Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent traveled to Minnesota this week to confront, head-on, the staggering fraud allegations plaguing the state—failures that the political class has spent years ignoring. Speaking with citizen journalists, local officials, and law enforcement, Bessent laid out the grim reality: the theft isn’t measured in millions, but in billions—possibly even hundreds of billions—of taxpayer dollars.
Bessent didn’t hedge. He confirmed that, on average, roughly 10 percent of the federal budget is lost to fraud every year, translating to an eye-watering $300 to $600 billion siphoned away annually. Those remarks, delivered to reporter Christopher Rufo, underscore what conservatives have long warned: rampant government waste, lax oversight, and soft-on-crime governance create a feeding frenzy for fraudsters—while hardworking Americans are left holding the bag:
The latest revelations follow a viral exposé by YouTuber Nick Shirley, who pulled back the curtain on what appears to be an industrial-scale fraud operation masquerading as daycare services. In one of the most egregious examples, a facility tellingly called “The Learning Center” was supposedly enrolling around 100 children and raking in millions in taxpayer funding. Shirley found something else entirely: an empty building occupied by men sitting around watching television.
That wasn’t an outlier—it was the pattern. Many of these outfits exist only on paper, with shell companies funneling public money into private pockets, frequently tied to Somali-run networks exploiting a system with virtually no oversight. Investigative partner David Hoch extended the reporting to medical transportation companies that appear to provide no services whatsoever. The vehicles remain parked and unused, while the checks keep coming. Offices for these “businesses” are often nothing more than apartments. No inspections. No audits. No accountability.
And when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent arrived in Minnesota for a roundtable on the scandal, Gov. Tim Walz reportedly couldn’t even guarantee basic security at the state capitol—an omission that set the stage for Bessent to deliver a blunt and damaging rebuke:
Tim Walz is a coward. He is a coward. He would not guarantee that the Treasury Secretary of the United States of America would have protection in the Minnesota State Capitol. He’s afraid of what is coming.
He later credited the work of independent reporters like Rufo—and others he declined to name—for exposing what the corporate press has no interest in touching. The reason is obvious: the facts are politically inconvenient, and they reflect disastrously on Democrats. So instead of investigating, the mainstream media looks the other way, leaving citizen journalists to do the job they refuse to do.
That work is already having an impact. Shirley’s reporting has emboldened ordinary Americans to grab their phones and start knocking on the doors of these so-called daycare centers, producing jaw-dropping results. And it’s becoming increasingly clear this rot isn’t confined to Minnesota. It’s a nationwide scam enabled by lax oversight and ideological blinders. The scale of the problem has grown so large that the Justice Department is now creating a new assistant attorney general position to oversee the investigation—a move announced by Vice President JD Vance last week:
The Treasury secretary is right: Tim Walz, who appears to have presided over massive fraud, was close to being one heartbeat away from the presidency. What a disaster that would have been.