adminYear after year Tim Walz has stood on a pedestal of liberal virtue while Minnesota’s government slipped into predictable chaos, and the state’s own auditors have now put cold paper on that reality. A performance audit of the governor’s office found a dozen instances of financial mismanagement — from sloppy receipt controls to bungled payroll and inventory gaps — problems the auditor said indicate the office “generally did not comply” with basic financial controls. This is not a partisan smear; it is the state’s watchdog laying out how the people in charge failed to keep the books straight while taxpayers picked up the tab.
Meanwhile the criminal picture is ugly and growing. Federal prosecutors have been peeling back layers of schemes like the Feeding Our Future scandal, which has produced dozens of convictions and charges tied to hundreds of millions in stolen COVID-era meal funds, and investigators now estimate the broader fraud across multiple programs could reach roughly a billion dollars. Working Americans who pay taxes deserve to know whether their money fed kids or fattened fraudsters—and the scale of what’s been exposed is nothing short of shocking.
Those on the inside are raising alarms loudly: an X account purportedly run by hundreds of Minnesota DHS employees and major national investigations have documented employees’ claims that warnings were ignored and whistleblowers were sidelined. The New York Times and other outlets laid out how audacious fraud took root in some social-service programs, and state workers say they repeatedly sounded the alarm only to be shut down or ignored. If true, that sounds less like incompetence and more like willful negligence — or worse, political calculation to avoid offending powerful interest groups.
When Governor Walz has been pushed on who’s responsible, his answers have tried to ride the fence between taking credit and dodging blame — and fact-checkers say his claims don’t line up with the record. Independent fact-checkers note that the prosecutions were built by federal investigators, not by Walz’s office, making his public statements about “putting people in jail” misleading at best. Hardworking Minnesotans deserve a governor who tells the truth and builds systems that prevent theft, not one who spins talking points while the state’s safety net frays.
The federal government is finally paying attention in ways that ought to keep every Minnesotan awake at night: Treasury and federal agencies have opened inquiries into whether illicit funds were laundered out of the country, and federal officials have publicly warned that federal funding could be at risk if the state does not clean house. When Washington starts asking whether American taxpayer dollars ended up in dangerous hands overseas, this stops being a local scandal and becomes a national-security question. That escalation is the direct result of years of lax oversight that Walz’s office should have fixed long ago.
Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators smell blood, and rightly so — you don’t let this many alarm bells go unanswered and expect voters to shrug. State GOP leaders point to the audit and the raft of fraud prosecutions as proof that the Walz administration’s priorities were warped by political correctness and a reluctance to ruffle certain constituencies. For those of us who believe in accountability, the lesson is simple: elected officials must be judged by results, not rhetoric.
This moment should be a wake-up call for all Americans who still trust government to act as steward of the public interest. Investigations, firings, and prosecutions should follow where evidence leads, and every penny recovered must be returned to the taxpayers and the vulnerable families who needed it. If Tim Walz cannot show he will enforce the law, clean up his house, and stop playing politics with people’s livelihoods, then his political career — already bruised on the national stage — should not expect an easy recovery.
