For more than a decade, tea party activists have been smeared as “extremist” and “racist” for insisting that government spending was out of control and ripe for abuse. The recent flood of fraud revelations, from Minnesota to New York to California and beyond, proves what we said from the beginning: America was being robbed in broad daylight, and too many leaders either didn’t care or were in on it.

 As Americans learn more and more about the massive fraud schemes surfacing in Minnesota and other states, the truth is unmistakable: many of the spending programs politicians swore were untouchable — because they were supposedly feeding hungry children or helping vulnerable Americans — were, in reality, wide-open pipelines for fraudsters.

 First came the “Feeding Our Future” scandal in Minnesota, which stole roughly $250 million and has already produced more than fifty convictions. But that case now looks like the preview to something far bigger.

In December, federal prosecutors described what they are uncovering as nothing short of an industrial-scale fraud. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson said, “The fraud is not small. It isn’t isolated… It’s a staggering industrial scale of fraud.”

Thompson’s office has identified 14 Medicaid-funded services at high risk — housing stabilization, adult day services, autism programs, non-emergency medical transport, home-based care, and more. These programs have cost taxpayers $18 billion since 2018. Thompson didn’t hedge when asked how much of that may have been stolen: it is “very possible” that half or more of the $18 billion was fraudulent.

Investigators say many of these schemes are tied to Somali........

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