The Stack: The Tip of the Iceberg in Government Safety Net Fraud
Federal safety net programs are often defended with emotion rather than evidence, making them politically protected and practically impossible to audit. On today’s Toddcast, Todd breaks down disturbing allegations of massive Medicaid fraud centered in Minnesota—fraud so blatant it includes daycare centers with no children and non-emergency medical transportation companies with no vehicles.
Investigative reporting and citizen journalism have exposed what appears to be a system designed to move taxpayer money with little oversight and no accountability. Todd argues that this is not about race, politics, or ideology—it’s about whether Americans should tolerate billions of dollars disappearing into businesses that may exist only on paper.
Extending an olive branch to the left, Todd makes a simple proposal: don’t eliminate programs, don’t cut benefits—just audit them. Protect legitimate recipients, prosecute fraudsters, and prove the system is real. If even that request is considered unacceptable, Todd asks the question no one wants to answer: what exactly is being protected?
🎧 Listen to Today’s Episode
📰 Stack Links
A New Nick Shirley Video Shows Grift That Is ‘Ten Times Worse’ and Will Cause ‘World War III’
US Treasury probes money transfer firms, banks amid Minnesota fraud scandal, Bessent says
Bessent says overseas money transfers are fine if people can prove origin of funds – https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bessent-says-overseas-money-transfers-are-fine-if-people-can-prove-origin-funds-2026-01-10/
Secretary Bessent Announces Initiatives to Combat Rampant Fraud in Minnesota
Secretary Bessent Announces Initiatives to Combat Rampant Fraud in Minnesota
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📝 Transcript: The Tip of the Iceberg in Government Safety Net Fraud
The Todd Huff Show – January 14, 2025
Host: Todd Huff
Todd Huff: My friends, federal, quote, safety net programs. Those are defended based upon emotion. They are structurally hard, if not impossible, to audit and they are politically protected, all at the expense, by the way, of the U.S. taxpayer.
This allows, this allows, I should say, large scale fraud, abuse, and the like to persist and makes even basic oversight feel forbidden or dirty or inappropriate or whatever. And I want to talk about this today.
My friends, thank you for tuning in. I'm your host, the ever so lovable Todd Huff. You can share your thoughts, questions, feedback via email todd@toddhuffshow.com.
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Todd Huff: My friends, you may have seen there's articles out there or there's posts on social media. You may have seen the original post on social media from Nick Shirley. You may have seen—sorry, Oz made a gesture, I did not know what it meant. I still don't know what it meant, but anyway.
So you may have seen the video from a couple, what was it, couple weeks ago. Nick Shirley exposed, we talked about it on this program, exposed the fraud happening in the state of Minnesota.
Tim Walz is Minnesota, by the way. It's the reason why Tim Walz is not running for reelection for governor of Minnesota. And this video ripped the top off of what has been just astonishing to see.
Now, it's not surprising. It's one of those things that it doesn't surprise me, but it's still shocking to see just the level of ineptitude.
The level of just mismanagement. The level of, I don't know, apathy, lack of concern, you name it, when it comes to the way that this Medicaid program was being run.
Todd Huff: There were schools that don't have kids in them that are getting money. And by the way, it's mostly, it's a very, very high percentage, almost all in fact, are people who are Somali refugees.
These are just the facts. You can get mad at the facts. You can say whatever you want to say about the facts, but these are the facts.
And then you couple that with things like reports that, of course, this money is being sent back to their home nation, Somalia, Africa. Some of these funds, it is believed, are being sent to Al Shabaab terrorist organization.
Well, there's a new headline out there today and some new posts on social media that says this: a new Nick Shirley video shows grift is—excuse me—that is ten times worse and will cause World War III.
This is at pjmedia.com. I want to read from this here really quickly, my friends.
Here's what it says, written by Victoria Taft, by the way.
Todd Huff: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was told over the weekend that a new Nick Shirley video being released soon, maybe even as early as Monday, is ten times worse than the Quality Learning Center daycare scam.
In Shirley's previous video, he and his source, David Hoke, who has been investigating this billion dollar plus scam for years, discovered multiple daycare centers in one building without children in them for years.
So multiple daycare centers were supposedly in existence in one building in Minnesota, and they don't have any children in them.
They exposed this in a YouTube video. Nick Shirley. This was posted on X, everywhere else. Many people have seen this.
