Donald Trump and his administration have put a massive spotlight on welfare fraud in Minnesota in recent weeks, threatening to pull all federal welfare funds from the blue state, but according to a Thursday report from HuffPost, his administration "gave a red state a pass" after it had been caught up in "one of the biggest welfare fraud scandals of all time."
According to the report, in the waning days of Joe Biden's presidency, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families ordered Mississippi to pay a massive penalty fine after an investigation determined that it had allowed embezzlement from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. The fine and the estimated cost of the fraud were the same, $100 million. The case, at one point, drew national attention when reports found that football legend Brett Favre had been among the recipients of these fraudulent payments.
That punishment did not last, however, as when Trump returned to office, his HHS department claimed to have found new materials linked to the case that "could validate some of its allegedly improper spending." As a result, the original Biden-era penalty was revoked, and the department told the state that it would issue a new one at a later date once the new total cost of the fraud had been determined.
As of now, no such new penalty has been issued, leaving the impression that the Trump administration has let Mississippi, one of the most heavily conservative states in the US, off the hook.
This report comes as the administration plans to cut off all federal welfare funding to several blue states, stemming from a renewed focus by right-wing media figures on fraud cases in Minnesota. Many of these cases in the state have already been prosecuted and led to convictions, but the story was reignited after a right-wing YouTube creator posted a video with new, and largely unsubstantiated, allegations against Somali-American daycare centers.
"In response to the fraud scandal in Minnesota — which includes dozens of well-documented and prosecuted criminal cases in addition to unproven allegations by a right-wing YouTuber — HHS announced a wholesale cutoff of funding under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, as well as two other federal programs that help with child care," HuffPost's report explained. "And not just in Minnesota, but also in the blue states of California, Colorado, Illinois and New York."
“There’s certainly a disparate effect here, in terms of these five blue states and that one particular red state,” Nick Gwyn, an expert on federal-state welfare programs with the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told the outlet.
In response to HuffPost's inquiry, HHS claimed that it was still “evaluating options to follow up with Mississippi.”