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The Democrat media and Harris-Walz marketing campaign are working time beyond regulation to grab the narrative surrounding the freshly coronated ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Walz is rightly beneath fireplace for his overstated navy file, horrifying views on free speech and doubtful relationship with the Chinese language Communist Occasion. Quite than addressing these points, Democrats are embracing the notorious recommendation of “Mad Males” character Don Draper: “In the event you don’t like what’s being stated, change the dialog.”
You’ll have seen the media heaping reward on Walz’s insurance policies as governor, together with the common college lunch laws he signed in 2023. Ignoring that this system abuses taxpayer {dollars} by permitting rich households to reap the benefits of school lunch programs, the media roundly casts it in a optimistic gentle. Why? To alter the dialog.
The reality is that Walz’s historical past of offering meals to hungry kids isn’t about feeding them in any respect. Starting in 2020, Walz allowed a fraud of large proportions that exploited a taxpayer-funded little one diet program through the pandemic. Some even known as it the “biggest grift in U.S. historical past.”
In keeping with federal prosecutors, a Minnesota-based nonprofit known as Feeding Our Future (FOF) dedicated the nation’s largest pandemic relief fraud. $250 million was stolen from beneath the nostril of Governor Tim Walz and his military of state schooling bureaucrats. 5 defendants have been convicted, in keeping with the U.S. Legal professional’s Workplace.
The fraud was carried out as a sequence of cascading kickbacks based mostly on FOF’s fraudulent reporting to Walz’s administration. FOF’s meals websites overrepresented the variety of meals they served to hungry kids by the 1000’s, arrange shell corporations to promote the story after which pocketed the thousands and thousands in further money from reimbursements.
The official narrative boasts the drama of a cleaning soap opera and the strain of a Hitchcock movie. It options corruption, greed and even a well-placed $120,000 bribe on a juror’s doorstep.
Whereas the scandalous particulars abound, the Minnesota Workplace of the Legislative Auditor launched a report that breaks down the fraud allegations over 103 plainly written pages. There, hidden crumbs reveal how such a fraudulent scheme was even attainable: Walz had structured the Minnesota Division of Schooling (MDE) in such a manner that correct oversight was close to unattainable.
The report exhibits that MDE suffers the identical affliction as all of the overwrought authorities businesses I oversee: diffuse decision-making that obscures accountability. As chairwoman of the Committee on Schooling and the Workforce, I’m all too aware of schooling bureaucracies just like the MDE enabling the misuse of taxpayer {dollars}.
Take, for example, web page 55 of the report, which states that “MDE inappropriately requested Feeding Our Future to analyze complaints about itself.” Basically, a complainant would method the Minnesota of Division of Schooling with a difficulty involving FOF, and schooling officers would say, “Determine it out amongst yourselves.” It’s like a court docket permitting a defendant to be the decide at his or her personal trial, a patently absurd technique to dodge duty.
Or on web page 48, the report finds that MDE welcomed unfastened oversight necessities for high-risk sponsors. Whereas this ostensibly helped maximize the variety of meals served, in keeping with the report, it additionally “put the packages’ integrity in danger.” A extra cynical and trustworthy evaluation is that weakening the guardrails helped divert funds from hungry kids.
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Moreover, the report reveals that MDE’s poor oversight was motivated by concern of being known as racist — the final word heresy of liberal bureaucrats. On web page 4, MDE officers declare that they have been prevented from performing by “accusations by Feeding Our Future that MDE was discriminating towards it as a result of it served minority communities.”
MDE’s hesitancy to exert its authority and oversight tasks undermined its capacity to smell out the scandal, making a powder keg of waste, fraud and abuse ready to catch fireplace.
The report exhibits that MDE suffers the identical affliction as all of the overwrought authorities businesses I oversee: diffuse decision-making that obscures accountability. As chairwoman of the Committee on Schooling and the Workforce, I’m all too aware of schooling bureaucracies just like the MDE enabling the misuse of taxpayer {dollars}.
Walz has since accepted that the fraud occurred on his watch. What he has but to assert duty for is harming 1000’s of Minnesotan kids. Wasted tax {dollars} is rarely victimless. The $250 million stolen by FOF quantities to over $1600 per little one dwelling in poverty in Minnesota. These funds ought to be with the youngsters, households, and communities for whom they have been meant, not lining the pockets of thieves who have been enabled of their fraud by Walz’s MDE’s lack of oversight.
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I, together with fellow Committee Chairs, and the Minnesota Republican delegation, wrote to the Minnesota Commissioner of Schooling requesting extra info relating to MDE’s communications. With Walz’s speedy ascension, it’s much more vital that MDE releases this info to the general public.
Lastly, to the media and the marketing campaign spinning the college lunch narrative, I say this: you could first deal with this scandal in good religion earlier than transferring ahead. Think about this stage of fraud on a nationwide scale: that’s the threat America runs with Walz on the ticket.