And this is where Hoke says is the heart of the ongoing continuing criminal enterprise. Hoke says the new video will show that most of these companies are Somali owned.
And his and Shirley's visit to these companies found zero companies.
Todd Huff: So he's basically saying all of these things. They've created a fraudulent enterprise, a fraudulent scam paid for by you, my friends, paid for by me, the American taxpayer.
Paying for this. He says that these companies, they visited them and there's zero real companies.
He continues here. What I believe is the core of all this is non-emergency medical transportation.
A search showed that Minnesota recognizes 1,020 NEMT companies. These are non-emergency medical transport companies.
Listen to this. Almost 900 of them are Somali owned, he told Bessent.
Hoke went on, in the second video, Nick Shirley and I went to 16 of them. I've actually been to about 70 of them at this point.
Todd Huff: He held up his papers and leaned forward to Bessent to emphasize they don't exist. They visited the NEMT companies to find the addresses, went to places with no vehicles.
Fronts included an apartment building. One of them is a liquor store. Another one is a wire transfer. Another one is totally unrelated. It's a grocery store.
There are no vehicles. Again, remember, my friends, we're talking about non-emergency medical transport.
You would think if there was transport going on, there would be vehicles. There are none, he says.
He continues, the vast majority of these companies exist on paper only. They are not real. They're fake, he says.
They exist only on a sheet of paper, much like the promise that Bill Clinton got from Kim Jong Il all these years ago that he would not develop nuclear weapons.
Todd Huff: Of course, we know how that turned out. They made a pinky promise and signed a piece of paper. That's good enough for these people in government.
That sounds great. We got the photo op.
You know the case of Minnesota, you can talk about all the good you're doing for people in your community, but when you get down to the brass tacks here, my friends, this is not real.
Going back to the article, he said that the average NEMT company in the United States has about 20 vehicles, and each vehicle generates about $70,000 a year.
He said that if you run those numbers—800 companies, 20 vehicles, $70,000 a year—it's an enormous sum of money that's going out.
I haven't done the math. Maybe I'll do that here in real time.
Todd Huff: Let's just see what that number comes out to. 800 companies. 20 vehicles. That's 16,000 vehicles. And then each vehicle, $70,000.
That is—oh boy—that is $1.12 billion with a B dollars.
Then they've got a link here to the video, a preview video that Nick Shirley released.
Shirley says that inside the store, referencing kind of this preview video, Shirley says that inside the store, in a grocery store in Minnesota, different shops are crammed into one store.
He says a phone company wires money back to Africa. That's not illegal, by the way. People wire money all the time.
What does matter is if you're trying to launder ill-gotten gains.
Todd Huff: And that's where Bessent and the Treasury Department come in. Multiple news sources, including Minnesota's Alpha News, report that there are suitcases of money being taken to Dubai and ending up in Somalia.
There is a Byzantine path through which government money is freely given for a Somali-run non-emergency medical transportation system whose vans have been parked for years.
Hoke said chasing the money line is fine, but he advised Bessent, you got to drop down like Batman on DHS, the government agency doling out the money, because they're the ones writing the checks.
They're the ones allowing the fraud to happen.
Look, he says, you can blame the Somalis, but if you stick your hand out and someone puts $100 in it, they keep doing it if the government is handing it out.
But he warned, I'm telling you, when the next video comes out, it's going to be World War III.
Todd Huff: So I want to talk about this today. My, oh, my. I want to talk about this. A lot going on, a lot to kind of work through.
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All right, the tip of the iceberg here. This may be the tip of the iceberg. In fact, there’s a second article I want to talk about here today, and it’s also coincidentally in PJ Media. This one is written by Rick Moran. The headline here is Tip of the Iceberg: You’re Not Going to Believe the Amount of Fraud and Waste in Safety Net Programs.
A lot of people will get caught up or tied down in the fact that this first program here that’s been exposed is being run by Somalis, Somali immigrants. That’s the story for them. Oh, it’s all about someone’s race or their ethnicity. That just happens to be who’s doing this.
Todd Huff: My friends, this is happening, I’m telling you, on a massive and large scale. In fact, Rick Moran says it’s bigger than what we can imagine. The headline he writes probably has most of you saying to yourselves, of course I believe the amount of fraud taking place in the federal safety net programs. No matter what number you report, Moran, I’ve already imagined it.
