OPINION:
Democrats in recent years have focused on waste, fraud and abuse — not to eradicate them but to politically exploit them.
The latest example erupted in Minnesota, home to the nation’s largest population of ethnic Somalis, led by Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Court cases and investigative journalism have exposed what has been going on for years. Residents of Somali descent in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from COVID-19 pandemic giveaways and medical services and spent the stolen money on lavish lifestyles. The systematic heist may total billions of dollars.
There are two scandals: the brazen theft and the see-no-evil Democratic Gov. Tim Walz. Conscientious state bureaucrats have taken to local media to tell the story of the Walz regime’s blatant disregard for their warnings.
What does Mr. Walz, Kamala Harris’ subpar running mate, say today? He is calling for more Somali immigration and shifting the discussion to White people who commit crimes.
Do you hear any concerted call from Democrats in Washington to stop the financial carnage? No. Why? Because Minnesota Somalia, population 100,000, is an important voter base to help win statewide elections. It also kicks back some of that dough to Democratic campaigns. Ignoring waste, fraud and abuse means more votes and more power. It also avoids the Somali community’s calling them racists, as threatened.
Competing with Minnesota for the top fraud of 2025 is Obamacare, officially known as the Affordable Care Act, for roughly 44 million Americans. It’s actually not at all affordable, which is why Democrats used a coercive shutdown to force Senate Republicans to extend more subsidy payments to insurance companies.
Here’s the pattern in Washington: Democrats institute failures and then demand that Republicans bail them out (even though, in this case, the Democrats voted to end subsidies this year). The Government Accountability Office reported Dec. 5 that the ACA is steeped in fraud. More than 50,000 ACA subsidy recipients were dead, thousands of them before coverage even began. This year, the GAO played a trick on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services by submitting applications from fictitious people and unreleased Social Security numbers. The marketplace approved all 20.
Democrats stayed mostly mum, presumably because they have calculated that it helps politically not to fight ACA fraud. President Biden used rampant college student loans and blanket forgiveness to bribe more Gen Z voters.
The new Trump team has gone to school. At first, the Department of Education uncovered nearly $90 million in student aid fraud, including $30 million to dead people and $40 million to online bots. On Dec. 11, the department announced an update: It has stopped billions of dollars in fraud with new controls that preemptively spot fraudsters and artificial intelligence bots.
Why didn’t Biden people do this basic anti-fraud campaign? We know why.
Then there were the “gold bars.” The Trump squad signaled right out of the gate that it planned to scour federal spending via the Department of Government Efficiency. A Biden bureaucrat inside the Environmental Protection Agency described walling off $20 billion from the Trump team as throwing “gold bars off the Titanic.”
DOGE, led by Twitter buyer and industrial dynamo Elon Musk, rapidly deployed and discovered that the Biden playbook involved sending billions of dollars to left-wing “nonprofits” to carry out Democratic Party agendas. A group associated with former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams was slated to receive $2 billion from the EPA, though it had no history of handling more than $100.
“We stopped a lot of funding just that really made no sense, that was entirely wasteful,” Mr. Musk told “The Katie Miller Podcast.” (Ms. Miller once served as DOGE spokesperson.)
DOGE may have stopped some funding, but in just 11 months, it hasn’t had a big impact on a $7 trillion federal budget. Part of the challenge is that only 13% of spending is nondefense “discretionary” spending. The remaining 74%, such as Social Security, is mandatory. The Pentagon’s 13% share is essentially mandatory because Mr. Trump wants more, not less, for defense.
DOGE’s new accountability culture is taking over. On Nov. 24, it announced the termination of 78 “wasteful contracts” with savings of $335 million. Earlier this month, it reported that the federal workforce has declined by 271,000 since Mr. Trump took office.
Nothing could be a bigger instance of fraud and abuse than Mr. Biden’s opening our southern border to the most vicious people alive: the Mexican drug cartels, but that’s what he and the Democrats did for four years. In came 15 million to 20 million illegal migrants, most chosen and smuggled in by the cartels, which raked in $1 billion a month in fees. Into the law-abiding American citizens’ midst were delivered criminal gangs, rapists, murderers and thieves.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates that the cartels trafficked more than 300,000 innocent unaccompanied children. The National Counterterrorism Center reported this month that more than 18,000 terrorist-linked migrants crossed the Biden border.
House Homeland Security Committee Republicans documented much of this in 2024, saying: “Quite simply, [Biden and his aides] have launched an assault on the rule of law, and in so doing, have undermined the sovereignty, national security, and long-term well-being of the country they claim to serve.”
Why would a U.S. president subject Americans to this abuse? The reason is cynical: future Democratic voters.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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