National Review Online
Tuesday, January 06, 2026
Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and erstwhile
congressman and vice-presidential hopeful, announced Monday that he is
abandoning his campaign for reelection. The about-face by Walz, who launched
his bid for a third term in mid-September, was triggered almost entirely by the
deluge of bad news about the state’s multibillion-dollar problem with
welfare-programs fraud.
Good riddance. Walz was sold to American voters in 2024
not only as a virtuous political leader but as an alternative and better model
of manhood. Almost nothing we were told about him in that process was true. His
selection by Kamala Harris confirmed all of our worst suspicions about her
judgment. The nation will be better off if neither of them holds public office
again.
Minnesota’s fraud problem is, as we have written before,
far from the only problem with Walz, from his extreme left-wing agenda and ideas to his issues with honesty. But neither is the fraud story simply
a run-of-the-mine government scandal of the sort that could happen under even
the most diligent chief executive.
Minnesota has opened itself up to abuse in three ways.
First, the state provides an unusually extensive array of generous benefits
with fairly lax criteria for qualification. The more rivers of money you
unsluice, the more opportunities you create to divert the flow. This dynamic
has been exacerbated by the deluge of new federal funds to and through the
states during and after Covid and the Biden administration, incentivizing them
to spend as much as possible as fast as possible. Second, the Walz administration
had lax financial controls and such minimal system oversight that a state audit in November found that the governor failed basic
internal controls even for his own office. Third, Walz and others in his
deep-blue cohort, especially after the George Floyd riots on his watch,
presided over a culture in which the fear of being called racist deterred them
from looking into fraud rings operating in the state’s Somali community, which
brandished such charges against anyone inclined to investigate.
The scale of the frauds involved is vast and as yet has
defied a full public accounting. The first major scandal to break came to light
in 2022 with federal charges involving the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, which
stole most of the money it took in for the ostensible purposes of providing
free lunches to schoolchildren. We already knew there was no such thing as a
free lunch, but in this case, there was no lunch at all. Then–Attorney General
Merrick Garland called it “the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme charged
to date.” Walz reacted by expanding the state’s school lunch program.
Since then, the revelations have kept coming, with dozens of federal
indictments under both the Biden and Trump Justice Departments for thefts of
staggering size and pervasiveness. More fraud turned up in housing subsidies,
Medicaid, autism services, and childcare, among others, while fraudulently
obtained funds were allegedly remitted back to Somalia. As a report at City
Journal observed, “An estimated 40 percent of households in Somalia
get remittances from abroad. In 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7
billion—more than the Somali government’s budget for that year.”
Then–Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson estimated in July that the “vast majority” of the federal
Housing Stabilization Services program in the state was fraudulent, with a
price tag exceeding $1 billion. By December, Thompson’s revised estimate was that “half or more” of the $18 billion
paid through easily exploited Medicaid programs since 2018 was received through
fraudulent means.
The immensity of this dereliction of duty to the taxpayer
is such that even the national political press occasionally took notice, albeit
while downplaying the Somali angle. CNN examined the problem in mid-2024, and so did the New York Times in November 2025. But it was a viral YouTube video by amateur commentator Nick Shirley
exposing blatant frauds in the form of nonexistent daycare centers without any
children that raised Minnesota’s fraud pandemic to a national issue.
There are lessons in all of this. One is that people will
abuse a welfare state that promotes an entitlement mentality in its recipients
and a mindset of clientelism in its personnel. A second is that electing
politicians who encourage both dynamics, and who depend upon both the welfare
recipients and the welfare bureaucrats as their constituency, will result in
leaders who act as their incentives would predict. A third is that programs
that rely on the culture and goodwill of the American people to avoid fraud are
more vulnerable when extended to immigrants who do not share that culture.
But maybe the simplest lesson of all is that nobody
should ever have trusted Tim Walz.
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