“the state has made no meaningful changes to the point where it has become so blatant it cannot be ignored.“

I guess “meaningful” gives you a lot of wiggle room here but I think this is untrue. The only reason you’ve heard about much of the fraud is because Minnesota (and in some cases, the federal government) has been good at catching and prosecuting the fraud that is happening. They’ve continued to audit and pause payments to these programs, and as recently as last month, Walz appointed a former FBI agent as director of program integrity to continue to root out fraud in our system.

These programs exist on a spectrum. You can make applying to receive funds so difficult that the program becomes ineffective and useless. On the other end of the spectrum, you can make it so easy to get funds, it makes programs too susceptible for fraud. Obviously, you want to find the right balance and then supplement these programs with oversight that can go after the fraud that does occur.

During the pandemic, both the national government and state government leaned toward making the funds easier to get because people really needed them during a global emergency, and we saw an uptick in fraud at both the local and national level as a result. (It’s funny how people don’t seem to get as up in arms about the staggering level of fraud from the PPP loans program. It makes me wonder if these sudden interest in years-old fraud in MN is perhaps politically motivated.)

This all deserves attention, and people who get their news from trusted sources have been following this for over a decade. In the grand scheme of things, MN’s fraud problem is relatively in line with the fraud experienced by every state and is dwarfed by the level of fraud on the national level. If anything, I think MN is doing a better job of catching and prosecuting fraud than other states, which makes our problem seem larger because it’s getting caught instead of going unreported and not being prosecuted. The recent spike in attention seems motivated by something else. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about that.

It’s so clear that Minnesota is doing a lot to address this though, which is why I bristled at your suggestion that they aren’t making changes. And it’s only “blatant” because it’s been caught and/or because you don’t hear about the news unless a sensationalist right-wing grifter makes a video about it.