Posted on Thursday, May 1, 2025

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by Outside Contributor

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Minnesota, once known for good government, was famously referred to in a 1973 Time magazine cover as “The State That Works.” After six years of Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, that reputation is gone. The state now faces a massive $6 billion deficit and plummeting educational outcomes, and it still hasn’t recovered from the trauma of the “Defund the police” movement and the George Floyd riots.

And things are worse than we thought. Under Walz and Ellison, over $600 million was lost to fraud — including to “the largest pandemic-relief fraud scheme charged to date,” according to a 2022 press release by the Department of Justice. This week, we learned of a new dimension of this scandal thanks to a secret recording of a meeting between Ellison and politically connected fraudsters, which was obtained and made public by the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based think tank. The recording demonstrates remarkable dishonesty and staggering incompetence by Ellison.

At the center of the fraud, the largest in Minnesota history, was a “nonprofit” program called Feeding Our Future. While working families were struggling to keep the lights on during lockdowns, a group of politically connected scammers stole $250 million from a federal program meant to feed hungry children. Ellison rightly took heat from the beginning — his office oversees all nonprofits in the state and represents agencies that are responsible for ensuring money doesn’t go to fraudsters. He obfuscated his actions (or lack thereof) in late 2022, claiming that his office worked hand in glove with the FBI to bring the fraudsters down.

This was never plausible. The recently released recording lays out why. In December 2021, Ellison took a private meeting with a group of individuals connected to the Feeding Our Future scheme. In the recording of that meeting, Ellison claims, “This is the first I’m really hearing about it,” referring to the so-called nonprofit’s interactions with state regulators. Yet in a press release less than a year later, he bragged that “for two solid years” his office had been holding Feeding Our Future accountable. It would appear that he was out of the loop, despite claiming otherwise to the press to save his political skin. Feeding Our Future offices would be raided by the FBI just one month after that December 2021 meeting.

Why the cover-up? Because it looks bad for a public official with Ellison’s responsibilities to be, well, so deeply incompetent. Add to this that shortly after that December 2021 meeting, Ellison accepted $10,000 in campaign donations from individuals directly tied to the fraud, and his incompetence looks more like corruption. It appears that Ellison didn’t just meet with the crooks — he let them bankroll his reelection.

In the recording, Ellison is heard mocking the oversight of Minnesota agencies as “piddly, stupid stuff” (a conclusion that, Ellison claimed in the recording, Walz shared). He listened sympathetically and incredulously as the fraudsters accused the Minnesota Department of Education of racism, and he promised to “fight” the very regulators who were trying to stop the theft (and whom he, as attorney general, is supposed to be representing).

It is difficult to draw any conclusions other than the following:

• Ellison failed in basic responsibilities of his office.
• He repeatedly misled the public about his many failures.
• He promised to go to bat against state agencies to defend the fraudsters.
• He accepted campaign contributions from individuals about whom state regulators had repeatedly raised red flags.

The fraud on Ellison’s watch represents one of the greatest failures of a public official in Minnesota’s history. And yet such failures have become commonplace in the Minnesota of Walz and Ellison. They are both toying with the idea of running for reelection in 2026. Whether they run or not, Minnesotans will have an opportunity to turn the page. For the sake of the North Star State and the country, let’s hope they do and thereby allow Minnesota to be a state that works — again.

Jim Schultz is the president of the Minnesota Private Business Council, a constitutional law professor, and the former Republican nominee for state attorney general. @JimForMN

Reprinted with permission from National Review by Jim Schultz.