U.S. Rep. Angie Craig introduced legislation Monday to double fines to $50,000 for fraud in federally funded child nutrition programs, in the wake of the massive Feeding Our Future scandal.
"We need to do more to discourage future criminals and increase our efforts to protect taxpayer dollars — that's what this bill is about," the Minnesota Democrat said in a statement.
Last month, Minnesota Republican U.S. Reps. Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach and Pete Stauber joined three House Republican leaders in a letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack requesting documents in the Feeding Our Future investigation.
The Republicans sent a similar request in September but said they got an "inadequate response" from the Agriculture Department (USDA).
"These allegations and guilty pleas raise many troubling questions about the management of these programs by the USDA," they wrote. "It is unclear how the USDA and its partnering state agency, the Minnesota Department of Education, failed to discern this fraud ... earlier in the grant cycle."
The FBI raided Feeding Our Future's St. Anthony office and other Twin Cities locations in January 2022, publicly revealing what prosecutors say was one of the largest pandemic-related fraud cases in the United States.
Prosecutors have alleged that a large ring of associates inflated the number of meals they claimed to have served children, or had served no meals at all, and instead used the millions of dollars they received in public funds to buy luxury cars, homes and trips and other items.
