Tag: taxes

Minneapolis Daycare Owner Fahima Egeh Mahamud Pleads Guilty to $5.45M Fraud in Child Care and Feeding Our Future Schemes

Fahima Egeh Mahamud, former CEO of Future Leaders Early Learning Center in Minneapolis, pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States. She admitted to schemes that fraudulently obtained more than $4.6 million from Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) through false claims and approximately $850,000 by falsely claiming to serve thousands of meals daily (at times up to 60,000 per month) through the federal Feeding Our Future nutrition program.

Prosecutors noted that her center received the highest amount of CCAP funding in Minnesota in 2025 (around $3.7 million that year alone, with over $10 million across recent years). Much of the money was allegedly used for personal gain, including real estate purchases, while minimal or no services were provided. Mahamud reportedly attempted to flee the country, booking a flight to London on the same day she notified the state of the center’s closure.

The daycare, located near George Floyd Square at 36th and Chicago Avenue, gained national attention after appearing in a viral December 2025 video by independent YouTuber Nick Shirley. His investigation into apparently empty or minimally operational taxpayer-funded facilities prompted intensified state and federal scrutiny across Minnesota. The center closed in January 2026.

Under her plea agreement, Mahamud faces a recommended sentence of 27–33 months in prison. She has been released on conditional bond pending sentencing, which has not yet been scheduled.

Mahamud’s case is part of the massive Feeding Our Future scandal, one of the largest pandemic-era fraud schemes in the U.S., involving roughly $250–350 million in alleged losses from federal child nutrition programs. By mid-2026, dozens of defendants had been convicted or pleaded guilty. The nonprofit claimed to serve millions of meals that were never provided.

Minnesota has seen multiple related probes into child care and social service fraud. In May 2026, federal authorities charged 15 defendants in a broader health care and benefits fraud takedown involving over $90 million, including additional child care cases. Earlier investigations revealed overbilling and weak oversight in CCAP, with critics pointing to insufficient verification of attendance and services.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reveals up to 10% of US budget stolen each year

Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are being squandered on waste, fraud, and abuse each year, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shockingly claimed in a recent interview.

Somewhere between 5-10% of the total federal budget gets gobbled up by wrongdoers each year, Bessent said, citing data from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

“If we can narrow that number, President Trump asked for a $500 billion increase in the defense budget to fortify the 10 to 20 years of neglect,” Bessent told journalist Christopher Rufo in a recent interview.

“If we need to flex up our military budget, if we can get rid of this waste, fraud, and abuse, we can finance a safer, sounder US with that, without taking on more debt. Sounds like a pretty good outcome to me.”

A GAO analysis found that between $233 billion and $521 billion was lost annually due to fraud during fiscal years 2018 through 2022.

Since fiscal year 2003, improper payments — separate from fraud — have likely cost taxpayers about $2.8 trillion, the GAO also found.

Federal spending has jumped dramatically in the time since the GAO study was conducted, meaning fraudulent expenditures could’ve shot up in the time since as well. 

Washington spent about $7.01 trillion in fiscal year 2025 and ran a deficit of about $1.8 trillion. Interest payments on the $38 trillion national debt totaled about $970 billion, more than what the US spends on its military.

Last week, Trump declared that he would like Congress to prepare a $1.5 trillion military budget due to “troubled and dangerous times” on the global stage.

Trump had tapped tech tycoon Elon Musk to helm the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was tasked with tackling wasteful government spending.

Musk departed that role this past spring, and DOGE has since wound down.

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A Budget of the Pentagon, By the Congress, and For the War Profiteers

The first sentence of Thomas Paine’s classic 1776 essay, Common Sense, urged the American people to challenge the legitimacy of the English Crown, something that had never been challenged before. He wrote:

“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them a great favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

Two hundred and fifty years later, time and reason strongly suggest that the U.S. “defense” budget is out of control, unsustainable and absent of accountability.

Only the American people can rein it in.

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The Cost Of Half-Empire

Introduction: The Question We Have Already Answered

The United States rejects the label “empire.” Yet it maintains overseas military installations, guarantees the security of allies across multiple continents, polices sea lanes, enforces sanctions with global reach, and repeatedly intervenes in the internal affairs of other states. Whatever term Americans prefer, the practical exercise of power increasingly resembles an imperial system.

The real question is whether it will continue practicing half-empire: exercising power without responsibility, spending lives, money, and credibility for temporary control while refusing to build the order that makes force politically meaningful. Power without responsibility is strategically self-defeating.

This is not an argument that empire is morally pure. It is an argument that incomplete empire is strategically disastrous: it kills people, drains wealth, leaves the United States less feared and less trusted, and then acts surprised when disorder returns more expensive than before.

