Ramstad: Readers join my appeal to focus on state services, but fraud dominates their emotions

The gamut of Minnesota’s cultural and political divides are expressed in my inbox, but since my last email cleanout, readers had the most to say about my Scrooge column on Minnesotans’ generous state services.

“Dealing with fraud alone is not enough to get Minnesota’s Medicaid, human services and the entire state budget under control,” I wrote in the days after a stunning estimate — $9 billion — emerged as the scale of fraud against government services.

“And without limiting all of that, there is no reckoning with the effect big government has on Minnesota’s economic growth,” I added in a nod to the reason I pay so much attention to government from the perch of covering Minnesota’s business community.

The consensus reader feedback was that it was about time someone outside of politics called for scaling back state services.

“The media must also improve its oversight responsibility with a more intrusive approach to holding public officials accountable and editorials challenging unacceptable performance regardless of partisan considerations,” former Gov. Arne Carlson wrote me.

He added that the way to a more competent government “starts with the understanding that management in the private and public sectors are very similar in that they both are charged with delivering product or service in an efficient manner and toward specific and measurable goals.”

From the other side of the political spectrum, Kevin Carpenter, a St. Cloud attorney who has written me several times to criticize my criticism of the growth of state government, wrote that the Scrooge column offered “a little more depth, but still not nearly enough.”

I reminded him of a column I wrote in 2024 about a Finnish writer who has compared Scandinavian and U.S. taxes and services, but I’m happy to take his suggestion to the editors who approve travel budgets.

Louis Johnston, the well-known Minnesota economy expert at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, cautioned me about oversimplifying the crowding-out effect government spending has on private output.

“In brief, rather than cutting government, it may be more productive to trim some aspects of government production and expand others,” Johnston wrote me.

A month since that column, events have diminished my hope that we’ll have a substantive conversation about state spending and the downward pressures on Minnesota’s economic growth.

Thousands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were sent to Minnesota to round up undocumented immigrants, and their mission was portrayed by some Republicans as part of the federal government’s response to the state’s irresponsibility over fraudulent spending.

Then, Justice Department officials redirected federal prosecutors in Minneapolis away from chasing fraud to investigate the widow of the shooting victim. Most of the leadership at the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office then quit, including the person who made the stunning $9 billion estimate, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson.

I wrote on Jan. 14 that this response to fraud had become overkill and was harming the people who depend on human services. That prompted another wave of emails, with several people describing instances they knew of assistance being cut back.

I’ll continue to write about the search for a balance in provision of human services, but I know emotions and politics about fraud are far more influential in Minnesota’s civic discussion at the moment.

In response to a Nov. 6 column, James Robins, who serves on the State Compensation Council, wrote to me about reforming the division of duties between counties and the state in human services.

He noted that new oversight ordered by Congress will further burden local governments.

Ron Williams, a former longtime trust officer at U.S. Bank, offered conditional agreement with my yearend observation that the zeitgeist on diversity and inclusion changed less than portrayed in 2025.

“But it isn’t because of Trump’s lack of trying,” Williams wrote, citing numerous efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration. “If we allow Trump to deregulate the way he wants, the zeitgeist will change for the worse.”

Finally, I enjoyed readers’ comments about columns I wrote from a trip through northwest Minnesota in November, including visits to DigiKey in Thief River Falls and Marvin in Warroad. Most complimented the companies and other organizations, Itasca Life Options and Leech Lake Financial Services, I visited.