Congress Built This
The Minnesota fraud scandals aren’t a failure of state administration. They’re a failure of Congress—and every taxpayer is paying for it twice.
The magnitude cannot be overstated. What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s staggering, industrial-scale fraud. It’s swamping Minnesota and calling into question everything we know about our state.”
First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson
Words 2,370 | Read Time 11 min | Enjoy
Foreword
When congressional committees convened hearings to interrogate Minnesota officials about the Feeding Our Future scandal, the daycare controversies, and the cascading Medicaid frauds that have cost taxpayers hundreds of millions—possibly billions—of dollars, the optics were compelling. Legislators leaned into microphones, expressed outrage, and demanded accountability. What they did not do was look in the mirror.
The uncomfortable truth is that Congress did not merely fail to prevent these frauds. Congress built the system that made them not just possible but, in retrospect, nearly inevitable. And in doing so, it also helped fuel the inflation that has eroded the purchasing power of every American’s paycheck.
Congress Appropriates. Congress Bears Responsibility.
Every dollar that flowed through Feeding Our Future, through fraudulent autism clinics, through ghost daycare centers, and through the housing stabilization services scheme originated in a congressional appropriation. The federal child nutrition programs exploited by Feeding Our Future draw their authority from statutes Congress passed and funds Congress allocated. Medicaid programs riddled with billing fraud are financed primarily by the federal government—in Minnesota’s case, the federal share is roughly 64 cents of every dollar spent. The Child Care Assistance Program, which became the focus of the viral daycare controversy, is likewise a creature of federal statute and federal funding.
When Congress authorizes a program and appropriates money for it, it accepts a corresponding obligation: to design that program with adequate safeguards, to fund its oversight adequately, and to monitor whether the money is being used as intended. On all three counts, Congress has chronically failed.
The Pandemic Acceleration: Congress Turned Off the Safeguards
The Feeding Our Future fraud did not erupt from nowhere. It erupted from a specific policy decision made in Washington. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Congress passed emergency legislation that dramatically expanded child nutrition programs and simultaneously relaxed the documentation and verification requirements that existed to prevent abuse. The intent was to move money quickly to families in crisis. The result was that billions of dollars were placed into a distribution system with the oversight mechanisms stripped out.
Minnesota education officials had already flagged Feeding Our Future as a problematic organization before the pandemic began. They had labeled it “severely deficient” and attempted to cut off its funding. But pandemic-era emergency rules, shaped by congressional action, flooded the program with money faster than any state apparatus could manage, and the legal environment made it difficult to deny applications even from organizations already under scrutiny.
Congress created the flood and removed the levees simultaneously. This pattern was not unique to Minnesota. Federal investigators documented pandemic fraud totaling tens of billions of dollars across unemployment insurance, Paycheck Protection Program loans, and nutrition assistance programs nationwide. The common thread in every case was a congressional decision to prioritize the rapid disbursement of money over the maintenance of controls. Speed was treated as a virtue. Verification was treated as an obstacle.
Printing Money, Paying the Price: How This Fuels Inflation
The fraud scandals in Minnesota are not merely a story about stolen dollars. They are a story about what happens when a government that issues a fiat currency treats the creation and disbursement of money as cost-free. It is not.
The United States does not tax and spend in a simple loop. When Congress authorizes enormous emergency expenditures—as it did repeatedly during the pandemic—and when those expenditures are not fully offset by tax revenue, the difference is financed by issuing new debt. That debt is purchased, in significant part, by the Federal Reserve, which creates the money to buy it. This is the mechanism by which government spending that exceeds revenue expands the money supply. More dollars chase the same quantity of goods. Prices rise. Every American pays a hidden tax in the form of inflation.
