There are government programs that waste money. There are government programs that lose money. And then there’s Minnesota, where a government program designed to help autistic children was hijacked by fraudsters who allegedly funneled stolen taxpayer dollars to a terrorist organization in East Africa.

That’s not government waste. That’s a crime scene with a Medicaid logo.

The Announcement

JD Vance stood at a press conference Wednesday with Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz and dropped a hammer on the Land of 10,000 Lakes. The Trump administration is temporarily halting roughly $259 million in Medicaid payments to Minnesota until the state proves it can stop hemorrhaging taxpayer money to criminals.

“We have decided to temporarily halt certain amounts of Medicaid funding that are going to the state of Minnesota, in order to ensure that the state of Minnesota takes its obligation seriously to be good stewards of the American people’s tax money,” Vance said.

Translation: you had one job, Minnesota. You blew it. Now the checkbook is closed until further notice.

The Scam

Vance laid it out plainly. A program created to provide after-school services for autistic children became a personal ATM for fraudsters. Sham businesses. Fake clients. People who weren’t even autistic claiming to be autistic so the money would keep flowing. The program didn’t help kids — it made crooks rich.

And the numbers are staggering. Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program was estimated to cost $2.6 million a year when it launched in 2020. By 2021, payouts hit $21 million. Then $42 million. Then $74 million. Then $104 million. In just the first six months of 2025 — $61 million.

That’s a program that was supposed to cost $2.6 million exploding to over $100 million annually in four years. If your household budget did that, you’d be living in a van. When a government program does it, somebody is stealing, and nobody in charge bothered to look.

The Terrorist Connection

Here’s where it goes from infuriating to genuinely dangerous.

A City Journal investigation confirmed what federal counterterrorism sources had been tracking — millions in stolen funds from these programs were being sent back to Somalia, where they ended up with Al-Shabaab, one of the deadliest terrorist organizations in Africa. Al-Shabaab. The Al-Qaeda affiliate responsible for massacres, bombings, and kidnappings across East Africa.

One confidential source put it in terms that should make every American’s blood boil: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

Let that sentence sit. Minnesota taxpayers — people going to work, paying their bills, trusting the system — were unknowingly bankrolling terrorism because their state government built a welfare program with, in City Journal’s words, “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.”

You couldn’t design a better fraud machine if you tried. And apparently, nobody in Minnesota government tried to stop it.

The State That Looked Away

This didn’t happen overnight. The cost explosion was visible in real time. The numbers doubled, then doubled again. Federal officials warned Minnesota back in January, withholding $515 million in Medicaid matching funds on a quarterly basis. The state had every signal imaginable that something was catastrophically wrong.

And yet here we are, with the Vice President of the United States having to publicly announce that the federal government is cutting off the money because Minnesota still hasn’t gotten its act together.

Where were the state auditors? Where were the oversight committees? Where was the governor? Either they didn’t know — which is incompetence — or they knew and didn’t act — which is something much worse.

The Political Angle They Don’t Want You to See

Minnesota’s leadership has spent the last year fighting ICE, protecting sanctuary policies, and grandstanding about immigrant rights. Remember the church riot in St. Paul? The anti-ICE protests? The political class in that state has been so busy performing for progressive audiences that they apparently forgot to check whether their own Medicaid programs were funding terrorism.

Trump mentioned the fraud at the State of the Union. He appointed Vance to investigate. And Schumer’s response was to crack jokes about Vance investigating corruption “down the hall.”

Meanwhile, the actual corruption was in Minnesota, it involved hundreds of millions of dollars, and the money trail led to Al-Shabaab. Nobody on the Democratic side wants to touch this story with a ten-foot pole, because it indicts everything they’ve been defending.

The Message

Vance was clear — providers who’ve already been paid aren’t losing their money. Patients aren’t being cut off. The federal payments going to the state government are what’s frozen, because the state government is the one that let this happen.

This is exactly how accountability is supposed to work. You don’t keep writing checks to a state that can’t explain where the money went. You close the register, demand an audit, and make them earn it back.

Minnesota had a program meant for vulnerable children and struggling families. Fraudsters turned it into a pipeline for personal enrichment and international terrorism. And the only people who seem interested in stopping it are sitting in the White House, not the governor’s mansion in St. Paul.

The Trump administration didn’t create this mess. They just turned on the lights. And what they found should keep every taxpayer in America up at night.