For more than a decade, tea party activists have been smeared as “extremist” and “racist” for insisting that government spending was out of control and ripe for abuse. The recent flood of fraud revelations, from Minnesota to New York to California and beyond, proves what we said from the beginning: America was being robbed in broad daylight, and too many leaders either didn’t care or were in on it.
As Americans learn more and more about the massive fraud schemes surfacing in Minnesota and other states, the truth is unmistakable: many of the spending programs politicians swore were untouchable — because they were supposedly feeding hungry children or helping vulnerable Americans — were, in reality, wide-open pipelines for fraudsters.
First came the “Feeding Our Future” scandal in Minnesota, which stole roughly $250 million and has already produced more than fifty convictions. But that case now looks like the preview to something far bigger.
In December, federal prosecutors described what they are uncovering as nothing short of an industrial-scale fraud. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said, “The fraud is not small. It isn’t isolated… It’s a staggering industrial scale of fraud.”
Thompson’s office has identified 14 Medicaid-funded services at high risk — housing stabilization, adult day services, autism programs, non-emergency medical transport, home-based care, and more. These programs have cost taxpayers $18 billion since 2018. Thompson didn’t hedge when asked how much of that may have been stolen: it is “very possible” that half or more of the $18 billion was fraudulent.
Investigators say many of these schemes are tied to Somali immigrant-linked networks, including individuals reportedly here illegally, exploiting programs American taxpayers are forced to fund. Even before this latest announcement, federal officials had uncovered roughly $822 million in fraud across Minnesota’s Medicaid and social-service programs. Now they believe even that staggering figure may represent only a fraction of the total.
Citizen journalist Nick Shirley’s investigative reporting finally captured the nation’s attention: daycares receiving millions with no children inside and medical vans billing for thousands of rides even though they never left the parking lot. And Minnesota is not alone. Officials in Ohio are raising alarms about fraudulent home-health networks. Maine and Washington State appear to have similar problems with systemic, Somali-linked fraud.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently said Minnesota is simply the early warning sign for what’s happening in blue states like California, Illinois, and New York: “Benefits have been turned into businesses. It is a cottage industry of teaching people how to form LLCs, multiple LLCs, how to game the system, how to move money around.” Secretary Bessent and Elon Musk have both estimated that roughly 10 percent of the federal budget, or about $700 billion a year, could be swallowed by fraud and abuse.
The pattern is clear: the more investigators look, the more fraud they find. That’s because fraud follows the money, and in Washington, the money spigot is always turned on.
None of this surprises those of us in the Tea Party. For sixteen years, we said Congress was spending money it didn’t have, in ways it couldn’t justify, on programs it refused to police. And for sixteen years, the political and media class mocked us for saying so.
Our calls for fiscal sanity were met with disdain, character assassinations, and lies. Democrats like Joe Biden said we were “terrorists” and their Communist Party USA friends accused us of “holding America hostage” for insisting Washington spend within its means. In 2011, a liberal economist called us “myopic” and “juvenile” for wanting to cut spending back to levels from three years prior. The message was often the same: everyone who wanted to spend more money was the adults, and we were the children (or terrorists!) who didn’t understand that spending must always go up.
Then came 2025, the year Democrats spent blocking every attempt to clean up Medicaid: every audit, every work requirement, every effort to slow the runaway spending. Congressman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D–NJ) even claimed, “Republicans are intentionally taking health care away from millions of Americans so they can give giant tax breaks to the ultra-rich who don’t need them.”
That old “taking health care away” line has always been a political weapon, and now we can see exactly how it works. It’s how Democrats deflect attention, shut down oversight, and protect programs that are being defrauded to the tune of billions of dollars by the very constituencies they rely on for lots of votes. They weren’t safeguarding vulnerable Americans. They were safeguarding a system that, as we now know, was hemorrhaging money through fraud.
And even now, unbelievably, Democrats — joined by 17 Republicans — just voted in the House to extend COVID-era Obamacare subsidies, despite billions of dollars wasted because of fraud. After everything we now know, the Senate must reject the extension of COVID-era Obamacare subsidies.
Stopping all of this fraud is not optional.
Audit all agencies.
Cut off federal dollars until recipients reapply for benefits and the government verifies they are legitimately qualified to receive the benefits.
End spending on programs that Washington has no constitutional authority to run.
Recover every dollar that can still be found, and prosecute the people who stole from the public.
It’s time to do what the tea party movement said from the beginning: Cut the fraud. Cut the waste. Cut the spending. Protect the American taxpayer.
The American people have been robbed long enough.
Jenny Beth Martin is Honorary Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action