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Minnesota was once a progressive trailblazer. Now it is a case study in how not to govern. We didn’t get here overnight. A toxic mix of political naïveté, bureaucratic laziness and ideological vanity has flung open the gates to fraudsters who now treat Minnesota taxpayers like a bottomless ATM.
The latest fiasco? The Housing Stabilization Services (HSS) program is a textbook case of a good idea gutted by poor design, creating an all-you-can-bill buffet for scammers (“State cuts payments as it seeks out fraud,” front page, July 29). [Opinion editor’s note: On Friday, the Minnesota Department of Human Services announced it is seeking to terminate Housing Stabilization Services. The agency said it intends to redesign and relaunch the program.]
The HSS program, launched in 2020, was meant to be a lifeline. It aimed to leverage Medicaid dollars to help people with disabilities, mental illnesses or substance use disorders find and maintain housing. The idea was noble: Stable housing is a cornerstone of health and self-sufficiency. But noble intentions don’t survive contact with reality when oversight is an afterthought.
The numbers are staggering. Initially projected to cost $2.6 million annually, HSS payouts ballooned to $107 million in 2024, with more than 1,700 providers cashing in. How did this happen? Minnesota officials deliberately designed a program with almost no eligibility checks and laughable accountability. Providers simply had to check a box claiming they had watched an online video, and presto! They were eligible to bill Medicaid.
This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s the latest installment in Minnesota’s rapidly growing Fraud Hall of Fame. We are already the epicenter of the Feeding Our Future scandal, the largest COVID-related fraud scheme in the country, with more than $250 million stolen under the guise of feeding hungry kids. Fake names. Fake meals. Fancy cars. First-class flights. All paid for by our taxes, while the Department of Human Services and the Department of Education dithered and looked the other way.
How about the autism therapy centers? Eighty-five of them are under federal investigation for overbilling Medicaid, another multimillion-dollar hole in our supposedly watchful welfare net. Then there’s the Child Care Assistance Program, where rampant fraud was reported as early as 2015, with millions siphoned off by providers allegedly inflating attendance numbers. Whistleblowers were ignored, oversight was nonexistent, and those who dared raise the alarm were treated as the problem.
