In the end, the most appalling thing about the ballooning US social services fraud scandals is the eager collusion of state officials in robbing the public by the billions — with Minnesota the early prime example.
Vice President JD Vance on Tuesday asked the Justice Department to investigate and perhaps prosecute Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison and other high officials over the evidence laid out in a devastating House Oversight Committee report on benefit fraud in Minnesota.
The committee documented how more than 30 whistleblowers tried to sound the alarm on fraud, only to be silenced by the Democrats running the state — e.g., with explicit orders to “stop looking into” obvious fraud because the folks in charge feared being labeled “racist or Islamophobic.”
Worse, the state Department of Human Services actually investigated state workers who called out the fraud — tracking their phones, photographing their cars and even collecting personal info such as their children’s schools.
A worker who emailed that she knew of noncompliant contracts approved by management that put “DHS funds at risk” found herself labeled “disruptive” and put on investigative leave.
Hotlines and other ways of supposedly reporting fraud anonymously turned out not to be, as workers’ confidential reports wound up being cited by HR as cause for discipline.
Walz and Ellison claim they had no idea any of this was going on — not the fraud, not the refusal to investigate it, nor the crackdowns on state workers who exposed it.
But the 205-page House report says otherwise, for example detailing Walz’s refusal to act on erupting fraud issues and even ordering investigators to stop looking into Child-Care Assistance Program fraud.
That fraudsters stole billions in taxpayer money in just this one state is outrageous — but that the officials elected to protect the public sided with the fraudsters is just obscene.
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