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fraud
Walz Says Trump Is Exploiting Minnesota Fraud Issue to Defund State’s Childcare Programs
"He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans," said the Democratic governor.
Dec 31, 2025
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday accused US President Donald Trump and his administration of sensationalizing and exploiting a real problem—fraud in the state's social services system—to advance their broader agenda of gutting the safety net.
"This is Trump’s long game," Walz wrote on social media after the US Department of Health and Human Services announced it was suspending all federal childcare funds to Minnesota, alleging "blatant fraud that appears to be rampant."
Walz added that fraud is "a serious issue—but this has been [Trump's] plan all along."
"He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans," the governor wrote.
This is Trump’s long game.
We’ve spent years cracking down on fraudsters. It’s a serious issue - but this has been his plan all along.
He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans. https://t.co/7ByWjeXxu0
— Governor Tim Walz (@GovTimWalz) December 31, 2025
The right-wing media ecosystem and Republican politicians have fixated on fraud in Minnesota in recent weeks, using it to launch bigoted attacks on the state's Somali community and call for mass deportations of Somalis.
The issue exploded over the weekend after Nick Shirley, a right-wing influencer and YouTuber, released a video claiming to expose fraud in Minnesota day care centers. The video went viral and was shared by top Trump administration officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Vice President JD Vance. Kristi Noem, head of the US Department of Homeland Security, said in the wake of the video's publication that federal agents "are on the ground" in the state and "conducting a massive investigation."
Minnesota Public Radio reported that the state's House speaker, Rep. Lisa Demuth (R-13A), confirmed that her caucus directed Shirley to the day care sites that he visited.
"Those featured in his widely viewed video have been part of a state-administered childcare program using federal money, although some recently had operations or payments suspended," the outlet noted.
The Guardian noted that "despite claims by conservatives on social media that the allegations of fraud were ignored until now, there have been years of fraud investigations that began with the indictments in 2022 of 47 defendants for their alleged roles in a $250 million scheme that exploited a federally funded child nutrition program during the Covid-19 pandemic."
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Beware Rick Scott's Brave New Healthcare Fix
The hospital CEO turned US senator is a fraud superstar at working the system.
Dec 08, 2025
When Rick Scott came to town, every one of us who worked at Columbia Hospital Corporation’s Victoria Hospital in Miami, Florida stood at attention. The young, dashing CEO had come to make sure staff bloat was reduced and profits were maximized. After leaving my position in Denver and moving my whole family to Florida just five months prior to being the hospital’s billing manager, I was just learning how to do my job within all the rules and regulations. And Rick Scott in our facility meant I needed to at least be pleasant to the big boss. And, indeed, I was.
As the day of Scott’s visit wore on, staff members who were about to be laid off just six weeks before the holiday season in 1989 were called to the admin offices via the hospital’s public announcement system. The extension named “3200” was the call to ride the elevator up several floors to be dismissed by the hospital CEO and his CFO. The day never left my memory as one during which good, kind, and dedicated colleagues, including the boss who brought me to the position, were riffed. On her way out the door, she reminded me to stay alert and be careful. I didn’t know what to do. I cried a lot that night at home, yet I didn’t know what was still to come in Scott’s new vision of profitability.
Within weeks, I noticed a change in our workflow. I was pushed hard to generate collection letters for all the Medicare patients who had been admitted to Columbia’s Victoria Hospital who had not paid their Medicare deductibles before discharge. But then I was instructed to put those generated collection letters in the patient files but never to mail them to the patients. That, I was told, would create a paper trail for due diligence in collection efforts as required before the hospital could submit to have those unpaid (and now unbilled) deductibles reimbursed by the federal Medicare program.
Filing letters in patient files without sending them out seemed wrong and it seemed fraudulent to me, and since I was new to it all I thought maybe if this was standard practice for the hospital, it could have been some loophole I didn’t know about. I dove into the Medicare rules, and I found this troubling line, “If you knew or should have known,” a certain action was fraud, you are complicit and could be charged with a crime. When I questioned the CFO about it, he snapped at me and said that if I wouldn’t do my job, I might need to rethink working there.
Universal coverage via improved and expanded Medicare for all of us would end Rick Scott’s grift.
In mid-December 1989, with my husband suffering heart problems and desperately in need of insurance coverage, I loaded all my personal items in a box and left the hospital. I quit my job. I wrote a letter to my former US Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado about the situation, and I never heard directly back about what happened to that letter as I asked him to be cautious about disclosing my name or location. I was already terrified of these people. They collected hundreds of thousands of dollars quarterly from the scheme I was asked to be part of, and Rick Scott’s Columbia Hospital Corporation was building a portfolio that included an awful lot of hospitals. Scott was a rising star, after all, and making the first few hospitals he owned profitable was critical to keep that star on its trajectory.
After the Department of Justice started investigating Columbia’s hospitals in the mid to late 1990s, the hospital industry giant paid a record $1.7 billion settlement around defrauding the US government programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and TriCare. It turns out the schemes to enrich profits were widespread and involved much more than patient collection letters. Yet, even after Rick Scott was forced to resign and take responsibility for the fraud committed, he took a severance package of $10 million and stock options totaling nearly $300 million. Wow, that was a generous, golden, gilded, and glorious send off, eh? Up next for Scott?
To see this man ascend the political ranks to be thought of as an appropriate US Senate architect of a new health industry scheme to replace the Affordable Care Act-Obamacare subsidies is a tragic turn of events. We will not get anything close to a humane system under a Rick Scott plan.
