UNDATED (LEARFIELD) – House Republican Minority Leader Kurt Daudt (DOWT) says the Walz administration didn’t do enough to end payments to the fraudulent “Feeding our Future” program — the target of a federal investigation resulting in over four-dozen indictments.
The state Education Department suspended payments — but the program sued, alleging discrimination, and a judge ordered the payments be resumed. Daudt says state officials should have appealed.
“It’s one thing if you want to say, well, we caught it as quickly as we could and then we stopped it as quickly as we could,” said Daudt. “They paid 200 million dollars out, after they knew the program was fraudulent.”
State Education Department officials say they immediately reported the suspicious activities to federal authorities — including the F-B-I — “until we were able to find someone who would take the troubling spending as seriously as we were.”