A 205-Page House Report Says Minnesota’s Attorney General Watched Billions Walk Out the Door. “Incompetence, Willful Blindness, or Worse.”

On June 8, 2026, the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a 205-page report on Minnesota’s serial looting of federal social-program money. Its title is not subtle: “The Cost of Doing Nothing: How Tim Walz and Keith Ellison Fueled Minnesota’s Fraud Explosion.” Its central charge is that Minnesota’s two top Democrats — Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and Attorney General Keith Ellison (D-MN)— knew about systemic fraud for years and chose not to stop it.

The committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), says it could not determine whether Ellison’s failure to protect taxpayers was “incompetence, willful blindness, or worse.” That is a federal oversight body, on the record, declining to rule out that a sitting state attorney general was complicit in the largest pandemic-fraud scheme in American history.

The numbers behind the accusation are staggering. The Feeding Our Future scheme alone stole roughly $250,000,000 meant to feed hungry children. Federal prosecutors estimate that as much as $9,000,000,000may have been fraudulently billed across fourteen Minnesota-administered Medicaid programs. Aimee Bock, the woman atop Feeding Our Future, was sentenced in May 2026 to more than 41 years in prison. The report’s question is not whether the fraud happened — courts have already proven that — but why the officials with the power to stop it didn’t.

• $250,000,000 — stolen in the Feeding Our Future scheme — the single largest COVID-19 fraud in the U.S., per DOJ · Source: U.S. Department of Justice; CBS Minnesota
• $9,000,000,000 — the federal prosecutors' estimate of potentially fraudulent billing across 14 Minnesota-run Medicaid programs · Source: Minnesota Reformer; House Oversight Committee report
• 205 pages — the House Oversight report accusing Walz (D) and Ellison (D) of years of inaction, retaliation, and contradicting their own public accounts · Source: House Oversight Committee; Fox News

The report is the culmination of a year-long investigation that included two hearings, transcribed interviews with current and former Minnesota state employees, and a document review. Its core finding is that fraud warnings reached the most senior levels of Minnesota state government, that meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and that payments to suspected fraudsters continued long after the red flags appeared. The committee says Minnesota agencies had clear authority to suspend or stop payments on their own — without waiting for courts, the FBI, or the federal government — and simply did not use it.

The line that gave the report its headline concerns AG Keith Ellison (D-MN) directly. The committee wrote that it was unable to determine whether his alleged failure to protect Minnesota taxpayers amounted to “incompetence, willful blindness, or worse” — and that Ellison had repeatedly contradicted public accounts of the Feeding Our Future scandal. The committee found that both Ellison and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN)were aware of credible fraud concerns as early as spring 2019 at the Department of Human Services and by April 2020 at the Department of Education — well before they publicly acknowledged the problem.

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The anchor case is Feeding Our Future, a St. Anthony nonprofit that, under cover of a pandemic child-nutrition program, claimed to be serving millions of meals to needy children. The Department of Justice calls it the single largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country. Some $250,000,000 in federal money was diverted — spent on luxury cars, real estate, and overseas transfers rather than food. In May 2026, ringleader Aimee Bock was sentenced to 500 months — more than 41 years — in federal prison and ordered to repay nearly $243,000,000. More than 70 defendants have been charged in the broader Feeding Our Future investigation, with dozens already convicted.

What the House report adds to the criminal record is the timeline of inaction. According to the committee, the Minnesota Department of Education flagged concerns about Feeding Our Future by April 2020, yet payments kept flowing for roughly two more years. The report says officials feared litigation and feared being accused of racial discrimination if they cut off providers — many of them tied to the state’s Somali community — and that those political concerns, not any legal barrier, drove the decision to keep paying.

“We were unable to determine whether the attorney general’s failure to protect Minnesota taxpayers was the product of incompetence, willful blindness, or worse.”

U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform · report on AG Keith Ellison (D-MN) · paraphrased from the June 8, 2026 report

Feeding Our Future was the opening act. In December 2025, the Justice Department announced charges against 15 defendants in what it called the largest autism-fraud bust in American history — including a roughly $46,600,000 scheme to defraud Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention (EIDBI) program for children with autism. EIDBI claims had exploded from about $600,000 in 2018 to more than $400,000,000 by 2025. A separate set of charges targeted roughly $15,700,000 stolen from the state’s Housing Stabilization Services program, where annual payouts ballooned from $21,000,000 in 2021 to $104,000,000 in 2024.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota has said the total fraud across fourteen state-administered Medicaid programs could reach $9,000,000,000. Notably, AG Keith Ellison (D-MN)partnered with federal prosecutors on the December 2025 indictments and says his office has “charged and convicted over 340 Medicaid fraudsters.” The committee’s response is that the prosecutions came years too late — after the money was gone — and that the same officials now touting enforcement spent years declining to use the simplest tool available: stopping the payments.

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One of the report’s gravest claims is that the Walz administration did not merely ignore warnings — it punished the people who raised them. The committee found that Minnesota state leaders “retaliated against state employees who sought to protect taxpayer funds,” while senior officials prioritized managing political and media fallout over fixing the underlying vulnerabilities. State employees who tried to flag the fraud, the report says, were sidelined rather than heeded, allowing the criminal schemes to keep flourishing.

Both Walz (D) and Ellison (D) testified before Chairman Comer’s committee at a fiery March 4, 2026 hearing. Walz acknowledged that fraud occurred on his watch but suggested some problems predated his administration and blamed President Trump’s immigration enforcement for hampering the state’s fraud fight. Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA)banged the table and told Ellison he should resign. Ellison’s office now calls the final report “riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations” and an attempt to “politicize the issue of fraud” — and a spokesperson for Walz dismissed the committee as “a joke.”

“This report is riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations in an effort to politicize the issue of fraud, instead of actually helping Minnesota protect tax dollars and go after fraudsters.”

Office of AG Keith Ellison (D-MN) · response to the House Oversight report · paraphrased

The report did not land in a vacuum. The same week, Vice President JD Vance (R), who leads the White House anti-fraud task force, referred allegations of complicity in Minnesota’s fraud — including against Walz (D) and Ellison (D)— to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation. Chairman Comer had previously written to Vance asking for a thorough federal review of Minnesota’s social-services programs. A referral is not a charge, and no charges have been filed against either official.

That distinction matters, and we hold it firmly: Walz and Ellison are accused, not convicted. The convictions in this story belong to the fraudsters — Aimee Bock and the dozens of defendants who actually stole the money. What the House report alleges against the two officials is an oversight failure so total that a coequal branch of government has asked prosecutors to determine whether it crossed from negligence into something chargeable. Whether it did is now the DOJ’s call, not the committee’s and not ours.

The committee chose its title carefully. “The Cost of Doing Nothing” is the frame because the dollars are not abstract: $250,000,000that was supposed to feed children went to luxury cars; tens of millions meant for autistic kids and disabled adults went to “fraud tourists” who flew in from Philadelphia because Minnesota’s programs were known as “easy money.” Every one of those dollars passed through a state apparatus that, the report says, had both the authority and the early warning to stop it.

That is the accountability question this story exists to put on the record. The fraud is proven. The convictions are real. The $9,000,000,000estimate comes from federal prosecutors, not pundits. And a 205-page report from a coequal branch of government now says the two Democrats who run Minnesota saw it coming, had the power to stop it, and did nothing — until the indictments forced their hand. Readers can weigh “incompetence, willful blindness, or worse” for themselves. The receipts are in the footnotes.

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Last updated June 9, 2026