Over the past year, Minnesota has become a national symbol in political rhetoric about government waste and fraud. Republican lawmakers and allied commentators have repeatedly pointed to the state as evidence that public benefit programs—especially Medicaid and child-care subsidies—are riddled with abuse. Headlines and hearing soundbites now regularly invoke figures in the “billions,” suggesting a system so compromised that ordinary oversight has failed. Yet when one steps back from the rhetoric and examines what has actually been confirmed in court over the past two years, a different and more prosaic picture comes into view.
Start with what is not in dispute. Minnesota has experienced real fraud in publicly funded programs. The most notorious example remains the pandemic-era Feeding Our Future case, one of the largest school-meals fraud schemes in U.S. history. But that case belongs to the COVID emergency period and predates the current controversy. The more relevant question—if one is assessing claims about present governance—is what has been confirmed recently, not what was uncovered during a once-in-a-century emergency that overwhelmed oversight systems nationwide.
Restricting attention to roughly the past two years, the dollar amounts tied to confirmed fraud in Minnesota are modest by national standards. Recent prosecutions and guilty pleas have centered largely on Medicaid-funded services, particularly autism-related therapy programs and a small number of housing-stabilization providers. Taken together, the fraud amounts established through convictions or guilty pleas during this period total roughly $25 million, give or take, depending on how overlapping cases are counted. This is not trivial money. But it is a far cry from the “billions” that dominate political talking points.
That disparity is not accidental. It reflects a basic but often elided distinction between confirmed fraud and estimated exposure. Prosecutors, auditors, and inspectors general routinely generate large figures when they attempt to quantify how much money might be vulnerable to abuse across an entire program. These estimates typically aggregate spending over many years, identify categories deemed “high risk,” and then apply assumptions about how much of that spending could be improper. Such exercises are useful for internal prioritization and for justifying investigative resources. They are not, however, findings of fraud in any legal sense.
This distinction matters because Minnesota’s experience, when placed in national context, looks strikingly ordinary. Every state that administers large Medicaid programs confronts provider fraud, billing irregularities, and occasional criminal schemes. Federal data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services show that Minnesota’s Medicaid improper-payment rate—a metric that includes both error and fraud—has been below the national average. In other words, when judged by the same standards applied across all states, Minnesota appears to have fewer problematic payments overall than many of its peers.
Other states provide useful points of comparison. California has faced hundreds of millions of dollars in confirmed fraud tied to pandemic relief and unemployment insurance. Mississippi’s welfare scandal, while different in structure, involved tens of millions of dollars in misused public funds. Florida, Texas, and New York regularly announce large Medicaid fraud takedowns involving provider networks that span multiple years. None of these cases has prompted the claim that those states are uniquely or categorically incapable of administering public programs. They are treated, instead, as manifestations of a nationwide challenge inherent in large, complex systems.
Why, then, has Minnesota drawn such disproportionate attention? Part of the answer lies in timing and narrative accumulation. The Feeding Our Future case primed national audiences to see Minnesota as a cautionary tale. Subsequent investigations—some real, some merely announced—were then interpreted through that lens. When federal prosecutors later stated that they were reviewing many billions of dollars in Medicaid spending for potential fraud across numerous programs and over many years, that statement was quickly compressed into the claim that “billions have been stolen.” The crucial qualifiers—timeframe, scope, and legal status—fell away.
The child-care allegations that gained traction through viral social-media videos illustrate the same dynamic. These claims triggered audits and inspections, as they should have. But as of now, they have not produced confirmed criminal cases commensurate with the scale suggested in political discourse. Investigation is not proof; scrutiny is not conviction. Treating them as such collapses due process into theater.
None of this is to deny the importance of vigilance. Public trust depends on governments taking fraud seriously, and Minnesota officials have legitimate questions to answer about oversight capacity and internal controls. But there is a difference between arguing for stronger administration and implying that a state is hemorrhaging public money at unprecedented rates. The evidence does not support the latter conclusion.
Indeed, if one were to describe Minnesota’s recent experience in neutral terms, it would sound familiar: a handful of mid-seven-figure fraud schemes uncovered through routine law-enforcement work; broader audits identifying vulnerabilities; prosecutors using expansive language about potential exposure to justify intensified investigation; and politicians converting that language into slogans. This pattern is not unique to Minnesota. It is the normal background noise of modern administrative governance.
The risk, in exaggerating that noise, is not merely rhetorical excess. Inflated claims of fraud can undermine confidence in programs that, by comparative measures, function reasonably well. They can also distort policy debate, shifting attention away from the mundane but essential work of improving oversight toward symbolic gestures and punitive freezes that harm legitimate providers and beneficiaries.
Measured against other states, Minnesota is not an outlier. Measured against the numbers invoked in political debate, the confirmed fraud of the past two years is relatively small. Recognizing these facts does not excuse wrongdoing. It restores proportion. And in public discussion of public institutions, proportion is not a luxury—it is a civic necessity.
Jonathan N. Badger teaches at St. John's College in Annapolis, Md. and is the author of the Substack, Idiosocratic.