The health industry is likely celebrating a return to laissez-faire, anything-goes-if-it’s-profitable model Rick Scott was an expert at designing and operating for Columbia Hospital Corporation. Patients will be the revenue stream upon which his fortune grows larger, and until we wake up and finally move to a model that puts patient health and well-being at the forefront of the design, we will see the health industry enrich itself beyond its wildest dreams while the architect of Medicare and Medicaid fraud, Sen. Rick Scott, takes yet another victory lap on taxpayer money. He and his health industry allies really love being on the dole, despite any claims to the contrary. They just call it profit.
Universal coverage via improved and expanded Medicare for all of us would end Rick Scott’s grift. Perhaps now the truth becomes even more clear. Ending the stranglehold of hospital corporations like the behemoth HCA Healthcare that also includes all of the hospitals previously owned by Columbia Hospital Corporation. On the corporate website, HCA Healthcare writes, “HCA Healthcare, Inc. owns and operates 186 hospitals and approximately 2,400 ambulatory sites of care, including surgery centers, free standing emergency rooms, urgent care centers, and physician clinics in 20 states and the United Kingdom.”
The profits are dear—not the patients, my friends.
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Trump Admin Threatens Blue State SNAP Funds Unless They Turn Over Recipient Data
"Why is the Trump administration so hellbent on people going hungry?” asked New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose state has nearly 3 million food stamp recipients.
Dec 03, 2025
The Trump administration is threatening to strip away funds used to provide food assistance to poor Americans in Democrat-led states beginning next week, unless they provide information identifying who receives benefits.
At a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said states would be denied the ability to access billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated to administer the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), unless they provide the federal government with personal information—including names, Social Security numbers, addresses, birth dates, and immigration status—of aid recipients.
SNAP provides Americans with incomes below 130% of the federal poverty line with roughly $6 per day on average to pay for food. Roughly 1 in 8 Americans—over 42 million—rely on the program. Rollins originally ordered states to provide this information to the government in May in what she said was an effort to verify the eligibility of those receiving benefits.
“As of next week, we have begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply and they tell us and allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and to protect the American taxpayer,” Rollins said Tuesday.
As of Tuesday, 29 states had provided the information, but many Democratic ones, including New York and California, had not. Rollins claimed that those states were choosing to "protect illegals, criminals, and bad actors over the American taxpayer.”
While the benefits paid to individuals would not be cut, states that don't comply stand to lose millions of dollars that they use to administer the program, which could delay benefits and force them to push some recipients off the program.
In its efforts to enact sweeping cuts to social safety net programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies, the Trump administration has often fallen back on false claims that the services are being abused by ineligible people, including undocumented immigrants.
"Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to receive federal benefits under [SNAP]," explained Melissa Cruz of the American Immigration Council in November. "However, SNAP benefits are provided to households rather than individuals. If, for example, the head of a household is undocumented, they may still apply for SNAP benefits for their U.S. citizen children. But benefits are calculated based on the number of eligible people in the household, so the assistance would only cover the US citizen children—not the entire household.”
Rollins has elsewhere claimed that 186,000 deceased individuals receive benefits, while 500,000 individuals receive duplicate benefits, citing it as evidence of fraud. But as the current US Department of Agriculture website explains, these are the result of administrative efforts—such as states being slow to update eligibility rolls when recipients die or move to a new state. The USDA says that over the past 15 years, it has reduced the prevalence of illegal benefit trafficking in SNAP from 4% to 1%.
The USDA's order comes on the heels of the largest cut to SNAP in the program's history. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed by Trump in July, cut funding to the program by roughly 20%.
Like with other programs, Rollins suggested on Tuesday that the goal of USDA's order was not simply to root out "fraud," but to further slash Americans' benefits: “As [former President] Joe Biden was working to buy an election a year ago, he increased food stamp program funding by 40%, so now... we continue to roll that back,” she said.
Rollins' 40% claim is also an exaggeration; according to an estimate by the Cato Institute last month, the spending increase was actually about 21%.
Like President Donald Trump's previous efforts to deny SNAP benefits to states during this fall's government shutdown, the USDA's order has run into legal hurdles.
After 22 states sued, a federal judge in San Francisco, Maxine Chesney, issued a preliminary injunction in October blocking the administration from demanding the data.
Chesney found that these actions likely violated the SNAP Act, which says that states are only allowed to release data related to administering the program. She also found that states would likely succeed in their argument that the administration might illegally share the data with other agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security, to aid mass deportation efforts.
Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP director at the nonprofit Food Research and Action Center, told the Washington Post that the USDA's demands for this data were likely illegal.
“The federal law restricts USDA access to this,” Plata-Nino said. “The agency has always relied on anonymized data or small samples to perform oversight… Them saying, ‘We’re going to go ahead and remove this funding,’ it’s just so unprecedented.”
The Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee accused Trump and Rollins of "illegally threatening to withhold federal dollars."
"SNAP has one of the lowest fraud rates of any government program, but Trump continues to weaponize hunger," they said.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), whose state had nearly 3 million food stamp recipients as of 2024, asked why Trump was again threatening to strip the state of SNAP funding after his previous attack on the program during the shutdown.
"Genuine question: Why is the Trump administration so hellbent on people going hungry?” Hochul asked.
Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst who focuses on SNAP and other antipoverty programs at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that while cutting funds, Trump has also scrapped the nation's most comprehensive food insecurity survey, the Household Food Security Report, which would measure the effects of those cuts on Americans.
“The Trump administration’s approach,” Bergh said, “has been enacting the deepest cuts to food assistance in history, needlessly disrupting SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, and terminating the most reliable measure of food insecurity to hide the consequences of those decisions.”
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