GOP lawmaker unveils WALZ Act after billions lost in Minnesota fraud scandal
FIRST ON FOX: A Republican lawmaker has reacted to the massive unfolding fraud scandal in Minnesota with legislation aimed at preventing more taxpayer dollars from being wasted at the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks has introduced the Welfare Abuse and Laundering Zillions Act, or the "WALZ Act," which would require the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General to open investigations into any HHS program that sees a 10% or greater increase in total payments over any six-month period within a fiscal year.
Under the bill, HHS would no longer have discretion to ignore sudden billing increases that critics say often signal fraud schemes, particularly in large entitlement programs.
The bill comes amid revelations in recent months that Minnesota’s federally funded health and nutrition programs were rife with fraud to the tune of potentially up to $9 billion, federal prosecutors said last week.
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Critics have made Walz the face of the scandal, given the fact that concerns over the fraud date back to 2019, when he took office and the inability of the state, of which he serves as the top executive, to tackle the problem over the last five years.
"This is on my watch," Walz told reporters on Friday. "I am accountable for this. And more importantly, I am the one that will fix it."
Miller-Meeks told Fox News Digital the situation in Minnesota represents a "jaw-dropping failure of leadership."
"This is what happens when soft-on-crime Democrats run the show: zero accountability, zero oversight, and taxpayers left holding the bag," the Iowa Republican continued. "The WALZ Act is named for a reason, to ensure this level of negligence can never be repeated anywhere else in America. This bill puts hard safeguards in place to protect taxpayer dollars, shut the door on scam artists, and bring real accountability back to government programs."
On Monday, a group of 98 Minnesota mayors raised concerns with state leaders and Walz in a letter about their state's fiscal policies, saying they have impacted their cities and residents, noting a disappearing $18 billion surplus and a projected $2.9 billion to $3 billion deficit for the 2028-29 biennium.
Former federal prosecutor Joe Teirab, who briefly worked on the Feeding Our Future aspect of the fraud investigation, recently told Fox News Digital the fraud scheme was notable not only for its size, but for how easy it was to carry out.
"Honestly how easy this fraud was to do," Teirab said. "These fraudsters were just saying that they were spending all this money on feeding kids… and they were just making up these PDFs, putting false names into Excel sheets."
Teirab said oversight failures within the Minnesota Department of Education and other agencies played a significant role. He argued that officials had incentives to avoid scrutiny, citing political sensitivities surrounding Minnesota’s Somali community.
"There were huge incentives to just turn the other way," Teirab said. "There’s a sense of, ‘If we say something, are they going to call us racist?’ And that’s exactly what happened."
Fox News Digital's Nikolas Lanum and Louis Casiano contributed to this report