The Covid Fraud Scandal Is Much Bigger Than Minnesota

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 30, 2025

 

Social media is not real life, as they say. Indeed, it departs even further from the median American experience during the holidays, when the population of active social media users is distilled down into a concentrated mass of monetizable outrage. It’s unwise for lawmakers to take their cues from this unrepresentative contingent, but they often do.

 

It seems Representative Chip Roy fell into this trap when he sought to channel the wholly righteous frustrations roiling social media this holiday week over the emerging scandal in Minnesota surrounding the fraud allegedly committed by a group of Somali migrants. Roy zeroed in on one prominent member of the Somali diaspora, Representative Ilhan Omar, whom Roy observed had grown conspicuously wealthy during her tenure in the legislature.

 

“We’ve got to stop all of this flow of dollars that is corrupting our system,” he told Fox News, “and we’ve got to pause immigration”:

 

Remember that in 1920, when we had a high percentage of people who were foreign born? We froze immigration for 40 years, and our country vanquished the Nazis in Germany, freed the world. We did great things in those 40 years. We can do it again. That’s why I introduced legislation to pause immigration. The president’s right to do that, and I’m supporting him in that effort.

 

Republicans ought to resist the temptation to make the Minnesota fraud story an immigration story, because that’s not what it is. It is a story that illustrates how lethargic and corruptible our public institutions have become. It’s a story about reckless public sector profligacy. It’s a story that encapsulates the pathologies that haunt the progressive mind. Republicans are well-positioned to tell this tale in a way Americans can understand and appreciate.

 

Of course, the allegations against the Minnesota fraudsters are quite serious. The “industrial-scale” embezzlement of taxpayer funds to the tune of a staggering $9 billion is scandalous. That $9 billion is, however, a drop in the bucket compared with the over $200 billion that the Associated Press reported in 2023 may have been outright stolen from Covid-era relief packages passed by Congress. That figure does not include the more than $100 billion in taxpayer dollars that weren’t pilfered but, rather, simply misallocated — never to be recovered.

 

As I said during a 2022 appearance on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, no one should or, honestly, can claim to be surprised by the level of fraud associated with the 2020 Paycheck Protection Program or the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act:

 

 

The story Republicans might be telling right now is not one that revolves around the uniquely perfidious Somalis or any other immigrant group. Rather, they might be saying that this exsanguination of the Treasury was gleefully presided over, after 2020 at least, by Democrats, few of whom seemed to care much that the government was funneling cash into fraudsters’ pockets. The Somali scandal is part of it; that is a story about how Democratic governance subsidizes anything that looks like a public service Democrats believe should be subsidized, and they withhold all scrutiny in the process. But that narrative tells the story in a microcosm. The broader arc of this story is about the failures of the welfare state in an age of tribalism.

 

Ultimately, Republicans could be using this opportunity to indict Democrats for insisting on an expansive social welfare apparatus, even if that apparatus cannot deliver the services it promises. As Semafor reporter Dave Weigel pithily put it, “Welfare liberalism can’t win if voters believe their money’s being stolen, and that liberals will let it happen to avoid being called racist.” That is precisely what happened in Minnesota.

 

According to onetime U.S. Attorney Joe Teirab, Minnesota fraud suspects “explicitly invoked race during a secretly recorded meeting with Attorney General Keith Ellison, asserting that investigators were targeting them ‘only because of race.’” Indeed, one juror was allegedly suborned by moneyed interests to allege that the investigation into this ring of fraudsters was “racially motivated.” And one legislative auditor’s report found that Minnesota Department of Education officials could not diligently investigate the outfits accused of fraud because they serve “members of a protected group of racial minorities and foreign nationals.” The mere threat of “negative media attention” deterred public officials from doing their jobs.

 

That’s the scandal. It’s a much bigger controversy than the one Chip Roy settled on. His proposed solution to it would neither mitigate the problem he set out to address nor put his Democratic opponents on the back foot. Democrats want nothing more than to avoid having to take responsibility for the corruption over which they presided, deferring instead to calcified narratives about Republican racism. The GOP should not give Democrats the opportunity to wriggle out of the trap they’ve set for themselves. They deserve to squirm, and only the GOP can make them.