This weekend, the Star Tribune carried an excellent report by Ryan Faircloth which looked in detail at the Walz/Flanagan administration’s handling of Minnesota’s epidemic of fraud. It opens:
Gov. Tim Walz was finally taking decisive action.
It was summer 2025.
As my colleague Bill Glahn noted recently, this is five years after the Department of Education paused payments to Feeding Our Future and was sued by them for doing so. Talking of the wave of fraud more broadly, Faircloth asks “Why had it taken them so long to see it?”
“By then, warning signs had been accumulating for several years,” Faircloth writes:
The Feeding Our Future scandal revealed that alleged fraudsters were involved in multiple taxpayer-funded programs.
State spending on autism services, housing assistance and other Medicaid-funded programs had skyrocketed. Providers were warning about potential abuse. Media outlets, including the Minnesota Star Tribune, published numerous stories.
Yet no one at the top of the Walz administration appeared to examine whether those red flags pointed to a broader problem.
Federal prosecutors ultimately sounded the alarm on what they described as “staggering, industrial-scale fraud,” estimating that billions of dollars may have been stolen from more than a dozen Medicaid-funded programs.
“Officials overlooked alarming spending growth in some programs, wrestled with whether to stop payments to known fraud defendants, bristled at fellow Democrats who voiced concerns and did not grasp the scandal’s political significance until it became a major threat to Walz’s re-election,” Faircloth records:
The breakdown was compounded by Walz’s leadership style. Former aides and advisers to Walz, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, describe a governor who heavily delegated to his commissioners and senior staff, rarely immersing himself in the details of programs his administration oversaw.
Yet some of the governor’s top advisers also appeared to be out of the loop at times, and Walz did not take a substantially more direct role in the state’s fraud response until 2025.
Of course, by then, billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money had been ransacked through fraud. The whole article is worth reading for the light it sheds on a thoroughly dysfunctional administration.
Faircloth notes that “The governor’s office declined to make Walz available for an interview. The office also did not respond to an extensive list of written questions and details about the Minnesota Star Tribune’s findings.”