Trump Freezes Funding to Punish Blue States for Welfare Fraud While Leaving Red States Untouched

There is a real and long-recognized scandal concerning fraudulent schemes to siphon off welfare spending in Minnesota. But the Trump administration is using this as an excuse to yank funding selectively, only for states run by Democrats, on the mere assertion of fraud.

The Washington Post reports:

The Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday that it had frozen grants that provide food and child care assistance to low-income residents in New York, California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota, saying that it has “serious concerns about widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars in state-administered programs” and that the states may be wrongfully providing services to illegal immigrants. …

Democratic leaders said the funding cuts were politically motivated. …

Freezing federal funds to child care providers across an entire state is “unprecedented,” said Ruth Friedman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, who directed the HHS office that handles child care under the Biden administration. Typically states handle fraud investigations, she said, since they are the ones distributing the funds to providers.

“You don’t harm hundreds of thousands of families and take away their child care assistance based on unproven allegations,” Friedman said.

There have been welfare-fraud scandals in Republican-led states, too, including one in Mississippi that is similar to the case in Minnesota. To pre-emptively remove funding only for states run by Trump’s political opponents is a nakedly political abuse of funds whose expenditure is mandated by Congress.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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