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Hundreds of fed-up employees inside the Minnesota Department of Human Services are publicly torching Gov. Tim Walz, accusing him of letting a “massive fraud” operation mushroom on his watch and punishing the whistleblowers who tried to stop it.
More than $1 billion in taxpayer cash was siphoned off by scammers in the Feeding Our Future scheme, the biggest COVID-era fraud case in the country.
“Tim Walz is 100% responsible for massive fraud in Minnesota. We let Tim Walz know of fraud early on, hoping for a partnership in stopping fraud but no, we got the opposite response,” the Minnesota DHS employees’ X account, representing over 480 workers, wrote Saturday.
“Tim Walz systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression, and did his best to discredit fraud reports. Instead of partnership, we got the full weight of retaliation,” the group added. “It’s scary, isolating and left us wondering who we can turn to.”
The outrage comes as the Justice Department just secured its 78th prosecution tied to the scam. At least 59 people have been convicted so far.
For years, fraudsters exploited Minnesota’s sprawling social-services programs, setting up shell companies that billed the state for services prosecutors say never happened. Feeding Our Future, founded in 2016 and supposedly dedicated to feeding schoolchildren, teamed up with dozens of local outfits claiming to provide meals to tens of thousands of low-income kids. The nonprofit dissolved in 2022 as investigators revealed the cash was blown on luxury cars, foreign real estate, and other lavish purchases.
Other groups tied to Minnesota’s safety-net programs were caught committing fraud as well. Prosecutors say many of the scams were driven by networks within the state’s roughly 80,000-strong Somali diaspora.
“As staff, we firsthand witnessed and observed fraud happening yet we were shutdown, reassigned and told to keep quiet,” the DHS workers’ account said. “Sometimes more. Leadership did not want to appear to discriminate against certain communities and were unwilling to take action, such as stopping fraud, that would have an adverse impact on their image.”
Federal charges started rolling out in 2022. Once investigators dug into the paperwork, the scale of the corruption became clear. One homelessness program ballooned from $2.6 million in 2021 to $104 million last year — driven almost entirely by fraud, according to the New York Times.
“Minnesota has become the land of 10,000 frauds under Tim Walz,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) told The Post. “This is a total slap in the face to the hardworking, law-abiding people of Minnesota. The Walz administration is either too incompetent or completely unwilling to clean up their own mess.”