>> Continued From the Previous Page <<
The scope of the abuse is hard to comprehend.
A state housing assistance program launched less than four years ago was expected to cost just $2.6 million per year. By last year, spending had exploded to more than $100 million before officials abruptly shut it down.
Minnesota’s autism services program followed a similar trajectory. In 2018, the program cost roughly $3 million. By 2023, taxpayers were on the hook for nearly $400 million — a jaw-dropping increase that triggered belated scrutiny.
Then there is the now-infamous Feeding Our Future scandal, which siphoned $250 million from a pandemic-era program designed to feed hungry children. Prosecutors later revealed much of that money never went anywhere near kids.
Former acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson has since estimated that when all programs are accounted for, the real damage could exceed $2 billion.
As bad as the fraud itself is, whistleblowers say the cover-up was even worse.
Hundreds of employees inside the Minnesota Department of Human Services have come forward with claims that senior officials — many appointed by Walz — retaliated against staff who tried to report wrongdoing.
“Tim Walz is 100% responsible for massive fraud in Minnesota,” the whistleblower account posted. “We let Tim Walz know of fraud early on, hoping for a partnership in stopping fraud but no, we got the opposite response.”
According to the whistleblowers, Walz’s administration “systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression, and did his best to discredit fraud reports.”
Employees say when they raised red flags internally, they were reassigned, marginalized, and warned to stay silent.
“Agency leaders appointed by Tim Walz willfully disregarded rules and laws to keep fraud reports quiet — even to the extent of threatening the families of whistleblowers,” the account stated.
Former federal prosecutor Joe Teirab, who worked on the Feeding Our Future case, described how absurdly easy the fraud was to pull off.
“These fraudsters were just saying that they were spending all this money on feeding kids… and they were just making up these PDFs, putting false names into Excel sheets,” Teirab explained. “I could do that in five minutes on a computer if I had absolutely no conscience.”
Teirab also delivered what may be the most damaging revelation of all: officials inside the Walz administration had powerful political incentives to look the other way.
He said there was fear that enforcing the law would spark accusations of racism due to sensitivities surrounding Minnesota’s Somali community.
“There’s a sense of, ‘If we say something, are they going to call us racist?’ And that’s exactly what happened,” Teirab told Fox News.
At a recent state hearing, Republican fraud committee chair Kristin Robbins confronted Walz’s inspector general over allegations of retaliation.
“The whistleblowers who reach out to us within the department are terrified,” Robbins said. “This fraud has been perpetuated on your watch.”
Specific cases read like scenes from a bad Hollywood script.
One autism provider billed Medicaid more than $850,000 in a single year for one child and was paid $438,000 before the scheme was discovered.
Another provider, Asha Farhan Hassan, allegedly paid parents between $300 and $1,500 per month to keep children enrolled in a fake autism therapy program, while employing untrained teenagers and billing the state for services that never occurred.
Hassan also operated a Feeding Our Future site, claiming to serve 300 meals per day, seven days a week — while sending hundreds of thousands of dollars overseas to purchase real estate in Kenya.
Fox News Digital investigators later traced fraudulent billing addresses to empty parking lots, nonexistent office suites, and one building housing 22 fake companies that collectively billed Medicaid for $8 million.
When confronted publicly, Walz went on Meet the Press and blamed the scandal on “criminals” being drawn to Minnesota’s “generous” programs.
But mounting evidence suggests Walz knew about the fraud early, his administration suppressed warnings, and government employees who tried to stop the theft were intimidated into silence.
For Minnesota taxpayers, the fallout is far from over. And for Tim Walz, this scandal may prove impossible to outrun.
