Welfare

Eric Boehm | 12.30.2025 1:15 PM

A sprawling welfare scheme that saw fraudsters steal over $9 billion in Minnesota is a damning indictment of a federal and state bureaucracy that failed at some of its most basic responsibilities to taxpayers.

That fraud is back at the top of the news this week after YouTuber Nick Shirley went viral with a 42-minute video in which he claims to be "investigating" the fraud scandal. In the video, Shirley knocks on the doors of several day care centers and demands to know whether the centers are engaged in fraud. It's a flashy piece of media, to be sure, and it caught fire over the Christmas weekend on YouTube and Twitter, where Shirley won praise from conservatives for covering a story that the mainstream media is supposedly refusing to touch.

But that is simply not true. Indeed, media outlets in Minnesota and around the country have been covering this story for months. Locally, the day care fraud story has been in the news for years—here's a Minnesota Public Radio article from 2015 about prosecutors targeting four potentially fraudulent day cares.

I bring this up not to make a point about media criticism—that's the realm of Reason's Robby Soave, who may have more to say about all this in the near future.

No, my point in bringing this up is to highlight how long state and federal officials have ignored obvious and recurring problems with the Medicaid-funded programs that are at the center of the Minnesota welfare fraud story. Look at that MPR article from 2015. It........

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