Can Republicans do it? The early signs are not promising. But it badly, badly needs to happen.
Kim Strassel explains the fundamental issue, i.e the big picture, in straightforward terms.
The Lesson of Minnesota’s Fraud
Republicans have an opportunity to run against an out-of-control welfare state.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Dec. 4, 2025 5:26 pm ET
Republicans in recent years were handed the gift of California, that collapsing paragon of climate virtue, an excellent argument for the GOP’s own, better energy agenda. Their Christmas present this year is Minnesota - if the party has the wits to seize on the moral of that state’s epic fraud story:
America’s welfare system is irredeemably broken.
The
Minnesota story - in which Somali fraudsters bilked taxpayers out of more than $1 billion—has many ugly story lines to choose from. It’s a parable of
failed assimilation and the need for policies that heat the melting pot. It’s another warning of identity politics, of
fraudsters using “minority-owned” status to cash in and crying “racism” to evade scrutiny. It’s a scandal of
politicians who looked the other way, more eager to win votes than to enforce the law.
President Trump has for his part sought to co-opt the story for his own priority: immigration. He’s raged about ungrateful Somali immigrants, paused immigration applications from 19 countries, and ramped up immigration enforcement operations in the Minneapolis area. This
might excite the base, but it’s diverting attention from a far better policy opportunity.
Because at root, this is a story of broken welfare. Of
a federal government that shovels more than $1 trillion annually into more than 80 major “antipoverty” programs (and countless minor ones) - a system too complex to ensure even basic integrity. And of a state that preened as a model of social welfare, its own lavish benefits drawing many immigrants, and invited a plundering.
The
U.S. welfare debate has long centered on the failed outcomes of overly generous government programs. The long-term dependency and loss of dignity. The discouragement of work. The damage to family structure. We’ve had many rounds of this discussion: from fallout over the New Deal and Great Society to “welfare queens” in the 1990s.
Today’s vast outlays and falling labor-force participation rates are proof that the failure is becoming deeper. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the share of U.S.-born working-age men not in the labor force was about 11% in 1960. It is now 22%.
But
Minnesota raises to alarm level a separate need for reset: The system itself - the government machine - is broken. Its heaving, duplicative federal-state programs, awash in forms and bureaucracies and ancient mainframes, has already suffered Soviet-style collapse.
The system serves more as a cash machine for criminals than a safety net for the needy.
How do you separate the wheat from the slime amid millions of overlapping, self-attested (yes, we still work on the honor system) applications for SNAP, WIC, unemployment insurance, EITC, LIHEAP, CHIP, TANF, Medicaid, Head Start, Pell grants, public housing, rental assistance, legal services, adoption subsidies and adult education—overlaid with hundreds of state-level counterparts?
You don’t, you write checks. And the crooks now know it. As Joe Thompson, lead prosecutor in the big Minnesota cases, said: “This isn’t just a few criminals exploiting the system,
this is a system that’s been begging to be exploited.”
We’d already been told this. Even the government auditors—numb to fraud - were bug-eyed at the scams that sucked through Joe Biden’s (your)
Covid dollars. Elon Musk’s
Department of Government Efficiency told us again of babies cadging small-business loans and long-dead citizens collecting Social Security.
Minnesota is the new outrage, useful both for the extravagant outrage of the theft (Somalis siphoning taxpayer dollars for luxury cars and homes) and because it’s Minnesota.
Democrats long pitched the state as a model of successful, generous Swedish-style social welfare, financed by high taxes - much as California pitched itself as the future of green energy. How’s that going?
This is a moment. Republicans might be shouting from the rooftops that Minnesota proves how right they were to have included in their tax-reform bill a slate of antifraud reforms to Medicaid and food stamps. But they might also seize on this scandal to take the fraud argument much further. To explain that
this is no longer a situation that can be corrected with more due diligence. It is the size and scope of the morass that is enabling fraud.
The argument:
We need to move many people off government dependency not just for moral and societal reasons, but because government has an obligation - to taxpayers and to the truly needy - to right-size and return to a system that can function. One
that is lean, efficient and able to focus its dollars on the actual mission: temporary assistance. In a perfect world, we’d tear down the maze we’ve added to for a century and replace it with a central clearinghouse for short-term government support, able to interact efficiently with states.
Why not reimagine government? All around us is evidence the current structure is failing, and past the date of fixing. Americans know it, and will reward a party that admits it and offers a reset.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-less...fraud-3e66f5f0
Far-Reaching Minnesota Fraud Scandal Is an Opportunity to Re-Imagine the Out-of-Control Welfare State
