Why Tim Walz ran cover for the Somali welfare fraudsters

For many years, Minnesota governor Tim Walz chose to look the other way while a Somali-run welfare-fraud scheme ran rampant in his state. Now, his do-nothing response to crime within this immigrant community – a key Democratic Party voting constituency – has cost him his career. On Monday, Walz announced that he was dropping his campaign for re-election as governor. Only a few months ago, Walz was riding high as Kamala Harris’s unlikely running mate and potential vice-president. Now he will exit the political stage leaving a legacy of incompetence.

It is fitting that Walz has been taken down by this scandal. The primary blame for the scam, of course, goes to the fraudsters themselves. But Walz and his administration have been willfully negligent. They deserve to bear responsibility for how easy they made it for con artists to steal taxpayer money for so long. The total tab is estimated to be a staggering $9 billion. It takes a special skill to allow such ‘industrial scale’ deception, as one US attorney described it, to develop right under your nose.

News of the welfare scam in Minnesota has rightly outraged Americans across the country. Over multiple years, fraudsters set up fake organisations, each billing millions to the state for services never provided. To date, 78 suspects have been charged, and 57 have been convicted, the majority being of Somali descent. Many more charges are expected.

The first of these charges, brought in 2022, related to the Feeding Our Future scheme. This was a childhood-nutrition programme, which claimed to distribute thousands of meals to schoolchildren during Covid, only it was doing no such thing. Investigations have since discovered fraud across a wide array of social services, including housing assistance, autism treatment and children’s daycare. One fake Medicaid programme set up to ‘provide advice on housing’ was found to have stolen over $100million from the state, with not a dime spent on legitimate purposes.

After literally taking food from the mouths of babies, the Somali fraudsters spent their ill-gotten gains on jewellery, expensive cars, houses and luxury resorts in Kenya. According to reports, funds were also funnelled from Minnesotan taxpayers’ pockets straight to al-Shabab, a Somali terrorist group.

To listen to Walz and his fellow Democrats in Minnesota, however, you would think the Somali fraud scandal was not a scandal at all. No big deal, nothing requiring exceptional measures to put a stop to. Indeed, Walz has previously bragged about Minnesota’s welfare programmes. In the 2024 vice-presidential debate, Walz cited a programme that made it easier for people to establish daycare centres as one of his main accomplishments – no mention of the fact that they were riddled with fraud.

For a long time, Walz has skated on this thin ice, just managing to avoid taking any responsibility. But renewed media attention meant that, eventually, his failures caught up with him. In November, Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe published a report into welfare fraud in Minnesota, which led to President Trump and treasury secretary Scott Bessent announcing an investigation. Then, in December, independent journalist Nick Shirley produced a viral video – now viewed by millions of people – on Somali-run daycare centres in Minneapolis. Infamously, he showed up at the ‘Quality Learing Center’ (sic) to find no children present.

In response to greater scrutiny, Walz has sought to deflect criticism. Last week, he claimed to have ‘strengthened oversight’ and ‘supported prosecutions’ of fraud. But it is the US Justice Department – not Walz, nor Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison – that has conducted the investigations and prosecuted the crimes. Back in 2022, when challenged as to why he continued to authorise payments to the Feeding Our Future programme after evidence of fraud emerged, Walz blamed a judge – only to be later admonished by that same judge, who said he had never issued such an order to continue payments.

Worse still, it is alleged that Walz and his administration actively sought to squash warnings from state employees and further investigations into the scams. In December, an account on X claiming to speak for 480 current Minnesota Department of Human Services employees alleged that ‘Tim Walz is 100 per cent responsible for massive fraud in Minnesota’. ‘We let Tim Walz know of fraud early on’, yet he ‘systematically retaliated against whistleblowers’ and ‘did his best to discredit fraud reports’, the post claims.

Looking the other way was systemic within the Democratic Party state apparatus. As Joe Thompson, a career prosecutor, powerfully expressed it:

‘This fraud crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the result of widespread failure across nearly every level of leadership in Minnesota: Politicians who turned a blind eye. Agencies that failed to act. Prosecutors and law enforcement who didn’t push hard enough. Reporters who ignored the story. Community leaders who stayed silent. And a public that wanted to believe it couldn’t happen here. This isn’t just a few criminals exploiting the system – this is a system that’s been begging to be exploited.’

Nevertheless, it remains the case that all these frauds happened under the auspices of Governor Walz.

To further deflect criticism of his own inaction, Walz also pulled out the race card. He said the Trump administration and their backers are ‘waging war’ against his state and the Somalis who live there because they are racist. ‘This is what happens when they target communities for their own benefit; this is what happens when they scapegoat, and this is what happens when they no longer hide the idea of white supremacy’, Walz said. But his allegations of racism have fallen flat; a case of crying wolf too many times. Clearly, it is not racist to criticise fraud, nor racist to notice that the fraudsters are predominantly of Somali background. The public remains rightly outraged, and sees Walz’s reaction for what it is – a deflection from his own failings.

The question of race is, of course, one of the reasons that these taxpayer-theft schemes reached ‘industrial scale’ in the first place. When state administrators raised concerns about dodgy practices, the scammers threatened to call them out as ‘racist’. In one email, the Feeding Our Future group threatened officials, saying that, if they did not approve applications from ‘minority-owned businesses’, they would face discrimination lawsuits and have accusations of bigotry ‘sprawled across the news’. Sure enough, the officials backed down, rather than endure being called racist.

Minnesota officials also let the fraud continue unabated because they were fearful of alienating the Somali community in Minnesota. Kayseh Magan, a Somali American who once worked as a fraud investigator, said Democratic Party administrators were reluctant to take more assertive actions, despite evidence of wrongdoing: ‘There is a perception that forcefully tackling this issue might cause political backlash among the Somali community, which is a core voting bloc [for Democrats].’

British readers will no doubt recognise similarities with their authorities’ handling of the rape-gang scandal. Just as in Minnesota, the UK government, police and media looked the other way, terrified of being accused of racism for drawing attention to crimes predominantly involving ethnic-minority perpetrators.

While Walz’s political career is essentially over, we have not heard the last of him. Republicans in the House Committee on Oversight and Reform have requested documents from Walz, and it is likely he will be hauled before the committee to explain how so much money was stolen on his watch. He is unlikely to be charged with a crime unless investigators can find evidence that he directly helped to advance the schemes. But you can believe Trump investigators will be looking into whether Walz and other Democrat officials received money from the fraudsters.

The issue of the Democrats’ complicity with social-services fraud could be a major theme in 2026. The scandal almost certainly goes well beyond Minnesota. The Trump administration announced this week that it is freezing $10 billion in funds for social services and childcare in five Democrat-led states (California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York), suggesting that funding there may have been used fraudulently. There are also reports of Somali-led fraud schemes in Maine and Ohio, among other states.

The blue states appear to have a corrupt governance model. In the name of helping the needy, Democrat officials funnel social-services money to politically connected nonprofit groups, who then, in turn, donate to the political campaigns. No doubt, we will soon learn that Tim Walz and his Minnesota allies are just the tip of the iceberg.

Sean Collins is a writer based in New York. Visit his blog, The American Situation.