America is no longer debating empire in theory; it is practicing it in fragments.

The Founders’ Warning—and the Reality of Power

The American republic was not designed for empire. The Founders feared permanent foreign entanglements because they concentrate power, require secrecy, and normalize executive discretion beyond ordinary consent.

That warning was right. Empire corrodes republican virtue. But the United States has already departed from the Founders’ design—not by declaration, but by accumulation: bases, sanctions, interventions, security guarantees, naval policing, and global commitments no pure republic could sustain.

This does not mean the Founders were naïve. It means the nation they built became powerful enough to inherit problems they hoped to avoid. Sea lanes, energy markets, hostile regimes, nuclear proliferation, and alliance commitments now pull the United States into decisions that look imperial even when officials avoid the word.

How Empires Actually Work: Trust, Trade, and Control

Modern debates fixate on imperial violence, but coercion is only the beginning. Successful empires pair force with economic integration, legal predictability, and public order.

Rome endured in part because conquered populations often found Roman administration more predictable than the fragmented political systems it replaced. Roads, law, contracts, currency, and infrastructure created incentives that made imperial rule sustainable beyond military conquest alone.

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Without Subsidies, Is AI Unaffordable?

Let’s pull all this into an undeniable conclusion: AI is based on massively subsidizing users’ costs.

What’s already abundantly clear but verboten to say as it would pop the bubble of AI valuations and triumphalism is that AI is unaffordable once the direct and indirect subsidies are withdrawn. Nothing that consumes this much electricity and requires such an immense scale of costly processing and memory capacity can be low-cost, never mind free.

The major AI platforms and vendors are subsidizing corporate and individual users in the hopes that they can achieve AI sector dominance –and the pricing power that comes with it–via the network effect, the dominance generated by having the majority of users bound by habit or dependence to your platform or tools.

This battle for network effect dominance is playing out in full view:

AI Giants Are Handing Out Tons of Free Computing Power to Grab Startup Share: (wsj.com) Pitched battle for business users comes as AI companies seek lasting streams of revenue.

Hans Ibarra, a founder building an AI-voice startup, has found himself on the receiving end of a big opportunity: Top artificial-intelligence companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and others desperate to win his business are ramping up discounts.

Across Silicon Valley, startup founders like Ibarra are enjoying a wave of computing credits and fielding competing offers from AI-model makers racing to land new enterprise customers. Cursor, the AI-coding company bought by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, offered a 75% discount through July 5.

“If I’m choosing between a really cheap Chinese model that I actually have to pay for, and a very expensive Anthropic model that I don’t have to pay for, I’m going to pick the Anthropic model,” Acker said. “I’m always going to pick the one for which I have free credits.”

Meanwhile, back in the real world of costs, AI Costs More Than The People It Replaced (forbes.com)(via Tom D.)

It turns out that experienced human workers doing the work right in the first place is cheaper than having AI run a probability distribution process that needs vetting and corrections. And remember, AI isn’t actually “intelligent,” it’s just a probability distribution using natural language.

As management guru Peter Drucker observed, enterprises don’t have profits, they have costs. Purveyors of AI platforms and tools have costs, and so do their customers. Those costs are currently being funded by investors, who are in effect subsidizing the AI companies’ “free” giveaways of horrendously costly “tokens” in a manic, desperate attempt to grab the brass ring of network effect dominance before their cash runs out.

This raises a question: Is this any way to run a railroad? In other words, is this actually a viable business model, burning billions of dollars in cash to lock in network effect dominance in a field that is rapidly obsoleting every iteration of an innately limited mode of computation? Is claiming that a probability distribution is “intelligent” in the same way humans are intelligent a viable business model when there is ample evidence this simply isn’t true?

AI and human intelligence are drastically different–here’s how (scientificamerican.com)

What happens when enterprises have to pay the unsubsidized costs of AI is they immediately curtail their AI spending because the customer-facing / financial benefits of AI are at best elusive and often negative. Peter Drucker was onto something that is currently being lost in the PR-propaganda push of those trying to cash in on the AI euphoria: enterprises don’t have profits, they have costs, and the real-world costs of AI are extraordinarily high while the payoffs are ambiguous.

There are many other hidden subsidies within the AI machinery. There are corporate tax write-off subsidies, energy subsidies, tax credit subsidies for building data centers, and so on. If these were stripped out, what would the real unsubsidized costs of AI be? No one knows, but they would be higher than what’s presented as the cost now.