I’d agree with you, he writes, except the scale of fraud, waste, and lax enforcement is beyond anything anyone ever imagined. There’s a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a contributing editor at Reason who spent her entire career as a voice crying in the wilderness, trying to get Congress, opinion makers, and citizens to pay attention to the extraordinarily lax oversight of most government spending.
Will the Minnesota Medicaid fraud scandal finally be the tipping point that will convince the parties to get serious about safeguarding the taxpayers’ money? That’s the question being asked. And my friends, the outrage is justified.
Todd Huff: The outrage is justified because Americans are finally getting a concrete look at what happens when pushing public money out the door matters more than verifying the eligibility of the recipients, confirming services were delivered, or ultimately being a good steward of taxpayers’ money.
Federal prosecutors in Minnesota are suggesting that up to, listen to this, half, half my friends, half of the eighteen billion dollars spent on fourteen Medicaid-funded Minnesota programs since 2018 may have been tied to fraud. Half of it. Half of it fraud.
This isn’t around the edges. This isn’t just isolated incidents of fraud or mismanagement or abuse or whatever else. This is documented examples of half, fifty percent, nine billion dollars of the eighteen billion spent since 2018 on these programs potentially being tied to fraud.
Yes, Moran writes here, that’s nine billion dollars of government money. And it’s not imaginary money. A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money, said former Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen. Ultimately, it is in fact real money because it goes into people’s pockets and gets spent on everything from chewing gum to cancer treatments.
Todd Huff: We’ve become so inured, so numb to the gargantuan amount of government spending that goes out the door in Washington in our name that it just doesn’t seem real, and that is a real problem.
This again may very well be the tip of the iceberg. Now, I want to pause here and kind of set up where we’re going from here. I want to talk about how many of these things are not audited, and when they are audited, the information that’s found or uncovered by the auditors often just falls on deaf ears.
There are some pitfalls when we talk about this, especially with people who are bleeding heart liberals, because again, these programs make people feel better. The way that they’re framed and discussed and presented and put into budgets, and then they’re basically etched in stone. They’re part of the system, and no matter what happens, they’re not coming out.
I want to talk about that, the dangers, and how we got into this mess. And I want to give an olive branch to people who are on the left, the bleeding heart liberal out there. I will have an olive branch to you because I’m not asking that we cut a single program today. Hang in there with me.
Todd Huff: If you’re conservatives, I do think we’ve got to fix this problem in the long run. But I will say this as an olive branch. I would make an agreement to the people on the left to say I wouldn’t touch these programs for some defined period of time.
Let’s just agree that money that’s being spent in these programs and that is being fraudulently spent needs to be exposed, it needs to be stopped, and people need to be prosecuted.
Time out for me. More on the other side of the break, my friends. Back in just a minute.
Todd Huff: Yes, my friends, I have an olive branch to the on the left. I want to talk to them specifically here, because anytime we start talking about audits, about programs that are Medicaid funded and so forth, federally funded to help people who are in dire circumstances, the alarm bells start going off for people on the left.
Listen, I look at this differently. I think that the federal government is doing a bunch of things here with social programs, with entitlement programs, that never should be done. If anything, these are state issues. If the government should be involved at all, the states should manage them. You could say, Todd, this is the state manager, but it’s getting Medicaid, federal Medicaid funding, so these are like pass-through grants. The whole system is screwed up.
I don’t like any of this. I would love to go back to the days where states collected taxes and then paid their percentage of the tax burden back to the federal government. Today, it’s completely on its head. We have money taken out of our paychecks in the form of payroll taxes. Those go straight to Washington, D.C. Other taxes do too.
Todd Huff: And then states are then given money back to do things if they check certain boxes by the federal government. There’s so much wrong with that. That is a topic of discussion in and of itself. I’m not going to do that today. But that’s a broken system in and of itself. It’s not the way that it should work. It’s not the way it was ever supposed to work, but here we are.
But the bottom line is these are federally funded, ultimately, programs because of the structure and so forth. And it’s not something the government, in my estimation, the federal government should have ever been involved in. These are states issues, if it’s a government issue at all.
I would even much prefer these things to be managed by the private sector, nonprofits, churches. By the way, this is a big opportunity. I don’t mean to be critical. I’m a follower of Jesus. I attend a church. And churches have done a lot of great things. They have. Christians have done a lot of wonderful things in this country, in this world.
