House Report: Walz and Ellison Knew of Minnesota's $9B Fraud Years Before Admitting It

House Report: Minnesota's Leaders 'Knew' About $9 Billion in Fraud — and Did Nothing

On June 8, 2026, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a 205-page report with a blunt title: *The Cost of Doing Nothing: How Tim Walz and Keith Ellison Fueled Minnesota's Fraud Explosion.* Its core finding is the kind of line that defines a 'they knew' story — that Minnesota's governor and attorney general were aware of systemic fraud in state-administered programs as early as spring 2019 and April 2020, years before they publicly acknowledged the scale of the problem.

The Numbers

The report documents up to $9 billion in losses or at-risk funds across Minnesota's Medicaid-related social services, plus roughly $300 million lost in the 'Feeding Our Future' child-nutrition scheme. It also flags a $90 million fraud against autism treatment centers — part of a billing category that ballooned from under $1 million in 2018 to hundreds of millions by 2024.

'Incompetence, Willful Blindness, or Worse'

The Committee wrote that it could not determine whether Attorney General Keith Ellison's failure to act amounted to 'incompetence, willful blindness or worse.' According to the report, officials 'had clear authority to suspend or stop payments to providers suspected of fraud' — but, the document alleges, they hesitated in part out of fear of litigation and accusations of discrimination, allowing suspect organizations to keep drawing funds.

The Response

Ellison's office pushed back hard, calling the report 'riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations' and pointing to a record of prosecuting more than 340 Medicaid fraud cases. What is not in dispute is the timeline the documents lay out — that warnings reached the top of Minnesota's government long before the public was told how bad it had gotten.