The Washington Post appears to want readers to believe that welfare fraud in Minneapolis is both widespread and inevitable — a natural outgrowth of a “too-big” welfare state. It’s a shopworn story, morally satisfying to some and politically repeatable by many. But its conventionality depends on leaving out the most important facts about fraud, public money, and who actually takes the most from government systems.
Let’s start with ownership. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, a man whose companies have long minimized taxes through complex international structures, transfer pricing, and generous access to public infrastructure funded by taxpayers. The US Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation regularly catalogs how corporate tax avoidance costs hundreds of billions annually — orders of magnitude beyond anything discussed in this article.
Yet when fraud is discussed in the Post, it is almost never about procurement scandals, multinational tax shelters, or billion-dollar overbilling by defense contractors. It is nearly always about someone at the bottom of the income distribution — preferably racialized, preferably foreign-born, and preferably dependent on services that already operate on a shoestring.
This is the morality play of American public discourse: small-time cheating by the poor is treated as a moral stain, while systemic extraction by the wealthy is treated as a technical matter, a footnote in a financial statement.
To be clear: fraud is wrong.
There is no public policy universe in which forging autism diagnoses, stealing money from feeding programs, or running fake companies is anything but criminal, corrosive, and damaging.
Programs that support vulnerable people rely on trust, and anyone who abuses that trust deserves prosecution.
But the Post’s framing — “welfare fraud is far too common,” caused by “the growth of the welfare state,” and particularly located in one immigrant community — is not only analytically thin. It is dangerously incomplete.
The scale of fraud is wildly misrepresented
The article quotes improper payment totals from the GAO as if they prove rampant criminality. They do not.
“Improper payments” include:
- agency clerical errors
- late documentation
- eligibility miscalculations
- system design flaws
- and yes, some fraud
But most improper payments are not criminal. They are administrative failures — often the predictable result of governments running massive benefit systems with outdated IT, understaffed departments, and contradictory rules written over decades.
The Post has every right to decry poor administrative design. But to equate improper payments exclusively with fraud is, frankly, misleading.
If fraud were truly 5–10% of all improper payments, that would put fraud losses somewhere between 0.25% and 0.5% of federal spending on income-support programs.
That is not an argument against a welfare state; it is an argument for better administration — something Open Policy has been saying for years.
Fraud by low-income individuals is prosecuted – fraud by high-rollers is shrugged off
This is what the Post never touches.
When a low-income person cheats the system, the full machinery of law enforcement descends:
- federal indictments,
- national headlines,
- congressional hearings.
But when wealthy people defraud government programs, it is called:
- “aggressive accounting,”
- “regulatory arbitrage,” or
- “settling with no admission of wrongdoing.”
Consider:
- PPP loan abuse by corporations during the pandemic — billions forgiven, no jail time.
- Defense contractors whose overbilling runs into the hundreds of billions over decades.
- Pharma companies fined for fraudulent marketing — fines treated as “cost of doing business.”
- Tax evasion via offshore holdings, costing the U.S. up to $1 trillion annually (IRS estimates).
Where is the Washington Post’s outrage about those?
Where are the columns calling for the shutdown of the procurement system?
Where are the think-tank essays describing corporate fraud as “inevitable” under capitalism?
The asymmetry is glaring.
Fraud by the poor is a moral failure.
Fraud by the wealthy is ho-hum.
Fraud is a symptom of system design, not evidence that the system should not exist
Minnesota’s Medicaid services for housing and autism did not collapse because the welfare state is too large. They collapsed because the program expansion outpaced administrative oversight — a classic case of administrative poverty:
- complex rules,
- fragmented accountability,
- short-staffed auditors, and
- rapid pandemic-era scale-up.
This is not proof that government should do less. It is proof that government must design better when it does more.
The Post treats the welfare state as the problem. The actual problem is an underbuilt administrative state managing overextended programs.
It’s the same mistake made over and over in North America:
Cut administrative capacity → programs become brittle → fraud rises → media blames the programs → capacity is cut further.
It is a policy stigma spiral.
Immigrant communities are visible targets — but not uniquely fraudulent
The article opens by emphasizing the Somali identity of several defendants. It also concedes, as an aside, that most Somalis are not criminals.
But the placement of that concession does not undo the framing.
And it perpetuates a familiar narrative: fraud committed by racialized communities is a cultural defect, not a structural vulnerability.
The reality:
- immigrant communities are often clustered in low-wage work,
- are targeted by unscrupulous actors,
- lack access to professionalized compliance advice,
- and are disproportionately involved in service roles within programs.
Fraud is not about culture. It is about opportunity, vulnerability, and the design of systems that make exploitation possible.
The welfare state is not a charity system; it is an economic stabilizer
The Post implies that less welfare would mean less fraud.
History suggests the opposite.
When income supports shrink:
- desperation rises,
- informal economies expand,
- illegal pathways become more attractive,
- oversight systems weaken,
- and fraud likely increases.
Well-functioning welfare states are not breeding grounds for fraud; they prevent it by making incomes reliable, reducing scarcity, and keeping people out of desperate circumstances that foster risky behaviour.
If the Post truly cared about preventing fraud, it would call for:
- adequate staffing,
- modernized IT,
- simplified eligibility rules,
- transparent data systems,
- and streamlined reporting.
Not smaller programs.
Yes — prosecute real fraud. But stop weaponizing it
There is no public-policy universe in which fraud should be tolerated. People who steal millions from nutrition programs or fabricate diagnoses should face penalties.
But fraud should not be weaponized to delegitimize the programs that tens of millions rely on — particularly when the largest drains on public funds are higher up the income ladder.
If the Washington Post wants to lead a national conversation about fraud, I welcome it.
But let it be a conversation about:
- tax evasion
- procurement waste
- corporate overbilling
- offshore avoidance
- pharmaceutical settlements
- defence contractor inflation
- and the high-roller frauds that dwarf anything happening in Minneapolis
Until then, we must be honest:
Fraud at the bottom is prosecuted. Fraud at the top is rationalized.
And articles like this — knowingly or not — help maintain that imbalance.
Fraud in Minnesota and elsewhere deserves attention.
But the Post’s argument — that fraud proves the welfare state has grown too large — is historically, economically, and administratively false.
Fraud is not an indictment of the welfare state. It is an indictment of an administrative state that has been hollowed out.
People who depend on these programs deserve better than moral panic about “welfare cheats.”
And readers deserve better than a newspaper that condemns fraud by the poor while often remaining quiet about the vastly greater fraud committed by the powerful — including those whose interests shape the paper’s own ownership structure.
If we want to protect public money, let us start where the money actually goes.
Not where it is easiest to moralize.