And those are tremendous things. They’ve also, the church has also made some mistakes. And I think a lot of times the church has deferred to the government to fix these problems, but that’s not the way that it works. And just a side note, this isn’t the whole topic of the show.
Todd Huff: When Jesus, again, I’m talking to my Christian brothers and sisters, or even to people who aren’t believers who just want to understand a little bit more, Jesus instructed us as individuals to give to the poor and to the needy, to help the widow and the orphan.
He never said, hey, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to structure a government, and then have that government by force take your payroll taxes out and then have some bureaucrat decide who gets the money. No, he wanted it to be personal in the sense where we’re involved with the people in our lives, in our community, to provide for their needs, but also to share the love of Christ.
And that’s lost. That’s really lost, especially when the government steps in because, A, they want to do the exact opposite of that. Separation of church and state and all that sort of stuff comes into play. And they don’t have the same values. The government doesn’t have the same values or ultimately the same level of concern that God has for humanity.
They claim that they do, but they don’t. And there’s a lot of things that begin to come off track, I guess, whenever you do it that way. But churches, nonprofits, this is where they can shine. They can.
Todd Huff: And the ones that do it best will be, I don’t want to say rewarded, but given the opportunity to do more because they’ll attract more people and more funds to continue the work that they’re doing versus what the government does, which is what we’re talking about here.
So that’s the case for me. But I’m telling you, I’m willing to table that. I’m willing to table that core belief for some period of time and just talk to my friends who say that, hey, government, the federal government specifically, should be doing this.
This makes me feel good to know that a portion of my taxes are going to this, that, or the other. Okay. I’m not trying to persuade you. I will say, fine, that’s okay for this discussion. Let’s agree there. Let’s start there.
I’m not going to push to touch these programs if you meet me here. If you meet me here, if you will say, Todd, I agree that there is some level of fraud. This story in and of itself, without any other examples or any other information, just the one, I guess, there’s a couple we’re talking about here, but just pick one.
Just pick the Somali daycare fraud. And if it makes you feel like you’re being racist for saying that, just call it the Minnesota Medicaid fraud. Whatever makes you feel better.
Todd Huff: If it makes you feel like you’re picking on Minnesota for calling it Minnesota Medicaid fraud, just call it Medicaid fraud. If you feel like it’s making you pick on Medicaid, just call it entitlement fraud, call it social program fraud. Call it whatever it is, whatever terminology, however you need this to be framed.
Can we not just agree, can we not just agree that we should audit this? Let’s say, look, we’re not going to cut. The program’s not going to be eliminated. The program, whatever percentage of the program is real, the conservatives, the limited government people say, you know what, we’re not even going to talk about eliminating it.
We’ll just say right now we’ll keep the program, but we only want to keep what’s legitimate. If that’s not a fair place to start, I don’t know where else to meet you. I don’t know what else to say to you because that is the most logical place to start.
We don’t need to start fighting about the intentions of the program, the effectiveness of the part of the program that’s actually legitimate as far as the stated purposes, and the reality of these people who are filling out the paperwork and collecting the money, what the truth there is and all that.
The people that are really using it for the right reasons, I’m going to tell you, we’re not going to touch them. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Let’s talk about all this wasted money. Let’s start by saying it should be audited. It should be audited.
Todd Huff: Now I say this, I realized during this whole DOGE situation earlier, I guess it was last year now, but in 2025, when they went through and found all this waste, fraud, and abuse. The immediate reaction, it’s amazing to me, and what do you do about this?
It didn’t matter what DOGE reported. People on the left said they’re lying. It’s made up. These are a bunch of kids that Elon Musk has hired. This is Musk trying to steal our money or whatever, right? Who knows, whatever they thought. This is Musk trying to protect the money that he’s made from higher taxes and all this sort of thing.
And I know, I know that whatever number was reported, whatever fraud was alleged, whatever waste was determined to be uncovered, no matter the ages, the alleged ages of people who are receiving Social Security benefits, people who are undoubtedly dead, people just don’t believe it.
And at some point it’s like, what do you do? Because you have to believe something. You have to. You have to make a decision on what reality is based upon all the information we’re being given or whatever we think is being withheld from us.
So it gets tough because some people only believe the bureaucratic state, and the bureaucrats are out there saying, and the media are out there saying, this is fine. This is the way. Yeah, there’s a little bit of fraud on the periphery, but this is, at its core, a program that’s being used the right way.