Fraud makes this dynamic worse in a specific and underappreciated way. When legitimate government spending reaches its intended recipients, it typically flows back into the productive economy: a family uses a childcare subsidy to pay a real provider, who pays real employees, who buy real goods and services. The multiplier effect, while debated in its magnitude, at least involves economic activity. But when hundreds of millions of dollars are stolen through ghost daycares, fake meal sites, and fraudulent Medicaid billing, those dollars do not flow into productive economic activity. They flow into luxury goods, overseas real estate, and accounts beyond the reach of American law. The money supply was expanded—the inflationary pressure was created—but no corresponding productive value was added to the economy.
In other words, the American public was charged twice: once through the inflation tax that accompanied the money creation, and once through the direct loss of the stolen funds. The beneficiaries were fraudsters. The victims were everyone who bought groceries, paid rent, or filled a gas tank in the years that followed.
The Federal Reserve’s response to pandemic-era inflation—the most aggressive interest rate tightening in four decades—carried its own costs: higher mortgage rates that locked millions of Americans out of the housing market, increased debt service costs for the federal government, and a credit crunch that constrained small-business growth. Every one of those downstream harms traces a chain of causation back, in part, to Congress’s decision to spend without adequate verification.
Structural Negligence: The Oversight Gap by Design
Beyond the pandemic emergency, there is a deeper and more chronic problem. Congress routinely authorizes programs and appropriates funds without providing adequate resources for their administration and oversight. The Minnesota Medicaid system, which investigators now believe may have lost as much as $9 billion to fraud since 2018, was monitored by a fraud team consisting of four investigators at the time the scandals broke. Four people are responsible for policing billions of dollars in annual expenditures across dozens of programs and thousands of providers.
This is not an accident of state mismanagement alone. Federal Medicaid law and congressional appropriations shape how much states can and must invest in program integrity. The Government Accountability Office has documented for decades that Medicaid’s structure creates systemic vulnerabilities: it is a massive, complex, jointly administered program in which the federal government provides the bulk of the money but relies on states to administer it, and neither level of government has an unambiguous incentive to invest heavily in fraud prevention. The federal government is spending someone else’s administrative capacity; the states are spending someone else’s money. Congress has repeatedly received GAO reports detailing these vulnerabilities and has repeatedly failed to mandate the structural reforms that would close them.
Congressional Hearings as Performance
When Congress hauls state officials before a committee to answer for fraud that occurred under their watch, it is engaged in a deeply dishonest theater. The implicit premise of such hearings is that the problem lies with the administrators who mismanaged federal money. The premise that is never examined is whether the programs were ever designed to succeed.
Legislators who voted for emergency pandemic relief without verification requirements, who have declined year after year to fund robust Medicaid program-integrity operations, and who have resisted electronic attendance-verification systems for childcare despite GAO recommendations are not investigators of a problem. They are architects of it.
There is something particularly brazen about members of Congress treating Minnesota’s fraud scandals as an opportunity to score political points, when the congressional record on program oversight is so plainly inadequate. The daycare controversy generated hearings, press releases, and executive branch actions within weeks of a viral video. The slow accumulation of GAO and Inspector General reports documenting systemic Medicaid vulnerabilities over the preceding decade generated almost nothing.
The Asymmetry of Accountability
The fraudsters who exploited these programs deserve prosecution, and most of those identified in the Minnesota cases have been or are being prosecuted. That is appropriate. But the accountability structure that has emerged from these scandals is radically asymmetric. Individual perpetrators face prison. State administrators face congressional hearings and public humiliation. The federal legislators who designed programs without adequate controls, who stripped verification requirements during the pandemic, and who declined to fund meaningful oversight face no accountability at all—indeed, they occupy the chairs and wield the gavels.
This asymmetry is not accidental. Congressional investigations are self-investigations, and they are structured accordingly. The scope of inquiry is always defined in a way that keeps the camera pointed at the executive branch and away from the legislative one. When fraud erupts in a federally funded, state-administered program, the natural target is the state. The question of whether Congress gave the state an impossible task—vast sums of money, inadequate tools, and conflicting legal constraints—is rarely asked.
