Staff Reports
Americans wake up angry because this week a damning City Journal investigation and a federal response exposed a grotesque failure of taxpayer accountability in Minnesota — and the questions it raises cut to the heart of who in Washington is actually protecting hardworking families. The City Journal report lays out how billions in fraudulent claims tied to state-run welfare programs were siphoned through shell providers and informal money networks and, according to multiple law-enforcement sources cited in the piece, some of that cash wound up in Somalia where Al-Shabaab operates.
The Biden administration’s Treasury Department has now launched a formal probe to determine whether Minnesotans’ tax dollars were diverted and ultimately ended up funding terrorists, a step that should have been taken months ago by career prosecutors and state officials who turned a blind eye. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the investigation publicly, and his action confirms conservatives’ long-standing warnings about sprawling, poorly supervised entitlement programs becoming cash machines for fraud.
Make no mistake: the fraud itself has been massive and brazen. Federal prosecutors have charged scores of people in schemes tied to programs like Feeding Our Future and Housing Stabilization Services, and court records show money moved overseas and was used on luxury purchases and foreign investments — even as prosecutors insist they’ve found no smoking-gun terrorism-financing charges so far. That gap should alarm every patriot: spending flowed where it shouldn’t have, and the fact that funds crossed borders into a country dominated in part by terrorists demands a full accounting.
Conservative investigators have traced how illicit proceeds often travel through hawala networks and informal money-transmission systems that are ripe for abuse and virtually invisible to bureaucrats in St. Paul or D.C. The City Journal reporting and subsequent conservative coverage have exposed how these informal channels can convert domestic theft into foreign remittances that, according to some counterterrorism sources, provide revenue streams for groups like Al-Shabaab. Our security depends on stopping those pipelines, not downplaying them.
Where were Minnesota’s Democratic leaders while this was happening? Where was the national press? The mainstream media’s silence and the state’s lax oversight didn’t just enable fraud — they endangered Americans by allowing money to move into lawless regions of the world. It’s shameful that Minnesotans’ tax dollars intended for housing, health, and children’s meals were turned into profit for fraudsters and possibly funneled into terror-supporting networks.
This scandal is also a policy wake-up call: Treasury has already begun tightening reporting rules for money-services businesses and is considering geographic targeting orders to force transparency into suspicious remittances — sensible actions that Republicans have been demanding for years. If Congress has any spine left, it should force hearings, demand immediate audits of every program with unexplained outflows, and pass real penalties for states and officials who allow federal funds to disappear into black holes overseas.
Every patriot should be furious, not just at the grifters who stole these funds but at a system that rewarded negligence and soft bigotry toward accountability. We must secure the welfare system so it serves Americans in need and not criminal syndicates or foreign thugs, hold local and federal officials accountable, and end the culture of politically convenient silence. Washington can either stand with the taxpayer and restore common-sense oversight, or it can keep protecting failed policies that put our security and money at risk — the rest of us won’t forget which side our leaders chose.
