Minnesota has the most generous and all-encompassing welfare programs in the nation. This soft-heartedness has a dark flip side: the state is "drowning in fraud," according to a City Journal investigative report.
If the people of Minnesota want to support politicians who throw money at any social problem known to man, that's their choice. But I'm sure they would be enraged to know the scope of the fraudulent schemes that have robbed taxpayers of billions of dollars.
In many cases, the fraud has been perpetrated by members of the state's large Somali community. Federal counterterrorism agencies say that millions of dollars from these fraudulent schemes that bilk taxpayers end up in the hands of the Somali al-Qaeda offshoot, al-Shabaab.
"Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone," according to the City Journal report. "Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots."
I covered one of these fraud schemes earlier this year, where prosecutors exposed a massive $250 million grift from a program meant to feed poor children. Feeding Our Future not only supplied meals to kids but also acted as a clearinghouse for dozens of other non-profit groups that also supplied food to children, many of which were implicated in the scam.
Few meals were ever served to anyone, but you'd never know that, looking at the records. It took the state several years to realize they were being fleeced. Poor recordkeeping and a decided disinterest in what black charities were doing with tens of millions of dollars made "Feeding our Future" easy pickings for the Somalis.
One scam involved Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program. It was designed "to help seniors, addicts, the disabled, and the mentally ill secure housing," according to the City Journal investigation.
Costs quickly spiraled out of control. In 2021, the program paid out more than $21 million in claims. In the following years, annual costs shot up to $42 million, then $74 million, then $104 million. During the first six months of 2025, payouts totaled $61 million.
On August 1, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services moved to scrap the HSS program, noting that payment to 77 housing-stabilization providers had been terminated this year due to “credible allegations of fraud.” Joe Thompson, then the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, went even further, stating that the “vast majority” of the HSS program was fraudulent.
On September 18, Thompson announced criminal indictments for HSS fraud against Moktar Hassan Aden, Mustafa Dayib Ali, Khalid Ahmed Dayib, Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed, Christopher Adesoji Falade, Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, Asad Ahmed Adow, and Anwar Ahmed Adow—six of whom, according a U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesperson, are members of Minnesota’s Somali community. Thompson made clear that this is just the first round of charges for HSS fraud that his office will be prosecuting.
“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just overbilling,” Thompson said at a press conference. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.”
Like any good American racket, the Somalis have bought off or hornswoggled politicians to give them a patina of respectability.
"Several individuals involved in the Feeding Our Future scheme donated to, or appeared publicly with, Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born congresswoman from Minneapolis. Omar’s deputy district director, Ali Isse, advocated on behalf of Feeding Our Future," the report states. "Omar Fateh, a former state senator who recently ran for Minneapolis mayor, lobbied Governor Tim Walz in support of the program," according to City Journal, and one of the accused, Abdi Nur Salah, was a senior aide to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.
There was a scheme to defraud a federally funded autism program for children. One of the fraudsters in the autism services scam, Asha Farhan Hassan, was a double-dipper. She was also involved in the "Feeding our Future" grift.
The autism scam was a thing of beauty (if you're a scam artist). Hassan and her co-conspirators “approached parents in the Somali community” and recruited their children into autism therapy services. It didn't matter if the kids were afflicted with autism. Hasan took care of it by faking a diagnosis.
In a press release announcing the indictment, the U.S. Attorney’s Office made clear that the alleged autism fraud scheme extended to a wide network of people. “To drive up enrollment, Hassan and her partners paid monthly cash kickback payments to the parents of children who enrolled,” the release reads. “These kickback payments ranged from approximately $300 to $1500 per month, per child. The amount of these payments was contingent on the services DHS authorized a child to receive—the higher the authorization amount, the higher the kickback. Often, parents threatened to leave... and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks.”
Dozens of Somali families took part in the fraud. This isn't unusual when you consider the tight-knit clans from Somalia that immigrated to America. The clans tend to group in one neighborhood or city and are able to carry out their criminal enterprises like a gang. They depend on the close ties they have with the rest of the community, which they can rely on to keep their mouths shut.
The al-Shabaab connection to these criminal enterprises is, perhaps, the most troubling aspect of the fraud.
According to Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who spent 14 years on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Somalis ran a sophisticated money network, spanning from Seattle to Minneapolis, and were routing significant amounts of cash on commercial flights from the Seattle airport to the hawala networks in Somalia. One of these networks, Kerns discovered, sent $20 million abroad in a single year. “The amount of money was staggering,” Kerns said.
Kerns’s investigation eventually expanded to Minnesota, where he realized the same thing was happening. “I worked on it for five years,” Kerns said. “We had sources going into the hawalas to send money. I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well s**t, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits. How does that make sense? We had good sources tell us: this is welfare fraud.”
The laxity in seeing where taxpayer dollars go is one thing. This is far beyond any lackadaisical attitude toward a bureaucrat's job in tracking where our money goes and how it's spent. This organized criminal enterprise played on the progressive sensibilities of politicians and bureaucrats to fleece the U.S. and Minnesota taxpayers of billions of dollars.
Related: New York's Bail Reform Has Not Made Anyone Safer. Here Are the Receipts.
The prosecutions may have uncovered only a small portion of the fraud.
