Vice President J.D. Vance announced yesterday that the federal government would hold back

$259 million in Medicaid funding for Minnesota over fraud concerns. The state and its

welfare fraud scandals have become a target for the Trump administration, which deployed

thousands of immigration agents to the Twin Cities in recent months. The vice president spoke in neighboring Wisconsin today.

The job of your government is not to open your borders and allow fraudsters to come in and take advantage of you.

The job of your government is to shut the border and shut off the fraud.

And that's exactly what we're doing in the Trump administration.

Democrats, including Minnesota Governor Tim Wall, says the defunding was politically motivated.

The sense of retribution, no state has experienced this before. How does taking and punishing

children and elderly have anything to do with fighting fraud when that's not where this issue was taking place.

To break this all down, we're joined now by Matt Seppik, reporter from Minnesota Public Radio.

Matt, thanks for being with us.

And for folks who might be confused by some of this, first we should explain where exactly

do these fraud allegations stem from?

Well, they go back several years, and they really begin with a scandal known here as the

Feeding Our Future Fraud. In that case, dozens of people, 79 at last count, have been charged.

Most of them have already been convicted, and this began. It became public in

2022 of stealing around $300 million from taxpayer-funded child nutrition programs. That investigation

has since morphed into Medicaid fraud, and that brings us to today, a former assistant U.S. attorney who

investigated this case estimated back in December that as much as $9 billion may have been stolen

from Minnesota's Medicaid program since 2018. So there is something to this. This $259 million figure, though, put that in the context

of how much money, Medicaid money, the state gets from the federal government. Well, Minnesota gets

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