A new House Oversight Committee majority staff report says Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison sat on fraud warnings for years while billions in federal money walked out the door.
The 205-page report dropped Monday. It is titled “The Cost of Doing Nothing: How Tim Walz and Keith Ellison Fueled Minnesota’s Fraud Explosion.”
The numbers are staggering. The report estimates $300 million in federal child nutrition funds lost and as much as $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds lost or placed at serious risk.
The House Oversight Committee put the topline numbers out this way:
BREAKING: We just released a BOMBSHELL report exposing how Governor Tim Walz and AG Keith Ellison fueled Minnesota's fraud explosion.
$9 billion in Medicaid lost. $300 million in federal child nutrition funds were placed at serious risk.
Read the report and key takeaways 👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/Srh819XTDh
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) June 8, 2026
The core allegation is not that Minnesota lacked the power to stop the bleeding. It is that the state had the authority and chose not to use it.
Investigators say fraud warnings climbed all the way to the most senior levels of state government. Then the corrective action stalled, and the checks kept clearing.
Here is how Fox News framed the findings:
A Republican-led congressional oversight report alleges that senior Minnesota officials, including Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., failed for years to act on warnings about fraud in the state’s social services programs, allowing hundreds of millions of dollars in confirmed or alleged losses and placing billions more at risk.
The Walz administration had the power to stop fraudulent payments to high-risk entities receiving federal nutrition and Medicaid funds, but the state “repeatedly failed to act” after officials raised concerns, according to a 205-page final staff report released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday.
Congressional investigators found that concerns about potential racial discrimination claims – rather than legal constraints – contributed to the Walz administration’s decision to continue paying providers suspected of fraud. The committee also spoke to nearly 30 whistleblowers, some of whom accused the Walz administration of retaliation against state employees for sounding the alarm about potential fraud.
The committee found Minnesota is estimated to have lost $300 million in stolen federal nutrition funds intended to feed hungry children during the COVID-19 pandemic and that as much as $9 billion in Medicaid billing may have been fraudulent, an estimate attributed to a federal prosecutor and disputed by Walz administration officials.
“Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison are responsible for one of the most stunning oversight failures this Committee has ever examined,” Comer said in a statement. “It is now clear the Walz Administration chose to protect the system rather than protect the taxpayer.”
The committee sent a letter to Vice President JD Vance urging a full review of Minnesota’s social services programs for potential fraud vulnerabilities, following the report’s findings.
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That detail stands out. The report says officials cited litigation threats and fear of discrimination accusations as reasons to keep funding entities they suspected of fraud.
In other words, money allegedly kept flowing to bad actors because stopping it was politically uncomfortable.
The House Oversight Committee majority staff report lays out the case in plain terms:
In December 2025, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform launched an investigation into fraud plaguing Minnesota’s social services programs that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison failed to halt despite repeated warnings.
The Committee’s investigation found that senior officials in Minnesota state government, including Governor Walz and Attorney General Ellison, were aware of widespread fraud in federally funded social services programs for years, possessed the legal and procedural authority to stop payments and ban fraudulent providers from participating in these programs, but repeatedly failed to act.
Testimony and documents obtained to date establish a consistent pattern: fraud warnings were elevated to the most senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and payments continued long after credible signs of fraud emerged.
These failures allowed an estimated $300 million in federal child nutrition funds and potentially $9 billion in Medicaid-related funds to be lost or placed at serious risk.
Throughout this investigation, the Committee has spoken to nearly 30 whistleblowers, most of whom are current employees in the Walz administration, with intimate knowledge of the Walz Administration’s failures to identify and eliminate fraud. They have faced retaliation for raising concerns.
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Nearly 30 whistleblowers spoke with the committee. Most of them are current employees inside the Walz administration, and the report says they faced retaliation for raising the alarm.
The report does not pretend to know the motive yet. It says the open question is whether this was incompetence, willful blindness, or something worse.
This is a committee majority staff report, not a court verdict. Walz administration officials dispute the $9 billion Medicaid figure, which the report attributes to a federal prosecutor.
Comer sent a letter to Vice President JD Vance urging a full review of Minnesota’s social services programs for fraud vulnerabilities.
That request lands on fertile ground. Vance’s anti-fraud task force has already produced at least eight arrests and frozen $1.3 billion in payments to home health and hospice providers suspected of defrauding the government.
President Trump’s administration has not waited on Minnesota to fix itself. On February 25, 2026, the administration withheld $259,505,491 in Medicaid federal matching funds from the state.
Minnesota Republicans are not letting this slide either.
.@GOPoversight just released a report exposing how Gov. Walz and AG Ellison had been aware of the widespread fraud in our federally funded social programs for years and failed to address it. This is unacceptable – Minnesotans deserve better. https://t.co/Na1k7YSZj6
— Congressman Brad Finstad (@RepFinstad) June 8, 2026
The story here is straightforward. A federal oversight committee says the people running Minnesota knew, had the tools to stop it, and let the money keep moving.
Now the receipts are public, and the people who flagged the fraud finally have somewhere to be heard.
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