A Minnesota nonprofit agreed to pay $18.5 million this week for stealing from a child food distribution program. In Ohio, eighteen Medicaid providers are accused of stealing more than $355,000 from the state’s health program for the needy. And Vice President J.D. Vance recently announced that 750,000 people fraudulently enrolled in Affordable Care Act plans will be removed from the rolls, a move the administration says will save taxpayers $2.2 billion.
The Minnesota case involves Partners in Nutrition (PiN), which agreed to the $18.5 million settlement over theft from a program meant to feed children. In Ohio, the eighteen accused Medicaid providers are alleged to have stolen from a program designed to serve low-income patients. Both cases add to a growing list of fraud findings tied to government welfare and health programs.
Chris Rufo has separately reported on widespread fraud uncovered in California, including what he describes as criminal conspiracies involving leftist NGOs.
Even Mamdani Says the Quiet Part
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, speaking at the Urban 20 Mayors Summit, made an admission that stood out given who was saying it: fraud and waste have been treated as a partisan issue rather than a governing one.
“Quality of life has come to be seen as somehow a right-wing concern. Efficiency … has been taken on as a right-wing concern, rooting out fraud and waste, a right-wing concern.”
Mamdani argued the problem is one of messaging, not policy: “If you are staring at an example of social disorder or social inefficiency, and the left refuses to explain either why it has happened or how they will fix it, then the right gets to point at someone in the immediate area and say, ‘That’s who did it.'”
Mamdani’s own city offers a case in point. Home health care is the largest source of employment for New Yorkers, a field critics have long flagged as vulnerable to exploitation and fraud.
A Pattern, Not an Accident
Conservative commentators have also pointed to fraud tied to pandemic-era aid. Podcaster Matt Walsh recently detailed how millions of dollars in Covid grants and loans went to fraudsters who used the money for mansions and luxury cars — in one instance, money that was allegedly connected to the assassination of the president of Haiti.
Critics of Democratic policy argue the fraud pattern traces back to the underlying assumptions behind welfare expansion: that inequality itself is proof of systemic injustice, and that pouring more money into a program is the fix regardless of whether the money reaches anyone it’s supposed to help. Writer Chris Bray, describing California’s high-speed rail project — which has cost roughly $15 billion with no train running — summarized the logic this way: “If you give money to people, then people have money, and that’s, you know, more bigger. For the economy!”
With Minnesota, Ohio, California and the federal ACA rolls all producing fresh fraud cases within days of each other, the pattern is hard to dismiss as isolated. The question heading into the November midterms is whether voters will treat it as a messaging failure, as Mamdani suggests, or as a structural feature of how these programs are run.
