Is Minnesota too well-governed? That was Gov. Tim Walz’s explanation for how his state allowed more than $1 billion worth of public funds to be stolen on his watch. The Democrat explained Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Minnesota is a generous, prosperous and well-run state. “We’re triple-A bond-rated,” he said. “But that attracts criminals.”
Does it? There is no evidence the 86 people charged so far for allegedly lining their pockets with taxpayer money flocked to the Land of 10,000 Lakes for low-yield bonds. Their sights were set on the state’s vast and unaccountable welfare programs: European-style entitlements that turned out to be shockingly easy to scam.
You might remember Walz as Kamala Harris’s deliberately unsophisticated running mate. He drank Diet Mountain Dew, bragged about never owning a share of stock and exaggerated his military service record. For seven years, he’s governed a state of 5.8 million through a string of crises. Minneapolis was set alight after the murder of George Floyd, and crime rates have never fully recovered. He imposed onerous covid restrictions longer than most other states. Despite high disapproval ratings, he’s seeking a third term in 2026.
The governor is not helping himself by refusing to take responsibility for the welfare fraud that happened in plain sight during the pandemic. Residents, mostly of Somali descent, targeted established Medicaid programs. They opened fake food distribution centers and autism centers to funnel resources away from the neediest. The numbers alone made clear what was happening. Autism centers in Minnesota grew by 700 percent between 2018 and 2023 once it became clear how much welfare money was available for the taking. Funding increased by 3,000 percent, from $6 million to almost $192 million. No reasonable person could possibly believe this money was addressing a real surge in autism, yet attempts to flag strange trends went unanswered.
Walz has long insisted that orders from the FBI and a judge stopped him from acting. “Certainly I take responsibility for putting people in jail,” he told NBC. This mirrors President Donald Trump’s comments to the same Sunday show six months ago about the country’s economic outlook: “I think the good parts are the Trump economy, and the bad parts are the Biden economy.”
But if anyone can help Walz win reelection in what’s shaping up to be a big Democratic year, it’s Trump. His most recent attacks on Walz’s mental abilities, expressed with particularly crass language, have already pivoted the story away from mass-welfare fraud to political mudslinging between boomers.
Trump also responded to fraud revelations by terminating the legal protections through which many Somali migrants first entered the United States. Walz correctly called it lazy “to demonize an entire community on the actions of a few.” Threatening the status of law-abiding refugees is morally bankrupt.
But it is also lazy to sing the praises of Minnesota’s famously generous welfare state when its merits, and its resources, are evaporating. Walz signed anti-fraud legislation at the start of this year in an attempt to weed out abuses of the system more effectively, but he has also overseen a vast expansion of the welfare state during his tenure, without implementing robust safeguards and checks to be sure the money is fairly distributed.
Even though Minnesota is a blue state, Harris and Walz carried it by just four points last year. Democrats there have never won five consecutive gubernatorial elections, which is what Walz is trying to do. A field of 11 Republicans, including the speaker of the state House, is vying for the nomination.
They will, of course, link him to the scandals. At the same time, all of them should make the more fundamental point that a “generous” welfare budget means little when it doesn’t truly help the most vulnerable. Spending large sums is not the point of welfare. It’s to provide a safety net so no one starves or freezes. The hard truth is that making more money available for the poor also makes programs more prone to abuse.
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