Todd Huff: So I don’t know how we get to the point where we can actually agree that the numbers presented by this group are the numbers we’re going to talk about, the numbers we’re going to accept, I should say.
We need to have an audit, not to eliminate programs, but to eliminate the parts of the programs that are being taken advantage of that are not real. Because the left and the people who have these large bleeding hearts or the ones that want you to think that they do, think that talking about a program having fraud is cruel to the people who are using the program for its legitimate stated purposes.
And they’re afraid. They don’t want these folks to get caught up in a program getting eliminated when really the fraud was the problem. I’ll agree with you. Step one, the fraud is the problem. Let’s address it, though. Let’s address it.
This is a compromise. I’m not asking for it to be cut today. Just show me what’s legit, what’s stolen, and hold people accountable. Prosecute whoever did it. Doesn’t matter.
And I will tell you up front, if they’re a Republican and they’re guilty of fraud, they need to be prosecuted. If they’re a Democrat, independent, I couldn’t care less.
Todd Huff: Can we just agree that this is a starting point? I don’t know why we can’t. I don’t know how a reasonable person would turn that down.
I know that they will. They’re not reasonable if they turn that down. But I know for a fact people would turn that down. It’s bizarre to me. It’s crazy. But that’s the way that it is, friends.
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And yes, my friends, time out for me. Back in just a minute.
Todd Huff: Welcome back, my friends. Time flies when you’re having fun. Third and final segment of today’s program here, being broadcast to you from the Full Suite Wealth studios.
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Okay, friends, I want to put this into perspective a little bit. When you think about entitlement spending, when you think about social programs, I want to put this into context. If we use the fiscal year 2024 budget as the clean baseline, federal spending was right at seven trillion dollars, about 6.9 trillion dollars. Mandatory spending, which includes these programs, was about 4.1 trillion dollars, and that’s coming from the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO.
That means roughly sixty percent, maybe as high as sixty-five percent, somewhere in that vicinity, of federal spending is mandatory spending. This is dominated, if you look at the main drivers, by Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. That’s where the bulk of this money is going, and these are entitlement programs. That’s what they are.
Todd Huff: So if you think about this for a moment, let’s just assume what we know from Minnesota. Half of the money. Now listen, I’m not claiming that’s universal, but just to give you an idea of the scale, if you were to take half of all spending in these mandatory entitlement programs and assume that it was fraudulent, abused, or wasted, the numbers would be absolutely enormous.
And I’m telling you, friends, a month ago, six weeks ago, no one even knew that this existed in Minnesota. That should concern freedom-loving people, because what has to happen for this scenario to play out? You have to earn money. They then tax your money. I’m not here to defend payroll taxes or income taxes, but that’s the system we’re operating under right now.
You work, you provide for your family, and that money belongs to you. And then we assume that the things we’re funding with those tax dollars are legitimate. There should be oversight. There should be proper management. There should be documentation verifying that these places are real and that the services are actually being provided.
But what happens instead is that the system becomes so swollen and so complex that it creates camouflage for people to take advantage of it. We’ve seen that clearly in Minnesota. And when these programs are federally managed and dictated from Washington, D.C., that creates distance, both physically and psychologically, from the realities on the ground in local communities.
Todd Huff: These communities across the country have similarities, sure, but they are also unique. And this structure creates a perfect storm. This is a perfect storm for waste, fraud, and abuse. And my olive branch remains true. I’ll sign a pledge if you’re on the left. I don’t want to eliminate anything today.
I’ll sign a pledge that says I’m not here today to eliminate these programs. I’m not taking that off the table permanently, but that’s not today’s discussion. The first step is simply this: let’s get this under control. Let’s audit. Let’s verify. Let’s enforce. Let’s protect the people who are legitimate recipients of these programs.
And then let’s go after the fraudsters. I don’t care if they’re individual fraudsters gaming the system, or if they’re politicians who were involved in allowing or enabling it. If politicians are found to have been involved, they need to be held accountable. Democrat, Republican, Independent—it doesn’t matter.
They need to be prosecuted. Why would anyone oppose that? What are they protecting? Is it taxpayers? Is it people in need? Or is it a narrative or a political ideology? If you can’t agree with that, then that’s my proposal to the bleeding heart left.
We’ve got to clean these problems up. The burden this places on the American taxpayer and on families already struggling to make ends meet is massive. I’ve gotta run. Have a great day, my friends. SDG.
