless and a waste of the court’s time and taxpayers’ money.”
A month after filing her lawsuit against The Villages, Ms. James sued Long Island-based Cold Spring Hills Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, making nearly the same allegations as in her previous lawsuit. Landa owned 25% of the facility’s real estate holding company, according to the complaint. Over the years, the facility paid more than $15 million in rent to a real estate holding company co-owned by Landa. More than $1.4 million to a management company co-owned by Landa. The lawsuit alleges that Landa was paid approximately $500,000 in consulting fees to a company he owns. At the same time, there was a lack of staffing, and residents lost significant weight, developed malnutrition, suffered life-threatening bedsores and were suffering repeated falls without realizing it, James claimed.
The home and its owners disputed the allegations. In March 2024, a Long Island judge ordered the four defendants, including Landa, to repay a total of $2 million to the nursing home and to appoint an independent health monitor to run the facility. Landa and his co-defendants appealed various orders in the case. In January 2025, Cold Spring Hills filed for bankruptcy. In March 2025, the facility was sold to a third-party receiver for $10 and renamed. (“Our facility is under new ownership with a new vision for excellence,” says the nursing home’s rebranded website. “A new chapter of compassionate care has begun.”) Appeals and bankruptcy proceedings are ongoing.
Landa’s attorney said he is simply the landlord of Cold Spring Hills and is not involved in the operation of the facility. She pointed out that the judge found no fraud by Landa, that all business arrangements between Landa and the home had been approved by the state Department of Health, and that none of the defendants was enriching their own pockets at the expense of patient care.
Landa is also involved in other legal cases related to his nursing home. For example, in 2017, Landa co-owned a recruitment agency that was sued on behalf of a class of Filipino nurses, alleging that it trafficked them, withheld their wages, and threatened them with civil and criminal lawsuits if they quit. In September 2019, a New York district court found that the agency and its owners violated the Human Trafficking Victim Protection Act. In April 2022, the lawsuit was settled for $3 million, with the condition that the human trafficking findings be reversed. Landa’s attorney did not respond to additional questions about other cases in which he has been involved.
In one of her 2022 lawsuits, James estimated Randa’s net worth in 2016 at more than $300 million.
The audit at the center of the current lawsuit was the government’s first related to the new nursing home payment system introduced during President Trump’s first term. Under the previous system, nursing homes were reimbursed based on the number of minutes of therapy provided to patients, which “created a financial incentive” to focus on patients who needed treatment, according to a November audit report. In contrast, the new payment system was designed to “improve the accuracy and appropriateness of payments by focusing on enrollees rather than the amount of services provided,” the report said.
The Office of the Inspector General found that Pinnacle, located in the Bronx, received significantly higher reimbursements from Medicare under the new payment system than under the old payment system, raising a red flag with authorities.
The inspector general found that Pinnacle violated CMS billing requirements in 99 of the 100 claims it audited. The agency noted that in 95 of these 99 claims, Pinnacle requested reimbursement for services at a higher level than was warranted upon review of patients’ medical records. For example, a claim for speech therapy for a patient’s aphasia when the clinician has stated that speech therapy is not necessary. Additionally, in 54 of the 99 claims, Pinnacle was found to have provided services that were not justified by the patients’ medical records. For example, it charged patients who could walk on their own for “bed transfers and wheelchair training.”
The HHS Office of Inspector General declined to comment on the audit, citing pending litigation.
Separately, the New York State Department of Health has imposed three financial penalties against Pinnacle since 2021.
In its lawsuit, Pinnacle alleges there is “blatant disregard” for state and federal exemptions to documentation and billing requirements issued as part of efforts to reduce administrative barriers to patient care during the COVID-19 public health emergency. “Pinnacle’s commitment to providing exceptional care to its patients has been an undeniable success,” the facility wrote in its lawsuit.
Additionally, the facility had only two COVID-19 deaths at the height of the pandemic, making it “one of the fewest COVID-related deaths of any nursing home in New York, despite being a 480-bed facility located in one of the hardest-hit areas,” Landa’s attorney said. “Outcomes over that period are the most important measure of care,” she added.
In its lawsuit, Pinnacle characterized the government’s repayment request as an “administrative process riddled with constitutional violations.” The facility added that the request “would immediately paralyze Pinnacle from being able to pay its employees,” adding, “The result would be the closure of the entire nursing home, leaving extremely vulnerable patients without life-saving care, eliminating the jobs and income of hundreds of people, and forcing the sale of this important medical facility from New York City.”
Industry watchdog groups say it is a common practice for nursing home operators to threaten closure in response to state or federal enforcement action.
“Whenever they don’t get what they want, they always keep their mouths shut,” said Kevin Walsh, a former New Jersey State Comptroller who investigated tens of millions of dollars in nursing home fraud during his tenure.
“Based on the financial and cost reports that I have seen, the risk of closure appears to be low,” Walsh added. “They’re not going to kill the golden goose that they’re using to siphon profits.”
Landa has repeatedly filed lawsuits over allegations against her nursing home. In 2022, he filed a defamation lawsuit against the American Prospect, one of its reporters, and the editor following an investigation titled “Nursing Home Slumlord Declaration.” A few years earlier, he had also sued freelancers who wrote for ProPublica for defamation. The judge dismissed both lawsuits.
Landa’s nomination remains under consideration by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (No hearing has been scheduled.) But if confirmed as ambassador to Hungary, Mr. Landa would occupy a powerful position.
Although Hungary has a small population and has historically played a small role in U.S. foreign policy, it has gained symbolic importance in the global conservative movement.
Trump administration officials who visited Budapest in mid-February reinforced their support for Mr. Orbán. Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed an agreement to foster Hungary’s civilian nuclear program. (The country currently has no nuclear weapons, according to the World Nuclear Association, an international organization that publishes reports on global nuclear activity.)
“We are in a golden age of relations, not just because of the alignment of our people, but because of our relationship with the president of the United States,” Rubio said at a news conference in Budapest.
