Trump repeats claim of $19 billion in Minnesota fraud. Here’s what the numbers show.

President Donald Trump re-aired an allegation in his State of the Union address that $19 billion has been stolen from Minnesota programs, a demonstration of what he called “the corruption that is plundering” the nation’s tax dollars.

Trump has on several earlier occasions presented the eye-popping number to the public without clear evidence, foundation or context. State officials have countered that it’s incorrect and political.

The figure Trump used in his Feb. 24 address would represent an enormous portion of the total amount of federal tax dollars that flow through Minnesota. In 2024, the state and federal governments together spent about $19 billion on Medicaid services.

Trump’s number is also far larger than what members of the Justice Department have publicly tallied or even alleged as they prosecute Minnesota’s largest fraud cases to date.

In December, Joe Thompson, formerly the lead white collar crime prosecutor before his departure from Minnesota’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, estimated that more than half of the $18 billion spent over the course of seven years across 14 high-risk Medicaid programs could have been fraudulent. State officials dismissed the idea of $9 billion in fraud as speculation.

The biggest known fraud case in Minnesota in recent years is Feeding Our Future, a scam defrauding a meal program that the U.S. Department of Agriculture funded and expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic to feed kids. Seventy-nine defendants have faced criminal charges in what federal authorities have described as the nation’s largest single pandemic-era fraud, which prosecutors pegged at $300 million.

Federal prosecutors last year revealed an overlapping investigation targeting Feeding Our Future fraudsters who enrolled in separate social services programs administered through the state’s Human Services department.

Since last fall, the federal government has charged 15 defendants with crimes tied to Medicaid fraud, alleging $34.2 million in stolen funds.

Separately, investigations led by the state’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit in fiscal year 2024, the latest available, led to $1.6 million in recoveries stemming from criminal cases.

Earlier this month, a state-commissioned report prepared by health services business Optum, a subsidiary of Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group, found $1 billion in payments from the social services agency over a four-year period were vulnerable to fraud. The Human Services department stressed the figures did not amount to conclusive evidence of waste, fraud or abuse.

The president’s own descriptions of programs fraud in Minnesota also appear inconsistent.

In late January, Trump said on Truth Social that an investigation into the “massive 20 Billion Dollar, Plus, Welfare Fraud” was going on in Minnesota. Two days later, the president wrote that his administration uncovered fraud schemes in states like Minnesota and California amounting to “hundreds of billions” of taxpayer dollars.