As the new year gets underway, Donald Trump wants to take the food out of millions of children’s mouths while depriving them and their parents of other social services, by supposedly freezing $10 billion in disbursements to Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois and Colorado going mostly to the TANF food assistance program. His excuse is the discovery of sprawling fraud in some state welfare systems, notably Minnesota, where entities billed for billions in services that were never delivered, and which has become a cause célèbre for MAGA and right-wing influencers.

Two things can be true at once: this can have been a particularly serious and widespread fraud, with Minnesota state authorities not doing enough to ensure that the funds were being used for their intended purposes and where Gov. Tim Walz, who was the VP running mate of Kamala Harris in 2024, has now dropped his reelection bid.

And it can also be that it’s been blown into a nationwide scandal now ostensibly justifying mass cuts in only Democratic-led states not because of the particulars of the fraud itself but because of where it happened and who perpetrated it. The vast majority of suspects in this Minnesota case are Somali-Americans, which fits in perfectly for the man infamous for referring to “s­-­-­-­hole countries.”

Multiple audits and investigations into the ramped-up aid spending during the COVID pandemic, for example, have indicated that funds might have been stolen on the order of $1 trillion or more, from a wide variety of people —opponents and supporters of the president in red and blue states, native-born citizens and immigrants, and so on.

This is to some extent a consequence of how quickly the government had to act in the face of that emergency, a catch-22 between ensuring that the money would be going to actually help people who needed it and having to get billions out the door at lightning-speed. None of this is good, and it should all be investigated, yet it’s obvious that Trump has latched on for reasons that have little to do with concern over fraud or misuse of government funds — which don’t seem to bother him that much when they’re benefitting his allies — but with his disdain for Democratic states and immigrants.

There is absolutely no evidence that frauds of this type or anywhere near this scale are happening in any of the other four states, or frankly that there is a large volume of as-yet-undiscovered fraud in Minnesota itself. What we do know, though, is that even momentary lapses in this funding will materially and severely hurt millions of people across these states, including ours. Services lost means parents choosing between food and rent, children doing more poorly in school and so on.

But this being Trump, as of yesterday, there was no formal notice to the targeted states. Trump did go on his social media on Monday to attack all the governors involved, but Colorado: “Governor Walz has destroyed the State of Minnesota, but others, like Governor Gavin Newscum, JB Pritzker, and Kathy Hochul, have done, in my opinion, an even more dishonest and incompetent job. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!”

As usual, it’s not entirely clear under what authority the president can just unilaterally suspend disbursements of appropriated funds. Trump for the most part does not concern himself with details like “legal authority,” which has time and again led to his actions being challenged and thrown out in the courts, though often not before they have time to do some damage.

We expect once more that this so-called freeze will be brought before a federal judge who will all but laugh it out of the courtroom, but this time we hope that a judge will go further and demand to know who in the federal bureaucracy is responsible for carrying this out and hold them accountable.

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