House Majority Whip Tom Emmer said Minnesota’s fellow blue states will be the next fronts in the Trump administration’s war on welfare fraud.
As much as $9 billion in taxpayer funds may have been stolen from Minnesota’s Medicaid programs in schemes where the vast majority of those charged were of Somali descent, federal officials say. Emmer, who represents Minnesota’s 6th congressional district, spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation after joining House Oversight Committee members Wednesday to grill Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison about their role in presiding over the theft of taxpayer funds intended for those in need.
“This should be a good message to every other state that has this type of failed leadership. The day is coming. You’re all going to be held accountable,” Emmer told the DCNF. “At the end of the day, these programs, they need to be viable for the people they were intended for, not the fraudsters.”
Just a week ahead of the hearing, Trump declared a “war on fraud” in his State of the Union address. He specifically singled out California, Massachusetts and Maine as having “even worse” rates of fraud than Minnesota, and appointed Vice President JD Vance to lead the effort. Maine, like Minnesota, also has a significant Somali population.
Vance quickly jumped into action and halted $259 million in Medicaid funds over fraud concerns, saying the government’s job is “to shut the border and shut off the fraud.” Minnesota state leaders, including Walz, have called the move politically motivated “retribution.”
Emmer called Vance’s appointment an “excellent decision,” adding he has “full confidence in our vice president.”
“[Vance is] going to go from Minnesota to places like California to Illinois to New York. They know where the fraud is currently, and they know where they need to look,” Emmer told the DCNF. “I have no doubt that when the president says this, he’s gonna find it, and they’re gonna root these people out.”
The Minnesota Republican has began sounding the alarm on fraud in his home state for years. The Walz administration was first notified of the rampant abuses as early as 2019, shortly after the fraud was said to have began, according to the assistant commissioner for the Minnesota Department of Education who testified under oath.
“I guarantee they’re going to find the same thing when people go to California, for instance. Minnesota is only 5.7 million people and we’re talking as much as nine billion in fraud. California’s got 40 million people,” Emmer told the DCNF. “I think these states are now on notice.”
Republican California Rep. Young Kim called California the “fraud capital of the world” during a February hearing with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. She underscored the $32 million in unemployment fraud throughout the state as well as significant fraud linked to artificial intelligence in community colleges.
Three individuals were arrested and another charged after the Department of Justice found over $1 million was stolen in a fraud scheme in Massachusetts that targeted the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance.
The Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General also recently released an audit report from Maine revealing $45.6 million in improper Medicaid payments for children diagnosed with autism.
Individuals tied to the Minnesota’s fraud cases started facing charges in 2022 under the Biden administration, with the Department of Justice charging 48 people with stealing $240 million for exploiting a child nutrition program during the pandemic. However, there was no further action to fix the program’s vulnerabilities that allowed for fraud to go unnoticed.
“I’m just grateful [the Trump administration] started in Minnesota,” Emmer told the DCNF. “We’ve been screaming about this for years. Nobody would listen.”
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