Minnesota is rife with fraud.

NYT:  How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch

Minnesota is a shit show, and that Walz was almost vice president.

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.

Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Anybody who could figure out that Somalis aren’t Scandinavian, would have seen this coming.

The episode has raised broader questions for some residents about the sustainability of Minnesota’s Scandinavian-modeled system of robust safety net programs bankrolled by high taxes.

The first public sign of a major problem in the state’s social services system came in 2022, when federal prosecutors began charging defendants in connection to a program aimed at feeding hungry children. Merrick B. Garland, attorney general during the Biden administration, called it the country’s largest pandemic relief fraud scheme.

Start up a phony organization to address a problem, get the grant money, don’t do the work, then repeat.  How did this continue for three years after Biden’s guys started acting on the fraud?

Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit group that was the largest provider in the pandemic program, responded with a warning. In an email, the group told the state agency that failing to promptly approve new applicants from “minority-owned businesses” would result in a lawsuit featuring accusations of racism that would be “sprawled across the news.”

The old Jesse Jackson fraud.  Any attempt to hold them accountable, and you called a racist.

A report by Minnesota’s nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor about the lapses that enabled the meals fraud later found that the threat of litigation and of negative press affected how state officials used their regulatory power