Welfare Fraud In Blue Cities: How Pervasive Is The Kleptocracy?

If you keep up with current events at all, it is unlikely that you have missed in the past week the explosion of the Minnesota Somali welfare fraud scandal into the national, and even international, news.  

Not that the enormous Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota is something new.  The bloggers at Powerline, who are based in Minnesota, have been covering the subject since at least 2018.  Here is a May 2018 City Journal piece by Scott Johnson (of Powerline), reporting on an investigation of Somali-owned daycare centers in Minneapolis suspected of stealing millions by billing the government for inflated number of enrollees.  But things really got going when the pandemic hit in 2020-21. Minnesota became ground zero for Somali fraudsters setting up sites supposedly to feed hungry children, and collecting millions for meals that were never prepared or served.  Federal indictments for this fraud —  including 47 people charged in the first indictment — began to issue in 2022.  Dozens of articles at Powerline have traced the scandal since that time, as the revealed scope of the fraud has gradually gone from the millions to the hundreds of millions, and most recently into the billions of dollars.

Yet somehow the scandal didn’t make it into the national press in a big way until the New York Times finally jumped in on November 29, 2025, with a long article headlined “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch.”  Excerpt:

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.  Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.  At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality.  Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

The Times piece appears to have given the cue to the rest of the liberal establishment that it was now OK to break the omertà previously in effect against covering the Minnesota scandal.  Suddenly the story is everywhere.