Minnesota Taxpayer Dollars Funding Terrorism: A Disturbing Investigation
In a shocking revelation that cuts to the heart of public trust, a new investigation by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo of the Manhattan Institute has uncovered a disturbing network of fraud that connects Minnesota’s social service programs to Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group in Somalia. What began as a look into financial improprieties has uncovered something far more sinister: taxpayer dollars meant to help vulnerable Minnesotans are instead funding terrorism half a world away. The investigation reveals not just administrative failures or simple theft, but a sophisticated international money-moving operation that redirects public funds from their intended purposes to dangerous extremists.
The investigation tracked how money flowed through Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program, Feeding Our Future, and other state initiatives. What they discovered was staggering in scale: programs that were designed to help with housing stability, feed hungry children, and provide autism services for kids had become cash machines for fraudsters. The Housing Stabilization Services program, initially estimated to cost $2.6 million, exploded to $21 million in its first year and reached $61 million in just the first half of 2025. Similarly, Feeding Our Future went from receiving $3.4 million in federal funds in 2019 to nearly $200 million by 2021. Rather than serving the needy, these funds purchased luxury cars and real estate in the U.S., Turkey, and Kenya. When officials grew suspicious of Feeding Our Future in 2020, the organization responded by filing a discrimination lawsuit, temporarily halting scrutiny. The investigation found connections between those involved in the scheme and political figures, including donations to Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose deputy district director had advocated for the group.
The mechanism by which these stolen funds traveled from Minnesota to terrorist hands involved a network of money traders called “hawalas” within the Somali community. Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who spent 14 years on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, explained that Somalis had established a complex money network routing cash on commercial flights from Seattle to these hawala networks in Somalia. “We had sources going into the hawalas to send money. I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well s—, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits,” Kerns told the investigators. The scale of these remittances is enormous—in 2023, the Somali diaspora sent $1.7 billion to Somalia, exceeding the Somali government’s annual budget. According to one confidential source quoted in the report, “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”
The fraud schemes themselves were remarkably brazen. In August 2023, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services finally ended the Housing Stabilization Services program after determining that 77 providers had been involved in “credible allegations of fraud.” A month later, acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson announced indictments against eight individuals, six of whom were identified as members of Minnesota’s Somali community. These weren’t cases of simple overbilling—they involved “purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system,” according to Thompson. The perpetrators often targeted vulnerable individuals, such as people recently released from rehabilitation programs, signing them up for services they never intended to provide. The Feeding Our Future scheme was equally audacious, with defendants using fake meal counts, doctored attendance records, and fabricated invoices to claim they were serving thousands of meals daily to underprivileged children. As of November 2023, 77 defendants had been charged in connection with this fraud alone.
The fraud extended beyond housing and food programs into healthcare as well. In a separate but related case, Asha Farhan Hassan, who was also charged in the Feeding Our Future scam, allegedly played a role in a $14 million scheme targeting Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program for children with autism. Prosecutors claim Hassan and her co-conspirators recruited children from the Somali community and facilitated fraudulent autism diagnoses for those who didn’t need them. Monthly cash kickbacks ranging from $300 to $1,500 per child were used to drive enrollment. As Thompson stated, “To be clear, this is not an isolated scheme. From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money.”
The implications of these findings are profound and disturbing. A former official who worked on the Minneapolis Joint Terrorism Task Force told investigators that “every scrap of economic activity” in areas where Somalis are concentrated that gets sent back to Somalia “benefits Al-Shabaab in some way.” Minnesota State Rep. Kristin Robbins, who is challenging Governor Tim Walz, has called for federal assistance to determine “if our state dollars are funding terrorism.” The investigation raises serious questions about oversight, accountability, and the potential national security implications of domestic welfare fraud. While most benefits programs help those truly in need, these cases demonstrate how vulnerable such systems can be to organized criminal exploitation—with consequences that extend far beyond financial loss to potentially aiding organizations that threaten American security interests. As investigations continue, the full extent of these fraud networks and their connections to terrorist financing remain to be uncovered.
