Tim Walz’s school lunch scam siphoned off $250 million right under his nose

The Democrat media and the Harris-Walz campaign are working overtime to capture the narrative surrounding Vice President Kamala Harris and her newly crowned ticket. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Walz is rightly under fire for his exaggerated military record, fraught views on free speech and questionable ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Instead of addressing these issues, Democrats are adopting the infamous advice of the “Mad Men” character Don Draper: “If you don’t like what you’re being said, change the conversation.”

You may have noticed the media praising Walz’s policies as governor, including the universal school lunch law he signed into law in 2023. Ignoring that the program misuses taxpayer money, allowing wealthy families to benefit. school lunch program, The media has portrayed it in a positive light. Why? To change the conversation.

The truth is that Walz’s history of providing food to hungry children is not about feeding them at all. In early 2020, Walz allowed massive fraud to occur by exploiting the taxpayer-funded child nutrition program during the pandemic. Some even called it “the biggest scam in American history.”

RNC slams Walz administration’s non-answer on how non-citizens made it onto Minnesota voter rolls: ‘This is not a hypothetical’

According to federal prosecutors, a Minnesota-based nonprofit called Feeding Our Future (FOF) committed the crime. The country’s biggest pandemic relief scam. $250 million was stolen right under the noses of Governor Tim Walz and his army of state education bureaucrats. Five defendants have been convicted, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The fraud was perpetrated as part of a series of bribes based on FOF’s fraudulent reporting to Walz’s administration. FOF’s food sites exaggerated the number of meals served to hungry children by thousands, created shell companies to sell the story, and then kept millions in extra cash from reimbursements.

The official narrative has the drama of a soap opera and the tension of a Hitchcock film. It talks of corruption, greed and even a $120,000 bribe thrown at a jury’s door.

While scandalous details abound, the Minnesota Legislative Auditor’s Office has released a report that analyzes the fraud allegations in 103 clearly written pages. There, hidden passages explain how such a fraud scheme was possible: Walz structured the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) in such a way that proper oversight was nearly impossible.

The report shows that MDE suffers from the same problem that plagues all of the overburdened government agencies I oversee: a tangled decision-making process that obscures accountability. As Chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, I am well aware of the ways education bureaucracies like MDE enable the misuse of taxpayer money.

Take, for example, page 55 of the report, which states that “MDE improperly asked Feeding Our Future to investigate complaints about itself.” Essentially, a complainant would go to the Minnesota Department of Education with an issue involving FOF, and education officials would say, “Let’s figure it out amongst ourselves.” This is akin to a court allowing a defendant to be the judge in his own case, an absurd way to avoid responsibility.

Or on page 48, the report finds that MDE welcomed lax monitoring requirements for high-risk sponsors. While this apparently helped maximize the number of meals, according to the report, it also “put the integrity of the programs at risk.” A more cynical and honest assessment is that weakening safeguards helped divert money from hungry children.

For more Fox News opinion, click here

Additionally, the report reveals that MDE’s inadequate oversight was motivated by fear of being called racist—the ultimate hypocrisy of liberal bureaucrats. On page 4, MDE officials claim they were “prevented from acting because of allegations made by Feeding Our Future that MDE was discriminating against them because it served minority communities.”

MDE’s hesitancy to exercise its authority and oversight responsibilities weakened its ability to catch the scandal, creating a powder keg of waste, fraud, and abuse just waiting to catch fire.

The report shows that MDE suffers from the same problem that plagues all of the overburdened government agencies I oversee: a tangled decision-making process that obscures accountability. As Chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, I am well aware of the ways education bureaucracies like MDE enable the misuse of taxpayer money.

Walz has since admitted that the fraud occurred on his watch. He has yet to take responsibility for harming thousands of Minnesota children. Wasted tax dollars are never victimless. The $250 million stolen by FOF amounts to more than $1600 for every child living in poverty in Minnesota. Those funds should go to the children, families, and communities they were meant for, not line the pockets of thieves who were helped to commit the fraud by Walz’s lack of oversight of MDE.

Click here to get the Fox News app

I, along with fellow committee chairs and the Minnesota Republican delegation, wrote to the Minnesota Commissioner of Education asking for more information about MDE’s communications. With Walz’s rapidly rising stature, it’s even more important that MDE release this information to the public.

In conclusion, to the media and campaigns spreading the school lunch story, I want to say this: You must honestly address this scandal before you move on. Imagine this level of fraud on a national scale: that is the risk America takes with Walz on the ticket.

Click here to read more from Representative Virginia Foxx