Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is being asked to testify in front of Congress about his administration’s handling of public funds, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer announced on Wednesday, further escalating the GOP’s scrutiny of alleged government program fraud in Minnesota.
The Kentucky Republican said the committee will host its first hearing in January investigating the impacts of alleged misuse of federally funded Minnesota programs, and invited Walz and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison to appear before the committee in February.
The hearings will amplify Republicans’ attacks on Walz and the Somali community in Minnesota. Federal prosecutors have alleged hundreds of millions in dollars were defrauded from state nutrition and child care programs dating back to 2021. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday that 85 of the 98 individuals charged in connection to schemes to defraud public funds were of Somali descent.
“Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison have either been asleep at the wheel or complicit in a massive fraud involving taxpayer dollars in Minnesota’s social services programs,” Comer said in a statement. “American taxpayers demand and deserve accountability for the theft of their hard-earned money.”
In a statement, Walz’s office expressed openness to appearing before Comer’s committee while attacking the committee and President Donald Trump, who has led the attacks on the Minnesota governor and the state’s Somali population.
“We’re always happy to work with Congress, though this committee has a track record of holding circus hearings that have nothing to do with the issue at hand,” the office said. “While the Governor has been working to ensure fraudsters go to prison, the President has been selling pardons to let them out.”
The statement did not definitively indicate whether Walz would voluntarily appear before Congress.
The president and his allies have used the fraud investigations to attack Walz, the former Democratic vice presidential nominee whom he’s seeking to unseat in the midterms, and disparage Somali immigrants in the state.
Trump called Somali immigrants “garbage” at a White House event in early December. On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services froze hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for Minnesota’s child care programs, the latest in a string of actions the administration has taken against Minnesota in response to the fraud scandals.
In a social media post Wednesday, Trump again railed on Somali immigrants and insisted the U.S. “send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration is seeking to revoke the citizenship status of U.S. citizens of Somali descent who were charged with benefits fraud, while acknowledging that action may be rebuffed by the courts.
“It’s something the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State is currently looking at right now,” Leavitt said in a Fox News interview Wednesday morning. “We know that there are liberal activist judges across this country who will try to block and tackle this administration from pursuing justice at every turn. But that’s not gonna stop the president and his entire cabinet by acting on behalf of law-abiding, tax-paying citizens in the state of Minnesota and in states across the country who have been ripped off by people who have abused our immigration system.”
Attention on the fraud reached new heights recently after conservative influencer Nick Shirley accused several Minnesota day care centers of public fraud in a viral video shared by high-profile conservatives and Trump allies, including Elon Musk.
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