Joe Teirab sounds off on Tim Walz’s mishandling of Feeding Our Future program

Joe Teirab sounds off on Tim Walz's mishandling of Feeding Our Future program

San Francisco radical Kamala Harris' Vice Presidential pick Tim Walz is coming under renewed scrutiny for a $250 million COVID-19 fraud scandal in Minnesota.

Minnesota Republican candidate Joe Teirab, who helped prosecute the Feeding Our Future case as a federal prosecutor, has sounded off on the largest COVID fraud in the nation that happened under Tim Walz's watch:

Read more from Fox News here or see excerpts below:

Tim Walz's $250M state program to feed hungry kids fraudulently spent on luxury goods, overseas real estate
Fox News
Audrey Conklin
August 12, 2024

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is facing renewed scrutiny for a $250 million COVID-19 fraud scandal in Minnesota that critics say falls on his shoulders as governor, particularly after he was tapped as a running mate for Kamala Harris on the 2024 Democratic ticket.

Between 2022 and 2024, 70 people have been charged in connection with the fraud scheme that resulted in a quarter-billion-dollar loss from the Minnesota Department of Education's (MDE) Feeding Our Future program - a federally funded meal assistance plan meant to help give free meals to eligible children and adults.

"At least a quarter billion dollars was stolen by fraudsters," Billy Glahn, adjunct policy fellow with Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment, told Fox News Digital of the scandal.

"The question, of course, came up: How did the state Department of Education let out $250 million out the door to people who were later convicted of defrauding the program? The legislative auditor took this on as one of her projects and did this report looking at how the department oversaw a single one of these nonprofits involved."

[…]

Critics say this failure goes back to Walz's leadership as governor. "The buck has to stop somewhere," as Glahn put it.

"He is the chief executive of the state. All of the people at the Department of Education and the other departments where fraud has taken place were appointed by him," Glahn noted. "So he appoints the commissioner, the deputy commissioner, assistant commissioners. They were all appointed by him. They all report to him. And these are the folks whom the legislative auditor has documented failed to do their job. So where does the buck stop?"

[…]

The Republican candidate for Minnesota's 2nd Congressional District, Joe Teirab, said in a post on X that the fraud under Walz's watch has exceeded half-a-billion dollars.

"Imagine fraud at that scale nationwide."
- Joe Teirab

"Governor Walz and the people he directly hired and oversaw lost half a billion dollars to fraud in a few short years as governor. Imagine fraud at that scale nationwide," Teirab said. "If every state lost that much, the amount lost to fraud would be greater than the annual budgets of over 15 states."

In a follow-up post responding to an ABC story on the fraud scandal, Teirab said, "[i]t isn't just the Feeding Our Future case."

"Over half a billion dollars has been lost by his Administration so far, with instances of waste and/or fraud in child care programs, the frontline worker bonus pay program, unemployment benefits, Medicaid programs, and more," he explained. "It's not the fact that his Administration let fraudsters walk away with over $250 million meant to feed hungry kids. It's the fact that that wasn't a wake-up call, and that there still hasn't been any accountability. Not one state employee has been fired for any of this."

Critics of Walz's handling of taxpayer funds have also noted an $18 billion surplus in Walz's $72 billion budget that was initially supposed to be returned to taxpayers but was spent on other state initiatives instead.

"We know that when there is tax relief offered for young families… as great as that sounds, and we are appreciative of that point, if Minnesota wasn't such an expensive place to live," House Minority Leader Lisa Demuth said in March. "In addition to that $18 billion of surplus that is now gone, taxes and fees - our state budget - was raised by another $10 billion. We grew government in a way that is unsustainable."

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