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FIRST ON FOX: A cohort of Senate Republicans plans to launch a targeted task force aimed at tackling fraudsters in the wake of the Minnesota fraud scandal.
Republican members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee announced that they would form a task force dedicated to rooting out fraudsters abusing federal funding.
The seven-member panel will be led by HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., who has cranked up efforts in recent weeks to crack down on fraud, particularly in Minnesota.
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“Our tax dollars are supposed to help American families, not line the pockets of fraudsters,” Cassidy said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “HELP Committee Republicans are committed to rooting out this fraud and ensuring Americans’ tax dollars are used responsibly.”
The long-running, nearly six years long investigation into alleged fraud in Minnesota gained new attention and traction among Republicans and the White House earlier this year.
The scandal, in which federal prosecutors estimate that up to $9 billion was stolen through a network of fraudulent fronts posing as daycare centers, food programs and health clinics, has dominated the bandwidth of many in the GOP and spurred the Trump administration’s deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into Minneapolis.
The majority of those charged, so far, in the ongoing investigation are part of Minnesota’s Somali population. The Trump administration has taken steps outside the deploying of ICE agents to target Somalis in the area, too, including ending protected status for the population and launching investigations into whether the fraudulent activity is connected to al-Shabab, a terrorist organization based in Somalia.
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The task force will delineate its focus into three prongs: health, education and labor and pensions.
Those three subgroups will be led by Sens. Ashley Moody, R-Fla., Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who will lead the health-focused section, Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., Jon Husted, who will lead the education-focused group, and R-Ohio, Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., and Tim Scott, R-S.C., who will chair the labor-and-pensions-focused section.
But the task force’s announcement comes at a precarious time, as lawmakers hurtle toward what could be another government shutdown fueled in large part by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) actions in Minnesota.
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That situation comes after Senate Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., signaled their plan to reject the DHS funding bill following the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Alex Pretti on Saturday by a border patrol agent. Cassidy, along with a handful of other congressional Republicans, demanded that the incident receive a fulsome and thorough investigation.
Still, Cassidy’s effort is not the first time he’s forayed into the Minnesota fraud scandal.
Earlier this month, the lawmaker led the entire Senate GOP in a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, demanding that he provide receipts on several issues, and warned that failure to do so could lead to several streams of federal money flowing to Minnesota drying up.
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That effort was centered on several requests, like how often the state conducted on-site monitoring, inspections or investigative visits to childcare facilities that received federal dollars.
Senate Republicans specifically wanted examples of any information uncovered on fake children, false attendance records, over-billing, ineligible enrollments, and shell or fake business structures, among other demands from Walz.
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