Add The California Post on Google California and Minnesota officials may have to shake down state taxpayers for a billion dollars to pay for their states’ Medicaid programs this year.
The reason: Govs. Gavin Newsom and Tim Walz terribly mismanaged their welfare programs and let rampant fraud go unchecked for years.
In March, the Trump administration launched a task force declaring a War on Fraud to clean up the nation’s welfare programs.
Medicaid, the nation’s largest medical welfare program, has also been the largest target for fraudsters.
Bad actors stealing benefits — and just plan incompetence-driven waste — have made a mess of Medicaid and diverted resources from people who truly need them. This, while state leaders in charge of protecting the program looked on.
That’s why the task force leaders, Vice President JD Vance and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are deferring $1 billion in federal Medicaid dollars from the two states with most prolific waste, fraud and abuse.
Good. California and Minnesota should answer for their sweeping program neglect.
Earlier this year, Walz and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued to block the withholding of federal funds, but a court refused to go along.
With the favorable court ruling and public sentiment on its side, the Trump administration is free to continue to holding states accountable for letting fraudsters loot public welfare programs.
It’s no surprise that Democrats are shocked by the new, steep federal penalties.
Blue states have let unchecked welfare fraud persist without consequence for years.
Democrats are finding out this administration is treating fraud more seriously than any that have come before.
And the same reckoning hitting California and Minnesota awaits any state that lets fraudsters and illegal aliens steal welfare resources meant for vulnerable Americans.
California Post News: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, LinkedInCalifornia Post Sports Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, XCalifornia Post Opinion California Post Newsletters: Sign up here!California Post App: Download here!Home delivery: Sign up here!Page Six Hollywood: Sign up here!
There’s no shortage of spending to probe: Medicaid, which cost taxpayers $206 billion in 2000, now costs taxpayers more than $960 billion a year.
This growth in enrollment and spending was driven by able-bodied adults and the surge of illegal aliens during the Biden administration’s open-borders disaster.
Dead people, illegal aliens, people enrolled in multiple states and able-bodied adults who aren’t working — these aren’t the truly needy Americans the program was intended to serve. And now states will have to remove them or pay the price: literally.
This really is a common-sense effort to rid welfare programs of fraud and corruption. The premise is simple: Welfare benefits should go to those who qualify for them — and no one else.
For too long, states have had little incentive to clean up their programs. Worse, some states have used schemes and loopholes to maximize program enrollment and the spending of taxpayer dollars.
The federal action to clean up fraud and corruption finally incentivizes states to prioritize program integrity.
The Obama and Biden administrations shielded improper payments from review and obscured true bad-payment rates to protect states from the financial consequences.
Moving on from those days is a huge win for taxpayers.
The reforms in Donald Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill alone are expected to save federal taxpayers more than $1 trillion by simply refocusing welfare on serving the truly needy.
States hoping to run out the clock, rely on the courts or call Trump’s bluff should look to California and Minnesota to see how serious this administration is about combating waste and corruption.
It’s not the time for blue-state leaders like Gavin Newsom to bury their heads in the sand or run away from reform; it’s time to run toward it and embrace common-sense welfare reform.
There’s a real price to pay if they don’t.
Michael Greibrok is a senior research fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability.