Then there’s the if it’s legal, it’s moral, and what’s legal is for sale subsidy: AI is built on the systemic theft of copyrighted content. Last month alone, AI scrapers gorged on 246,000 pages from my Of Two Minds server, and hundreds of thousands of pages of my copyrighted works on my mirror site and other sites posting my work.

This is legal, but is it moral? Nobody asks such questions because the important thing is to avoid saddling AI users with the real costs. So if all those content creators get nothing–in effect, subsidizing both AI companies and the users of their AI platforms and tools–well, so what, because if it’s legal, it’s moral, and what’s legal is for sale.

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Nick Shirley Drops New Bombshell Video Exposing New York Fraud: Over $190 Million in Personal Home Care Scams

Investigative reporter Nick Shirley on Friday released his latest video uncovering over $190 million in fraud in New York.

The fraudsters used the needy and elderly to steal more than $190 million in home care scams.

“Here is the full 53 minutes of my crew and I exposing New York fraud, we uncovered over $190,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters use the elderly and needy to commit fraud through adult and personal home care scams in NYC,” Nick Shirley said.

“Your tax dollars are paying for elderly Koreans and Chinese to play ping pong and do tai chi, while the fraudsters give $ kickbacks to those who enroll. Like it and share this video, the fraud must STOP,” Nick Shirley said.

“We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for fraudsters to steal from our pockets. These fraudsters have been able to defraud American taxpayers for years without any pushback from the public and politicians. Time is up,” he said.

“Nobody speaks English here. Our tax dollars are going to places like these. Straight from NY Medicaid! No one can answer any questions!” Nick Shirley said.

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SoCal Education Leaders Stole Nearly $20M From Schools; Report

A new report has revealed that a pair of Southern California school leaders separately stole nearly $20 million from their schools in order to fund lavish personal lifestyles.

According to The New York Post, the report was co-authored by the State Financial Officers Foundation, a watchdog made up of state treasurers and auditors, and OpenTheBooks, a nonprofit focused on transparency in government spending.

The cases of the two Southern California educators were among the most expensive examples of K-12 education fraud documented nationwide.

Jorge Armando Contreras, the former fiscal services director for the Magnolia Elementary School District in Orange County, was charged with altering school checks over several years to funnel $16.7 million into his personal accounts.

Contreras was spending the money on everything from a luxury home and a BMW to designer clothes and pricey tequila and federal investigators found stacks of cash stuffed into a mini-fridge and luxury designer bags at his home.

He was sentenced to nearly six years in federal prison in 2024 and order to pay $16.7 million in restitution to the Magnolia School District in Orange County.

Another case highlighted in the report revealed that Janis Bucknor, the head of the Community Preparatory Academy charter school in Los Angeles, stole more than $3 million in taxpayer funds to cover travel, restaurants, shopping and private school tuition for her children.

Bucknor also pleaded guilty to spending more than $220,600 on Disney cruise line vacations, theme park admissions, and other Disney-related expenses.

According to prosecutors, Bucknor admitted in 2020 to stealing the funds, and was sentenced to three years’ probation and ordered to pay $2.5 million in restitution.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, State Financial Officers Foundation CEO OJ Oleka said:

All fraud is harmful, but defrauding education dollars meant to help kids learn and succeed is especially hideous. The findings in this report should alarm every family, teacher, and civic leader.

The California cases were part of nearly 90 cases identified by a coalition of auditors over the past six years involving embezzlement, phony invoices, inflated enrollment, bid-rigging and kickbacks, among other crimes.

The report follows the Trump administration’s promise to crack down on government waste, with Vice President JD Vance leading a nationwide “War on Fraud” that has raised new questions about oversight of federal education spending.

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Fauci: The Public Servant from Hell

If the allegations put forward by Tulsi Gabbard, former Director of National Intelligence, prove to be substantially true, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s legacy will be remembered as one of the greatest betrayals of the public trust in modern American history.

For four decades, Fauci occupied one of the most influential positions in the federal government. As Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), he controlled billions of taxpayer dollars, directed research priorities, advised presidents of both parties, and enjoyed a level of public credibility rarely afforded to unelected bureaucrats. Americans were encouraged to trust him — not because he was elected, but because he was presented as the embodiment of objective science.

That trust is precisely what makes the controversies surrounding his tenure so consequential. Fauci’s history in this position of power is one that should not be overlooked. That is why Senator Rand Paul, as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, issued a subpoena compelling Fauci to testify before Congress. Fauci had declined to appear voluntarily. 

