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The Department of Justice on Thursday announced criminal charges against 15 defendants in Minnesota amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on corruption.
The charges were announced during a press conference by the Assistant Attorney General for the National Fraud Enforcement Division, Colin McDonald.
“Today, we are announcing criminal charges against 15 defendants in Minnesota for Medicaid fraud schemes that targeted over $90 million in taxpayer dollars,” he said. “Let me be clear up front about something, this is not the end of our work in Minnesota. This is not the end of the beginning of our work in Minnesota. This is the beginning of our work in Minnesota.”
He called the alleged fraud in Minnesota “shocking” and noted that the defendants charged on Thursday involved seven individual state-managed Medicaid programs.
“One of the programs has been completely shut down because there’s no money left – it’s all gone. That was Minnesota’s state-run, Housing Stabilization Services program, designed to help the homeless find and maintain housing,” McDonald explained.
He said that the program was initially estimated to cost around $2.5 million annually to fund this program, but it “ended up costing over 50 times that much, over $104 million by 2024 due to fraud – and because of all the fraud, Minnesota had to shut the program down in 2025.”
McDonald said that the “same trend exists” for several other state-run programs in Minnesota.
CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz told reporters during the press briefing that they have deferred $350 million to the state of Minnesota amid this financial chaos, and said that Medicaid is the “fundamental payer of the last resort for our most needy.”
He noted, “When we’re unable to keep these programs alive because of fraudsters, it hurts all of us deeply – and that’s what happened here in Minnesota.”
Assistant AG McDonald told the press that the DOJ is adding “strike force prosecutors to our Midwest healthcare strike force team” and building a specific Medicaid strike force team, starting with 15 attorneys, to assuage the shocking levels of alleged fraud in these state-funded programs across the nation in corruption “hotspots” like California and Minnesota.