What Real Accountability Would Look Like
If Congress were genuinely interested in preventing the next Minnesota-scale fraud rather than exploiting the current one, the legislative agenda would look very different. It would include mandatory electronic attendance verification for all federally funded childcare programs, something the GAO has recommended and Congress has never required. It would include robust, adequately funded federal-state fraud-coordination units within Medicaid, rather than the skeletal teams that states currently field. It would include honest legislative post-mortems on the pandemic emergency relief programs that examine the actual cost to taxpayers of documentation waivers.
And it would include a serious reckoning of the monetary consequences of undisciplined spending. Every dollar that leaves the Treasury without adequate verification is not merely a dollar lost to fraud. It is a dollar that was created—expanding the money supply, diluting the value of every dollar already in circulation, and imposing an invisible tax on every American who had nothing to do with the scandal and no power to prevent it.
Conclusion: The Red Herring in the Hearing Room
Congressional investigations into the Minnesota fraud scandals are, in a meaningful sense, an investigation of Congress’s own handiwork. The hearings are a red herring—a way of directing public anger at state administrators, immigrant communities, and program recipients, rather than at the legislative branch that designed the programs, set the funding levels, waived the safeguards, and then declined to mandate the oversight that would have caught the fraud early.
The real scandal is not that fraudsters found and exploited gaps in government programs. Fraudsters always will. The real scandal is that Congress kept creating those gaps, kept being warned about them, and kept doing nothing—while the money supply expanded, prices rose, and ordinary Americans paid the bill.
Until Congress accepts that appropriating money without adequate oversight is not generosity but negligence—fiscal, administrative, and monetary—the hearings will continue, the press releases will continue, and, in the next crisis, so will the fraud.
Postscript: The War That Buried the Story
There is a bitter irony in the timing of what you have just read. By the time this essay reaches you, the fraud scandals that consumed Minnesota’s political oxygen for the better part of two years — Feeding Our Future, the ghost Medicaid billers, the autism clinics that never treated a child, the daycare centers that may or may not have been empty — have been largely swallowed by a far larger news event.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated airstrikes on Iran, targeting military and government sites, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and triggering Iranian retaliatory missile and drone strikes across the Middle East and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict disrupted global travel and trade, halted flights across the Middle East, and sent shipping lines scrambling to reroute around the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. Oil markets lurched. NATO allies scrambled. A region already scarred by years of proxy conflict was plunged into open war.
Against that backdrop, the question of who stole $250 million from a school lunch program in Minneapolis does not trend. The congressional hearings have quieted. The press conferences have stopped. The accountability that was never really coming has now been given a perfectly respectable excuse for not arriving.
This too is a pattern worth naming. Large-scale government fraud rarely gets the sustained reckoning it deserves precisely because the news cycle is infinite and human attention is not. A war — any war, but especially one involving nuclear facilities, great-power calculations, and the assassination of a head of state — is the ultimate page-turner. Everything before it becomes, in the media’s taxonomy, old news. The stolen billions become a footnote. The structural failures of Congress that enabled the theft go not merely unexamined but unremembered.
The fraudsters who are still awaiting trial may quietly calculate that a distracted public, an overwhelmed Justice Department, and a federal prosecutor’s office already depleted by resignations make their odds somewhat better than they were six months ago. They may not be wrong.
The Strait of Hormuz has since partially reopened. The war grinds on. And somewhere in Minneapolis, the ledger of stolen dollars sits in a federal courthouse, waiting for a moment of national attention that may never fully return.
The money is still gone. The system that lost it is still intact. And Congress is still writing the checks.
Parting Shot and Bottom Line
Show me where the Constitution mandates ANY money to be bled out of the treasury for these “programs” — $521 Billion and counting. It is all part of a pogrom that will end our Republic.📕
I warmly encourage you to consider becoming a paid subscriber if you have the means. Tips are appreciated, too. Regardless of your choice, your support is deeply appreciated. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for your invaluable support!
Even granting that the intent was to move money quickly to families in crisis, I can't find enough words to describe the unscrupulous, amoral, narcissistic, psychopathic, greedy bastards who took advantage of it.
Con gress meaning= swindle step