Minnesota’s multibillion-dollar welfare scammers surely have counterparts in New York

Scammers have vacuumed billions out of Minnesota’s lavish human-services spending, and New York social programs are likely suffering much the same.

Federal indictments in the North Star State reveal a welfare system picked over as by carpet beetles on a carcass.

The now-infamous “Feeding Our Future” fraud that hijacked $250 million in pandemic-relief funds is only the leading edge of what Acting US Attorney Joseph Thompson calls a “systematic and wholesale attack on our state government programs.” 

Fraudsters established bogus “community based” outfits that billed the state for “housing stabilization services” they never provided. As the fake invoices piled up, the state just kept cutting checks, even as the sums grew to 40 times the anticipated costs.

Scammers who often had zero connection to Minnesota targeted programs to assist autistic children and the disable, treat addiction, offer child-care services and more.

Yet because the scammers largely hailed from the Somali immigrant community, whose voters are vital to Democratic power, local and state officials like Gov. Tim Walz either turned a blind eye to the deeds of their criminal constituencies or facilitated them.

While still in Congress, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison championed the 2014 Money Remittances Improvement Act, which pushed the US Treasury Department to rely on weak state-level compliance rules on international money transfers by “nonbank” financial institutions — empowering Somalian criminals to siphon the stolen welfare funds to Mogadishu, with thumbs-up from Minnesota’s compromised regulators.

Minnesota became such “a magnet for fraud” that it “developed a fraud-tourism industry — people coming to our state purely to exploit and defraud its programs,” thunders Thompson, the federal prosecutor who just charged Philadelphia-based Anthony Waddel Jefferson and Lester Brown with siphoning millions from Minnesota Medicaid programs meant to help addicts and the disabled.

New York’s $116 billion a year in Medicaid outlays present an even richer target than Minnesota’s welfare programs, yet the Empire State’s anti-fraud efforts are a joke.

Notably, Gov. Kathy Hochul in recent years has called out how New York’s program to pay people to assist Medicaid-eligible relatives in their homes, the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program, has doubled and redoubled to $11 billion a year in outlays — yet her “solution,” hiring a single, private firm to manage CDPAP, has yet to limit spending by identifying scammers.

Instead, it empowered powerhouse 1199 to unionize the almost 300,000 “personal assistants,” which will surely boost costs.

And where liberal Minnesota pols fear cracking down on Somali scammers, New York politicians are routinely in bed with the state’s scandal-plagued (mostly all-American) nonprofit-industrial complex.

Progressives love to throw taxpayer cash at social problems but are chronically un-curious about where the money actually goes or how well it actually helps the needy: It’s a safe bet that New York’s welfare state hosts nonprofit profiteers every bit as sleazy as Minnesota’s, but even more politically plugged-in and so better at hiding it.