Minnesota residents slam Walz, state oversight after $250M Feeding Our Future fraud

Minneapolis residents speaking with Fox News Digital were largely critical of the state government's handling of the massive fraud crisis that's caused plunging confidence in Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and put a new spotlight on the state's Somali community.

The $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme involved alleged perpetrators, many of them Somalis, targeting a children's nutrition program that Minnesota oversaw during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Peter, a lifelong Minnesota resident, told Fox News Digital that he felt governance in the state had gotten worse.

"No disrespect to the people who are running it. Well, a little bit, but I feel like they just don't care about the little people," he said. "They don't care about the government, don't care about the people that are below them. They don't care about the taxpayers. They only care about how they can get more money in their pockets."

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"I understand taxes are necessary, like to fix roads and to do other stuff to better the community," he added. "However, if my money is not going, you know, back into the community to help us out or anything like that, yeah, it pisses me off. It's not cool. And if anything, I want my money back."

Another resident, who didn't identify himself, said: "You have the worst accountants in the entire world, or you just don't care. And I'm kind of gathering we don't care."

Feeding Our Future, a Minnesota nonprofit, partnered with local businesses that enrolled as feeding sites, which were then reimbursed for invoices that said they'd fed thousands of children, according to The New York Times. However, in many of the cases, there were no meals for hungry children at all, and the money was used on personal and luxury items.

The man added that it should have seemed "obvious" that the nonprofit feeding program wasn't doing what was advertised.

"I mean, talk about feeding thousands of children out of a small place that doesn't seem like it would have the capability to feed this many kids, and yet here we are allegedly feeding this many kids," he told Fox News Digital. "I clearly don't think it was looked at very in-depth, or at all, to be honest with you."

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With many of the charged suspects being Somali, the case has taken on an extra political lens. President Donald Trump called Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is a Somali American, and her "friends" "garbage" in remarks at a Cabinet meeting earlier this month.

"What bothers me is that I learned that they get all the benefits from the government," Minneapolis resident Luis told Fox News Digital of the Somali community. "They don't even pay like full rent. They get a rent credit from the state. They get all types of credit. And a lot of them don't even like to work."

But another resident, Maya, said Trump was disparaging whole groups of non-White people.

"With Trump's administration, they have normalized this rhetoric that anybody who isn't White, honestly, is not meant to be in this country, even though we all know that this entire country's been built on the backs of immigrants and people coming here," she told Fox News Digital.

"We do have a huge Somali population, and they contribute to our economy and our society just as much as any one of our other neighbors, and I think that with them being targeted in the way that they are, that it's important that we show, that our government shows that they're standing with these people."

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Omar has touted Somalis as hard workers who were also victimized in the scheme. 

"We also could have benefited from the program and the money that was stolen," she told CBS last week. "So it's been really frustrating for people to not acknowledge the fact that we're also, as Minnesotans, as taxpayers, really upset and angry about the fraud that has occurred."

Walz's leadership is particularly under the microscope as the scale of the fraud has become more apparent.

"I don't think it just happened in Minneapolis," the unidentified man told Fox News Digital, saying responsibility ultimately lay with Walz.

What had been a modest stream of taxpayer dollars to Feeding Our Future suddenly became a flood, surging 2,800% in a year, an abrupt spike now at the center of mounting scrutiny and oversight concerns.

Data from the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor sheds light on how the scheme went unchecked for so long, finding that the Minnesota Department of Education oversight was "inadequate" and that its failures "created opportunities for fraud," Fox News Digital reported on Monday.

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State records chart the rise in payments and reveal how the fraud ballooned in plain sight. According to data from the state audit, payments to Feeding Our Future began in 2019 at $1.4 million. That figure rose to $4.8 million the following year before topping out at $140.3 million in 2021, a staggering 2,818% increase.

Walz has defended his conduct but admitted any fraud on his watch is unacceptable. Last week at a press conference, he said there was work to be done to restore the state's reputation. 

"Minnesotans deserve to know that their tax dollars are being put to good use, and they deserve to know that they can trust our public institutions," he said. "We have work cut out for us to rebuild that trust."

Fox News Digital's Amanda Macias contributed to this report.