It’s all about the ratings

Minnesota has become a victim of fraud, coordinated by the Trump administration and its political supporters who have twisted the truth and offered gross exaggerations in their efforts to defame Gov. Tim Walz and other top state officials for purely partisan purposes.
During last week’s State of the Union, President Trump falsely claimed that fraud in Minnesota had topped $19 billion, a number that Trump clearly pulled from thin air. It has no relationship to reality.
While we’re all used to a little political spin from our politicians, continual outright lying is a phenomenon that seems particular to the Trump administration. Fortunately, political spin isn’t ubiquitous throughout the federal government. There are places where actual numbers are still tallied by honest and impartial civil servants, a few of whom continue to hang on in our federal workforce despite the best efforts of the administration to weed them out. These are folks who pour over the data and make their routine, non-political assessments, and issue their occasional reports. As we reported last week, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, recently issued its annual assessment of the rates of improper payments made by the various states. As it has in the past, Minnesota was rated well above the national average for compliance with payment rules. That’s right. When you take the politics out of it and base your assessment on actual data, Minnesota is doing comparatively well in terms of its handling of federal Medicaid funding.
So why did Vice President J.D. Vance announce last week that the administration is cutting off $259 million over the next quarter over fraud concerns? “Political retribution,” said Gov. Tim Walz, and that’s exactly what it looks like. The administration is intent on creating a financial crisis in Minnesota in hopes of furthering the interests of Republican politicians in the state. In doing so, the administration knows full well that their funding cutoff will deny critical aid to real people who rely on Medicaid-funded services, including the elderly and the disabled. The administration is also aware that the state ceased funding of the programs seen as vulnerable to fraud last fall, to give time to address concerns.
It’s all pretty remarkable given that the Trump administration’s track record on fraud is the worst of any presidency in American history. Trump has pardoned dozens of fraudsters— at least rich white ones who make donations to Trump causes— far more than any other president, and his track record on fraud prosecutions is pitiful. It’s worth noting that the Feeding Our Future fraud, which is the only large-scale fraud actually proven in recent years in Minnesota, began under the first Trump administration, which failed to initiate investigations when state officials expressed serious concerns about the organization in early 2020. It was only under the Biden administration that federal officials began taking action to get the problem under control.
Now, with the Trump administration back in charge, the federal investigations begun under the Biden administration into possible fraudulent claims in Medicaid programs have been virtually gutted. Of the 64 attorneys who populated the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota at the beginning of Trump’s term, at least 31 have left, including virtually the entire team that had been handling fraud investigations. The rest of the attorneys are buried in an avalanche of immigration cases that mostly end in orders to release law-abiding immigrants who were in Minnesota legally and were improperly detained by ICE.
The Justice Department has, for decades, emphasized the importance of impartial justice to the attorneys it hires to prosecute federal cases. They have traditionally operated with a high ethical standard, which is a fatal flaw for anyone seeking to survive under the misrule of our current president. Ethical attorneys, who want nothing to do with this administration’s misuse of the Justice Department, have been resigning at a pace never seen before.
While the administration and the state’s GOP politicians can be expected to continue to mislead about fraud through the November mid-terms, don’t expect them to provide much evidence of it. The administration and its GOP allies in Minnesota see fraud as a tool to bludgeon political opponents or people of color. Beyond that, it’s of little interest.
As we noted from the first days of Trump’s second term, this isn’t a federal administration in the typical sense. It’s a reality TV show, designed to politicize and pollute every last corner of our federal government and our society at large to serve the political and financial interests of the man at the top and his cronies.
The real fraud is the suggestion that this administration has the slightest interest in the hard work of governing. In reality, it’s just looking for the ratings.