Minnesota will roll out a statewide paid family and medical leave program on January 1, 2026, and critics warn it hands scammers another big target after years of documented welfare abuses. Past cases involving Feeding Our Future, housing assistance, and Medicaid have burned taxpayers and raised questions about oversight and leadership. Lawmakers, employers, and auditors are publicly worried the new benefit could be exploited unless controls actually work.
“Minnesota nice” captured a cultural tendency toward modesty and communal support that helped push the state into generous social programs and safety nets. Those programs were built with good intentions and a genuine commitment to caring for neighbors in need. Over time, however, generous benefits also created complex systems that can be vulnerable to abuse when oversight breaks down.
The article argues the state has been strained by an influx of migrants from Somalia who, it claims, brought cultural differences that clashed with local norms. It says that combination, paired with Democratic policy choices, turned several welfare programs into fertile ground for fraud. That failure to contain abuse has come with a real fiscal cost for Minnesota taxpayers.
Several specific programs are named as having been compromised, including Feeding Our Future, multiple housing programs, and Medicaid. The piece asserts those fraud schemes cost billions, contributed to the death of at least one vulnerable man, and in some cases funded extremist activity abroad. Those are stark charges that drive the central worry about the new leave program.
State leaders are also accused of knowing about or turning a blind eye to problems. The article names Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison as officials who were allegedly aware of fraud in welfare systems. That history fuels skepticism about whether new programs will be safeguarded or become another expense for honest taxpayers.
The state hasn’t gotten that problem under control, but starting on January 1, 2026, it will hand fraudsters another massive program they can scam for billions.
Here’s more:
You can take paid leave to care for yourself during serious health conditions, like surgery, injury, a chronic condition, pregnancy, and childbirth, and other health needs certified by your provider.
For family leave, it covers bonding with a child through birth, adoption, or foster placement, caring for a family member with a serious health issue, supporting a military family member called for active duty, or responding to a safety issue, including domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking, for you or a family member.
The law will provide up to 20 weeks of paid leave per year for eligible employees, including 12 weeks of personal medical leave and 12 weeks of family leave, both capped at 20 weeks total.
Republicans in the state have publicly raised alarms about how the program will be overseen and how fraud will be detected. Given prior episodes of large-scale abuse under current state management, those warnings are presented as reasonable and urgent. The debate centers on whether promised controls will be enough to stop what happened before.
“Can you share with the committee what fraud DEED is anticipating?” Rep. Isaac Schultz asked Evan Rowe, the assistant Commissioner of Minnesota’s Department of Employment and Economic Development.
Other lawmakers on the House Fraud and State Agency Oversight Committee had more specific questions about how the program could be abused when people apply to care for a sick relative. “How do you verify that care is actually being provided and they’re not, as we had spoken in many hearings before, just going to Florida for vacation and not really taking care of anybody?”
“If you are taking leave for that care, the employer has a role in providing that information to us,” Rowe said. “As well as all the other kinds of reporting elements I walked through to that can help ensure program integrity.”
Department officials pointed to a fraud reporting portal on the program’s website, a move critics describe as handing the party line another snitch line. That response prompted derision from some who say hotlines have not stopped abuse in other programs. The concern is that reporting after the fact is pay-and-chase, not prevention.
Business owners say the program could impose real costs on employers who must manage staffing when multiple workers take overlapping leave. Restaurant owner Troy Reding warned about verification and the burden on small businesses. “We are concerned with the mechanisms that will be in place at DEED to verify that an employee is appropriately caring for the designated individual on leave,” Reding said.
Evan Rowe tried to reassure skeptics directly. “We are going to take those reports incredibly seriously,” Rowe said, promising enforcement and follow-up. Still, critics remain unconvinced because past whistleblowers who raised alarms at state agencies were, the article claims, punished rather than heeded.
Legislative Auditor Judy Randall offered a more optimistic take on paper, arguing prevention is both cheaper and more effective than chasing fraud after payments are made. “Prevention is the most effective and the cheapest way to handle fraud,” she said. “Putting the controls in place up front is by far the most effective way. It’s much better than pay-and-chase which is what we have found ourselves doing in some programs … There’s a lot of good things here, (but) the proof is in the pudding.”
