Over the last few weeks, Minnesota has been dominating national headlines for the unbelievably blatant fraud that has been taking place.
Finally, someone in the federal government is doing something about it.
Small Business Administration (SBA) Administrator Kelly Loeffler has announced that she is suspending funding to Minnesota until the state's fraud problem is addressed.
Before I get into the fraud and Loeffler’s response to the situation, everyone needs to understand that the blame for this scenario extends to both sides of the aisle and throughout Congress. We have a House Oversight Committee and the House Appropriations Committee that are expected to monitor these types of spending programs. When it comes to grants, oversight would fall more under the purview of the House Appropriations Committee.
That committee was previously chaired by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), she of the blue or purple dyed hair. With all the money being handed out during the COVID-19 pandemic, making sure there was no waste or fraud should have been her primary concern.
The House Oversight Committee is more or less the congressional watchdog, also protecting against waste and fraud within government agencies. And during the pandemic, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) was its chair.
The GOP took over those committees in 2023 after winning the House in the 2022 election cycle, yet there was nary a peep from either committee about all this waste and fraud in Minnesota, even though federal grant money was involved. The point is, none of those responsible were doing their jobs.
That brings us to all the rampant fraud, which has grown to as much as $9 billion according to recent reports, and that is just in Minnesota, as fraud in other states is now popping up on the radar.
The blatant nature of the fraud was recently exposed by an independent YouTube journalist, Nick Shirley, who exposed building after building apparently housing so-called healthcare and childcare centers, with one of the latter having a particularly egregious misspelling, namely, that of the “Quality Learing Center.”
After Shirley's video blew up and Tim Walz's office responded, "The governor has worked for years to crack down on fraud and ask the state legislature for more authority to take aggressive action. He has strengthened oversight — including launching investigations into these specific facilities, one of which was already closed."
It’s comical. He closed one, but Shirley visited a building where there were more than 20 of these questionable businesses, and there was not a child in sight. Keep in mind, the state legislature also has committees and agencies designed to monitor for fraud, yet dozens of these entities are still operating all around Minnesota.
Loeffler just announced that the state will no longer receive SBA money, with journalist Benny Johnson reporting, “SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler tells me she is ‘disgusted and sickened’ by Nick Shirley’s expose of Somali small business fraud and is taking immediate action.”
He continued, “SBA is cutting off and clawing back ALL SBA grants to Minnesota, effective immediately.”
I am going to take this a step further and ask House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) to explain what work they did to expose this fraud and what controls are being put in place to ensure it never happens again.
If they cannot answer those questions, then what purpose are these committees actually serving? A young YouTube reporter should not be the one exposing this scale of wrongdoing. If local, state, and federal governments had the proper controls in place, bells and whistles would have been going off long before fraud ran this rampant and out of control. It just goes to show you how clueless everyone in government truly is.