Fauci is no stranger to controversy. As director of NIAID (1984–2022), he oversaw the institute that funded much of the nation’s HIV/AIDS research. For two decades, beginning in 1985, NIAID conducted research involving the treatment of society’s most vulnerable children during the AIDS epidemic. Investigative journalist Liam Scheff alleged that HIV-positive foster children and orphans were enrolled in experimental drug trials without adequate informed consent or independent advocacy. Official reviews raised legitimate ethical concerns about research involving vulnerable children.

Critics alleged that the treatment children received was brutal and unethical, with staff and doctors prioritizing trial compliance over the children’s well-being. Scheff reported that some children experienced significant side effects, and those who resisted the drugs were held down and force-fed. It is also on record that persistent refusers underwent surgical insertion of gastric (stomach) tubes for direct drug delivery. One reason this policy faced little resistance is that the foster children had no parents protecting their interests.

But this wasn’t the only experimentation under Fauci that exploited a vulnerable population.

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Trump Admin Targets Medicare Fraud After 7,100% Surge In Transplant Claims

The Trump administration says it has uncovered a dramatic increase in Medicare claims for tissue and organ transplants, resulting in a broad crackdown on suspected fraud that officials say has already blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in questionable payments.

Administration officials said Medicare claims for tissue and organ transplants, known as allografts, climbed from $200 million in 2019 to $14.4 billion in 2025—a 7,100 percent increase.

The surge led the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force, headed by Vice President JD Vance, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to intensify their review of claims. Since March, the agency has denied 96 percent of allograft claims identified during the review.

CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz said the agency identified 4,200 potentially fraudulent allograft claims totaling $224 million through May.

“That’s a lot of money,” Oz said during a Wednesday news conference in Milwaukee.

“And that bankrupts not just hospital systems and physician groups, but it causes major problems across the entire landscape.”

The agency also announced enforcement actions involving Durable Medical Equipment (DME) including wheelchairs, walkers, hospital beds and other medical equipment.

According to CMS, payments have been suspended to 102 suppliers, while billing privileges have been revoked for another 725 suppliers. The agency said those suppliers accounted for 8.6 percent of all Medicare-funded DME in 2025.

CMS officials reported they identified suspected fraud involving claims for equipment that was not medically necessary or ordered, equipment that was more expensive than prescribed, and equipment that was never delivered.

“In just six months, the task force has effectively wiped out Durable Medical Equipment fraud in America,” a spokesperson for Vance’s office said.

“After the vice president and Dr. Oz announced a moratorium on new DME companies, paired with aggressive enforcement actions by DOJ and HHS, this kind of fraud has effectively ended.”

Oz said the administration’s efforts have already prevented significant losses.

“Thanks to the whole-of-government approach spearheaded by the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force, we stopped nearly $220 million in fraudulent skin substitute claims and suspended or revoked billing privileges for over 800 DME suppliers,” Oz told Fox News Digital. “We are keeping our promise to the American people: we will root out corruption, protect vulnerable patients, and hold every bad actor accountable.”

Oz also warned those engaged in health care fraud that the administration intends to continue its enforcement campaign.

“To anyone out there, and I’m talking to you if you’re a fraudster, for anyone out there who thinks they can get away by stealing from the American people, especially American patients, I’ve got a bit of advice for you: Do not walk away from this press conference. Don’t walk away from us. You start running because the vice president and this task force are coming after you,” Oz said.

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Not Making Headlines: Dr. Oz Announces Crackdown on Durable Medical Equipment Fraudsters and Fraudulent Medicare Tissue and Organ Transplant Claims – Saving American Taxpayers Millions

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced on Thursday that 725 durable medical equipment suppliers had their billing privileges revoked.

According to Dr. Oz, these suppliers represent more than $1.5 billion billed to Medicare just last year!

In just six months Dr. Oz and the Trump administration have effectively wiped out Durable Medical Equipment (DMS) fraud in America.

Dr. Oz and the Trump Administration also cracked down on fraudulent Medicare claims for tissue and organ transplants.

Pro Trump News and IJR reported:

The Trump administration says a dramatic increase in Medicare claims for tissue and organ transplants has led to a nationwide fraud crackdown that is blocking millions of dollars in suspicious billing.

According to Fox News, new figures released Wednesday show Medicare claims for allografts, or tissue and organ transplants, climbed from approximately $200 million in 2019 to $14.4 billion in 2025.

Administration officials said the 7,100% increase prompted a closer review by the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

CMS, led by Administrator Mehmet Oz, said it identified about 4,200 suspicious transplant claims totaling $224 million through May. Since March, the agency has denied 96% of claims submitted in that category.

Speaking in Milwaukee, Oz said the sharp rise in billing posed a significant financial threat.

“That’s a lot of money,” he said. “And that bankrupts not just hospital systems and physician groups, but it causes major problems across the entire system.”

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