Poli Alert Politics & Civics
Related Articles
Vice President JD Vance said Wednesday the Trump administration will withhold $259 million in federal Medicaid money owed to Minnesota “in order to ensure that the state of Minnesota takes its obligations seriously to be good stewards of the American people’s tax money.”
The money is a small portion of Minnesota’s total Medicaid budget, which is more than $18 billion, with 60% of the money coming from the federal government. Still, state government is already facing an unstable fiscal environment given economic uncertainty and upcoming Medicaid cuts passed in President Trump’s signature domestic policy bill last year, set to take effect after the midterm elections. The cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill Act were passed to pay for tax cuts whose greatest beneficiaries are the richest Americans.
Since an article about fraud in Minnesota public programs appeared in a right-wing journal in November, the Trump administration has launched a slew of investigations and sanctions against Minnesota, most significantly an immigration enforcement crackdown that brought 3,000 federal agents and officers here — and led to the deaths of two Americans and a retreat by the administration in the face of a public backlash.
Minnesota’s Medicaid program — which provides health care to the indigent and people with disabilities — is already facing significant scrutiny from state investigators as part of a yearslong scandal that began with the theft of money intended for hungry children during the pandemic. The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office said earlier Wednesday they are investigating at least 200 health care and social service providers for potential fraud across 14 Medicaid services. Attorney General Keith Ellison said he’s prosecuted over 300 cases of Medicaid fraud during his seven-year tenure, according to the Associated Press.
A day prior, Tim O’Malley, who was designated the state’s Director of Program Integrity in December after a career in the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the FBI, released a 57-page report with an analysis of program vulnerabilities and a list of recommendations.
Minnesota has drawn attention thanks to some spectacular examples of fraud — like one program so riddled with theft it was shut down — but Medicaid fraud is a common problem across the country. In a single case last summer, for instance, the feds charged 324 defendants for falsified Medicare and Medicaid bills totaling more than $14 billion, according to the Miami Herald.
President Trump — who once paid $25 million to settle lawsuits with people who accused Trump University of fraud — has sometimes viewed scammers with mercy, like when he commuted the sentence of Philip Esformes, a Florida health care executive convicted in 2019 of a $1.3 billion Medicare and Medicaid fraud scheme.
Gov. Tim Walz derided the administration’s move as “a campaign of retribution.”
“This has nothing to do with fraud. The agents Trump allegedly sent to investigate fraud are shooting protesters and arresting children. His Department of Justice is gutting the U.S. Attorney’s Office and crippling their ability to prosecute fraud. And every week Trump pardons another fraudster,” Walz said on X. “These cuts will be devastating for veterans, families with young kids, folks with disabilities, and working people across our state.”
Walz’s jab about the U.S. Attorney’s Office refers to the cavalcade of career prosecutors — including former Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson — who have left in frustration over, for instance, the handling of the investigation of the killing of Minnesotan Renee Good by federal officer Jonathan Ross, the New York Times reported. The resignations — and a blizzard of immigration-related wrongful detention petitions filed by volunteer lawyers here — have almost certainly impeded the ongoing fraud investigations, given the key role of Thompson and other prosecutors in bringing charges.
Vance has taken a special interest in Minnesota recently. He was here in the days after Good’s killing. He called her “a victim of left-wing ideology” and blamed her for her own demise. He also referred to Good’s actions on the day she was killed as “classic terrorism.”
During his visit, Vance misled the public when he said the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown focused on Minnesota because “that’s where we have the highest concentration of people who have violated our immigration laws.”
This is false. Pew Research estimates that 130,000 undocumented immigrants lived in Minnesota as of 2023. States that are the most populous — California, Texas, Florida and New York — had the highest concentration of unauthorized immigrants, a combined 8 million in 2023.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the one-time TV doctor and now administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said Walz would have 60 days to respond to the Medicaid withholding.
“We will give them the money, but we’re going to hold it and only release it after they propose and act on a comprehensive corrective action plan to solve the problem,” Oz said.
by J. Patrick Coolican, Minnesota Reformer
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: [email protected].
