Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has a rather significant mess on his hands.
What started as a $250 million fraud scheme has grown into one that is now rumored to be as much as $20 billion, and things seem to get worse with every passing day.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, says Walz knows the walls are closing on him, and he would appear to be right.
This all got started with a $250 million fraud scenario related to COVID-19 funding.
Somali residents in Minnesota were reportedly starting shell companies and billing the state for serving children meals when they were not actually providing the services.
The IRS released a statement, explaining, “According to court documents, Najmo M. Ahmed helped her husband Said Ereg run a small storefront grocery store in Minneapolis called Evergreen Grocery and Deli. In April 2020, Ereg enrolled Evergreen Grocery and Deli in the Federal Child Nutrition Program as a food distribution site under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future.”
It continued, “Under the direction of her husband, Ahmed signed falsified meal count sheets, including one dated Dec. 31, 2020, claiming Evergreen Grocery and Deli served 3,250 children -- twice a day -- during the week of Jan. 24, 2021. Between April 2020 and April 2021, Evergreen Grocery and Deli claimed to have served over 1.4 million meals to children.”
As time passed, more and more of these scams were being uncovered, with nearly five dozen people having already been convicted, nearly all of them from the Somali community.
They were all following the same game plan in terms of setting up shell companies and billing the state for funds, but now they were suddenly talking billions of dollars of taxpayer money funding lavish lifestyles instead of programs to feed children.
Trump has been hammering Walz ever since, using a controversial slur against him as well as calling the state “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”
The president also created a bit of a firestorm by stating that he wanted to send the Somalis “back to where they came from.”
Now, federal investigators are involved, and Comer knows there is pressure on Walz, stating, "The walls are caving in on Tim Walz.” He continued, "This massive amount of fraud is affecting and impacting every citizen of Minnesota because they're having to cut services because so much of the money for social programs was wasted and defrauded by this Somali population."
Just as big a problem for Walz is the fact that state officials are starting to come forward to point the finger at Walz, saying that if he did not know about it directly, the policies he put in place allowed this to happen.
Walz also stated that this was none of Comer’s business, to which the chairman responded, "One of the things he said in the last 48 hours was that the Oversight Committee didn't need to worry about this investigation, that he would take care of it. No one in America believes that…. We are going to investigate this."
I agree that Congress needs to look into this, but I am not giving anyone in D.C. a free pass on this because this is the same problem we have seen for decades. The federal government writes a big check, then walks away in terms of accountability. That is the one good thing about DOGE, in that it exposed how the government does business. If we cut out waste and fraud, I think most people would be shocked at how much less money the government needs to operate.
