Nick Shirley made serious waves exposing the rampant fraud that engulfed Minnesota. It killed Tim Walz’s hopes for a third term. It bogged down Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who is running in a dead heat with Republican Michele Tafoya. From Seattle to New York, other independent journalists worked to expose migrants exploiting our safety net, and it wasn’t just Somalis either. Democrats don’t support this since it targets their base: illegal aliens. It’s also a Trump-led initiative, so, by default, they hate it.
Democrats can undo it if they retake the House, so members of the Republican Study Committee are racing to pass two bills to codify the anti-fraud hunt: the National Fraud Enforcement Division Act of 2026 and the Medicaid Fraud Fighting and Taxpayer Protection Act.
On October 29, Reps. Brad Finstad (R-MN) and Morgan Griffith (VA-09) discussed these bills and the ongoing fraud campaign on the RSC’s Right to the Point podcast.
Brad Finstad: Yeah, so you know, there's been a couple bills, and you talked about you know the growing programs and really the foreign influence in some of those programs in Minnesota. We, you know, we see so many so many. Bags full of cash leaving the leaving the MSP airport going overseas, and it has become a problem. And so, you know, one of the bills that I've introduced, and we're getting some traction in Congress, is going after these foreign countries that aren't complying or working with us when we, as a government, find this fraud and want to go after those dollars, your dollars, the taxpayers' dollars, and so you know my bill calls for stopping foreign investments in these countries until they start playing nice with us. the other bill, and I was very happy to get a vote, and you know getting some bipartisan support on it, is setting up the fraud enforcement division within the Department of Justice, to formalize that, to make it an assist assistant attorney general position, so we can go after these indictments, we can go after these crooks, and really you know send a message that that the fraudsters can no longer abuse our taxpayers like ATMs. and you know and if we look at the history a little bit, and you know, some of the misconceptions that I think Republicans get labeled with is that you know we're cold, we're heartless, we're cutting programs, and that couldn't be further from the truth. When you look at you know the work that we did to strengthen the Medicaid program or strengthen SNAP, it was really intended to make sure it was getting to our neighbors in need. not the neighbors in want and not the crooks in waiting, but our neighbors in need. We truly believe in giving people a hand up, not just a hand out. And if you if you look at the history of Medicaid, Medicaid was formed in 1965, and it was a way for the federal and the state governments to work together to help those that were vulnerable and needed that hand up, and as we've seen over the years, that program has been abused by Democrats at the state level when they started, you know, skirting means testing, which really is a way to say if you're financially able to pay for these services, you need to have some skin in the game, and if you can't afford it, there is that need for the state and federal government to step in. But states have skirted those programs. Heck, in Minnesota, we saw a millionaire farmer on SNAP for 18 months to prove a point that you can be a millionaire and still be on these government programs. And so, again, it is something that is really deeply unfair for our neighbors that are truly in need of these programs. Minnesota is, you know, Morgan, you alluded to it, but we have been unfortunately in the spotlight on this fraud issue. We've seen the mismanagement from that that partnership of a federal state government, and really from a federal standpoint, we are allocating those dollars for the states to facilitate the programs that we're asking them to do, whether it's SNAP or whether it is childcare, daycare, autism centers, housing stabilization programs, food programs, and in Minnesota, we have seen the childcare fraud where people were using Medicaid dollars, saying they were running childcare programs, and lo and behold, they didn't have attendance records to say they were they were actually taking care of children. We saw the fraud scandal in Minnesota, hundreds of millions of dollars, where these you know these crooks, these criminals, were saying that they were feeding hungry kids during COVID. Lo and behold, they weren't feeding any kids. They were pocketing those dollars. Autism centers, you know, programs with great intentions to help families that have children with autism. Again, not even serving those families in those programs.
Brad Finstad: So, the mismanagement that we've seen here, you know, and it took a YouTuber, a 20-some-year-old YouTuber, Nick Shirley, to do what the media should have been doing, and quite frankly, what our government should have been doing, and so bills like stepping up the fraud enforcement division puts more teeth, more tools, more resources to get a get ahead of this versus respond to this when it happens. So, when you look at the SNAP program, the Medicaid program, Morgan, what do you see as some of the vulnerabilities, some of the biggest vulnerabilities? What are the fraudsters typically exploiting when it comes to these programs?
Morgan Griffith: Well, one of the things that they're taking advantage of is that we don't have the right tests in place to test and make sure that they're real people or real organizations, real healthcare companies providing the services. So, we need to beef that up. And in fact, as the health subcommittee chair on Energy and Commerce, we did an investigation through Energy and Commerce, and there were a couple of committees subcommittees involved, looking at Democrat states, including your own state of Minnesota, and one of the things that we found in the report that came back from the staff report was that that a lot of Democrat states set weak or insufficient oversight guardrails as to what's you know what's out there and what's being done. So, we're going to need to beef that up… What was that number you used? $550 billion a year. It shouldn't be in that in those levels, and we just haven't put in the right procedures for the people who are providing. We had big problem with durable medical equipment in Florida. We had the Minnesota issue issues that you've talked about. We had the hospice issue in California. Every time you turn around, there's some group of criminals trying to take advantage of us, and instead of having 30 percent of all hospice care agencies in the country in one region of California, not even the whole state in one part of California, then you know we need to have a better way of vetting those providers. So, there's a lot that we can do at the federal level, but we also need those audits being done by the state. That if somebody claims to be a state-licensed hospice care or a state-licensed provider of durable medical equipment, that we're actually, or that the states are actually checking to see that if the X Y Z corporation actually has wheelchairs for sale to the seniors who live in Florida, and we've not we've not been doing that in the past. We are going to do a better job. There's all kinds of new technologies out there, Dr. Oz is working on a lot of this to make sure that you know they can't fake patients, that you actually are a real person who really needs those services, and that will help too. So, vet the vendors, and make sure that we don't have fake people who are getting it, or in the case of the hospice care. It was really tragic, what they were doing was they were stealing the identity of a senior citizen, and here's where this gets really bad, Brad. So, they steal the identity. Let's say it's Morgan Griffith, just so we don't have to make up somebody and accidentally, you know, get somebody riled up that I use their name. So, they steal my identity. Say I'm in hospice care and assume that I'm on Medicare for the sake of argument. Then what happens is I go to see my doctor for Medicare. They can't see me because I'm now a hospice patient, and they say, "Well, you have to go to your hospice provider." And I look at them and go, "I don't have a hospice provider." So, there were 1000s of people who were caught in this conundrum because gangsters had stolen their identity and were using it to get money from the federal government for hospice care and denying the senior citizen who actually needed the care their regular Medicare. It's just terrible.
The 2026 midterms are on Tuesday. But the anti-fraud campaign is one of a host of America First initiatives that could be scuttled by Democrats who are lusting to impeach not just Donald Trump but also his family and members of his cabinet, and who have an unhealthy obsession with Elon Musk.