(The Epoch Times)—The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) threatened to withhold federal funding from Minnesota after fraudsters allegedly stole more than $1 billion set aside for Medicaid programs.
CMS administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz ordered Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to follow a series of guidelines that crack down on the fraud and said that if the state does not comply, it will lose federal money.
“Either fix this in 60 days or start looking under your couch for spare change because we are done footing the bill for your incompetence,” Oz announced on Dec. 5.
CMS will require Minnesota officials to provide weekly updates for six months on the actions it is taking to stop fraud and to freeze enrollment of high-risk providers.
The Minnesota Department of Human Services was also ordered to create a corrective action plan outlining how it will prevent fraud going forward. Oz wants this plan submitted by the end of December.
“Our staff at CMS told me they’ve never seen anything like this in Medicaid—and everyone from Gov. Tim Walz on down needs to be investigated, because they’ve been asleep at the wheel,” Oz wrote in a X post on Dec. 5.
The Epoch Times reached out to Walz’s team for comment but did not hear back by publication time.
The CMS administrator blamed “bad actors” in Minnesota’s Somali community for being part of the fraudulent activity.
There are nearly 80,000 Somalis living in the state, with the majority of them in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul Twin Cities region, according to Minnesota Compass.
Oz specifically alleged fraudsters targeted a housing program that was designed to help disabled homeless people and a program that reimbursed therapy costs for families who have children with autism.
“The housing program was supposed to cost $2.6 million annually,” Oz said.
“Last year, it paid out over $100 million. The autism program ballooned from $3 million in 2018 to nearly $400 million in 2023. These scammers used stolen taxpayer money to buy flashy cars, purchase overseas real estate, and offer kickbacks to parents who enrolled their kids at fake autism treatment centers. Some of it may have even made its way to the Somalian terrorist group Al-Shebab.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) was asked about allegations that the stolen funds could be linked to terrorism during an appearance on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Dec. 7.
“If there was a linkage in that, the money that they had stolen going to terrorism, then that is a failure of the FBI and our court system in not figuring that out and basically charging them … with these charges,” Omar said.
“And so I do know that for many years, this sort of like alarm that there is money being transferred through the airport in bags and going to terrorism has all—that accusation has always existed. There has never been here and there in those accusations. But if that is the case, if money from U.S. tax dollars is being sent to help with terrorism in Somalia, we want to know, and we want those people prosecuted, and we want to make sure that that doesn’t ever happen again.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced plans to ramp up activities in the Twin Cities region after President Donald Trump rescinded temporary protected status for Somali immigrants living in the state.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey dismissed the Trump administration’s immigration efforts and accused it of spending too much time “terrorizing certain groups within our community.”
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