The House Oversight Committee released a report Wednesday concluding that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were aware for years of widespread fraud in Minnesota's federally funded welfare programs and chose not to act. Worse, according to the committee, they retaliated against the state employees who tried to sound the alarm.
Both Walz and Ellison were scheduled to testify before the committee Wednesday at 10:00 AM.
The fraud schemes in question are estimated to have cost taxpayers as much as $18 billion. That figure alone should stop you cold. The schemes centered on a Minneapolis fraud ring, and dozens of defendants, many of them Somali immigrants who settled in Minnesota, have been charged. The U.S. Department of Justice first charged 47 people in 2021 as part of a $250 million scheme involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland called it the largest pandemic-era fraud scheme ever identified.
Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer did not mince words:
Testimony obtained by the Committee reveals that Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were aware of widespread fraud in social service programs, lied about their knowledge of the fraud, and retaliated against employees who dared to raise concerns.
Instead of protecting vulnerable Americans, they handed over billions in taxpayer dollars to fraudsters and threw their own state employees under the bus.
The committee gathered testimony from nine current and former Minnesota state officials. Republican staff posed questions for a combined 36 hours and 46 minutes. Democratic staff managed 3 hours and 14 minutes. Draw your own conclusions about which side wanted answers.
The timeline the report lays out is damning. The Minnesota government received complaints about Feeding Our Future as early as 2018. Daron Korte, then an assistant commissioner at the Minnesota Department of Education, confirmed to the committee that complaints arrived between 2018 and 2021. He testified that Walz's office would have been informed by April 2020, and that Ellison's office would have received a notice as well.
That means both the governor's office and the attorney general's office had knowledge of suspected fraud well before the DOJ brought charges in 2021. Walz himself originally said he was informed about suspicious activity related to Feeding Our Future in November 2020, but he could not recall the precise date. He has previously acknowledged there is fraud in his state and said his administration has made it a priority to root out for years.
The record suggests otherwise.
The Minnesota Department of Education found Feeding Our Future in "serious deficiency" in March 2021 and moved to cut off all funding. That should have been the end of the pipeline. It wasn't.
Feeding Our Future's founder and executive director, Aimee Bock, threatened MDE with a lawsuit in April 2021, claiming racial discrimination if funding was terminated. By April 30, 2021, MDE had resumed payments. Bock was eventually charged and convicted as part of the fraud scheme, but not before her threat worked exactly as intended.
Korte's testimony to the committee explained the capitulation. He told investigators that MDE knew it could unilaterally cut off funding, but feared the legal consequences:
[We] could unilaterally make that decision, but we just knew, with Feeding our Future, it was going to end up in court and had the potential to be overturned.
MDE looked to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for backup. It didn't come. Korte described asking USDA for written support and getting nothing:
I think they were supportive generally of what we were saying we wanted to do, but they weren't willing to provide anything in writing. And we felt like, without having that backup from USDA that we just didn't have firm enough ground to stand on to continue to deny those sites in the face of the threatened lawsuit.
So instead of cutting off a suspected fraud operation, MDE approved an additional four sites. The spigot stayed open because a nonprofit waved the race card, federal officials refused to put their support on paper, and state bureaucrats buckled.
Feeding Our Future formally filed the lawsuit in November of that year, alleging violations of state law. The legal threat wasn't a bluff. It was a shakedown. And it worked.
Feeding Our Future wasn't the only fraud festering under Walz's watch. The committee's investigation also examined Minnesota's Child Care Assistance Program, where the problems began even earlier.
Minnesota's legislative auditor brought warnings about persistent signs of fraud in childcare benefits dating back to 2018, the year before Walz was sworn in as governor. By early 2019, Walz's office knew about fraud concerns in the program. Former DHS Commissioner Tony Lourey told investigators he was in communication with Walz's then Chief of Staff Chris Schmitter about those concerns that same year.
One investigator cited in the report claimed that fraud rates could exceed 50% of all government funding for the program. Signs of overbilling appeared in as many as 72 of the top 100 recipients of state money.
Half of all government funding. Seventy-two of the top hundred recipients. These are not rounding errors. This is a system hemorrhaging taxpayer money while the people charged with oversight looked the other way.
This is what happens when government accountability becomes optional. The warnings arrived in 2018. The fraud kept growing through 2019, 2020, 2021, and beyond. State employees raised concerns. According to the committee, those employees were punished for it. And the man who presided over all of it became the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024.
The committee launched its investigation in December, and fresh evidence, including new daycare video, surfaced shortly after. The fraud was first reported by Just the News in the summer of 2024. It took a congressional committee and years of dogged reporting to force what Minnesota's own government should have handled from the start.
Billions of dollars meant for vulnerable Americans. Routed through fraudsters. Enabled by officials who knew. Protected by a system that punished the people who spoke up.
That is what the Oversight Committee found. Now Walz and Ellison have to answer for it.
