Let the children eat: Trump’s aid cut to New York and other states doesn’t pass muster |
As the new year gets underway, Donald Trump wants to take the food out of millions of children’s mouths while depriving them and their parents of other social services, by supposedly freezing $10 billion in disbursements to Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois and Colorado going mostly to the TANF food assistance program. His excuse is the discovery of sprawling fraud in some state welfare systems, notably Minnesota, where entities billed for billions in services that were never delivered, and which has become a cause célèbre for MAGA and right-wing influencers.
Two things can be true at once: this can have been a particularly serious and widespread fraud, with Minnesota state authorities not doing enough to ensure that the funds were being used for their intended purposes and where Gov. Tim Walz, who was the VP running mate of Kamala Harris in 2024, has........