Newt Gingrich is pressing Washington to move faster against government fraud, pointing to a string of recent failures that range from Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future scandal to dead people showing up on federal benefit rolls. In March, President Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing a task force to eliminate fraud, and Gingrich is arguing that the government should treat the problem as a priority, not an afterthought.
Feeding Our Future in Minnesota falsely claimed to serve 125 million meals to children and submitted a fake attendance roster listing 2,040 children, but only 20 of those names matched district school attendance records. Gingrich 360 examined corruption in Minnesota and posted a paper on its findings, using the case as the opening example for a broader warning about waste and abuse in public programs.
The numbers are large enough to make the point on their own. In June 2024, the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor said the state Department of Education ignored at least 30 complaints about Feeding Our Future and failed to verify the group’s statements before approving funds. A February 2025 Department of Health and Human Services audit found Colorado’s Medicaid program made at least $7.3 million in payments on behalf of deceased enrollees. Then, in January 2026, the FCC Office of Inspector General reported that between 2020 and 2025, $5 million in federal funds for subsidized internet service were sent to nearly 117,000 people who were dead, with many of them enrolled and claiming benefits after death in multiple states in the same month.
That is why Gingrich is framing the issue as something larger than one criminal case or one bad state agency review. The Government Accountability Office estimates the federal government loses between $223 billion and $521 billion each year to fraud, based on data from fiscal years 2018 to 2022, while the Treasury Department says it successfully prevented and recovered more than $4 billion in fraud and improper payments in 2024. Gingrich says Washington must act to stop massive government fraud, and the case he is making is that the system is still designed to chase losses after the money is gone.
The tension in that argument is plain. The Minnesota auditor’s review showed that warnings went unanswered before the money flowed, while later audits in Colorado and at the federal level showed dead recipients still attached to payment systems years after they should have been removed. The fraud fight, in other words, is no longer just about recovery. It is about whether agencies can prevent abuse before taxpayer dollars disappear.
That is the point Gingrich is making now: the federal investigation into fraud in Minnesota is sadly just the tip of the iceberg, and it’s crucial to shift the focus from recovering stolen funds to preventing fraud altogether.