Daily Reformer: Too little, too late

Good morning, Reformers, 

The Star Tribune’s Ryan Faircloth published an inside look (gift link) this weekend at why the administration of Gov. Tim Walz took so long to confront the fraud crisis that was consuming it, relying on interviews with current and former administration officials and a congressional committee investigation issued earlier this year. It’s worth reading. 

The explicit conclusion is that Walz — and even top staff — were disconnected from the day-to-day of governing. 

For instance: “(Former Chief of Staff Chris) Schmitter testified that he heard about allegations of fraud in the (autism) program in either 2023 or 2024 but said he ‘generally would not get reports of growth and numbers in programs, just because there’s so many of them. That would be sort of an impossible thing to track,’ he said.”

This was no ordinary program or growth: Autism spending went from $6 million to $341 million. (See the spending growth in all the “high-risk” Medicaid programs, via Reformer reporters Alyssa Chen and Max Nesterak.) 

Part of the problem seems to have been cultural at the Department of Human Services, where they were temperamentally incapable of confronting the problem as aggressively as required. (The Department of Education had a similar problem when Feeding Our Future was going on, including fears of being tagged racist or Islamaphobic, stoked by accusations from some politicians.) Faircloth shares a now infamous quote from an assistant commissioner at DHS, via a 2024 Reformer story, when she says the growth of the autism program is no real concern because it matches growth in other programs like housing stabilization. Which would be shut down a year later because it was riddled with so much fraud. 

A year earlier, 2023, the story says: “Walz’s office ordered state agencies to search for connections between the 48 people initially charged in the Feeding Our Future investigation and other public programs.” 

Interesting, because in early 2023, our then-colleague Deena Winter — whose years of Reformer reporting on this issue is essential to the Faircloth story — began tracking what other government contracts were held by people indicted in Feeding Our Future. She asked DHS in February in 2023. She couldn’t get any answers for months. We wound up publishing a story based on our own investigation, and I wrote a column about DHS stonewalling. (At the risk of too much ‘I told ya so,’ I wrote another in 2023 warning Democrats that they should tackle the fraud issue head-on or risk major blowback.)  

The Walz team’s take: They acknowledge they were slow to react and should have made changes at DHS much sooner, but argue the governor’s small staff can’t run every agency every day, especially in the environment of constant crises the state’s endured since the pandemic and murder of George Floyd. Fraud is a thing in blue and red states alike, they say, but no other governor has been personally held responsible like this, let alone been under the heel of the entire power of the federal government as Walz has for the past year.

An interesting omission: Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who is running for U.S. Senate, is unmentioned. Perhaps being iced out was to her great benefit. 

We just binged “Furious,” about broken FBI and NYPD detectives chasing a serial killer, who has been sex trafficked by her victims. Here’s an essay about it.

Not really the point, but there were a few moments that I cringed at character speechifying, because people don’t talk that way. But I reconsidered. Some of the most beautiful and profound sentiments in English emerged from Shakespeare soliloquies, after all. 

Here’s a song from the soundtrack, “Wonderful Illusion” by Eartha Kitt.   

Have a great day all! JPC