Tag: welfare

Trump’s HHS Overhauls Welfare Program with Focus on Accountability

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through the Administration for Children and Families, selected Arizona, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, and Virginia to participate in the redesigned Temporary Assistance for Needy Families pilot.

This pilot will test innovative approaches to promote employment, reduce government dependency, and strengthen family outcomes. 

Authorized under the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, the six-year pilot will replace the Work Participation Rate and instead measure state success using new, outcome-based metrics that aim to deliver real results for families and taxpayers. 

For example, states will now be held accountable for improving employment outcomes, supporting earnings growth, and reducing reliance on cash assistance, Medicaid, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

“The Trump Administration is returning to the original promise of welfare reform—ensuring our programs are laser-focused on helping families achieve lasting self-sufficiency while delivering results for taxpayers,” said ACF Acting Assistant Secretary Andrew Gradison. “This pilot marks the beginning of a new era where states are empowered to test new strategies, achieve real outcomes, and build an evidence base for innovations that drive upward mobility in America.”

The federal agency posted on social media:

“ACF is launching the redesigned TANF pilot with newly selected states: AZ, IA, NE, OH, & VA. The 6-year pilot will test new ways to: Promote work Strengthen family stability Reduce dependency.”

Keep reading

SNAP Fraud Has Doubled Since Last Year. Here’s Why.

Criminals are looting public safety net programs using digital tools, according to a new report released by LexisNexis Risk Solutions. 

The report analyzed reported fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Integrated Eligibility Systems. Fraud in the SNAP program has doubled, the report said. 

The 54-page report reveals that the cost and volume of SNAP fraud have risen sharply over the past year, driven by the accelerated shift to digital channels, increasingly sophisticated Electronic Benefits Transfer theft schemes, and complex multi-program eligibility systems. 

The findings of this year’s report are especially significant given the administrative and programmatic changes introduced to SNAP agencies across the country by House Resolution 1. 

According to the 2025 study, the average monthly rate of fraudulent SNAP applications and post-issuance cases has doubled since 2024. For every $1 in SNAP benefits lost to fraud, agencies now incur $4.14 in total costs, up from $3.93 a year ago.

“SNAP is a lifeline for millions of families, and these findings highlight how increasingly sophisticated criminals are targeting this critical benefit program,” said Amanda D’ Amico, Senior Director at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. “Digital channels and expanded eligibility systems improve access but also expand the attack surface. Agencies that leverage real-time data, identity verification, and digital authentication solutions to detect fraud and increase cross-program collaboration can turn the tide against fraud while ensuring timely benefits for those in need.”

Keep reading

Zohran Mamdani Wants to Spend $100 Million in NYC Tax Dollars on Increased Services for Illegal Aliens

Zohran Mamdani, the communist running for mayor of New York City, wants to spend $100 million in tax dollars on increased services, specifically legal services, for illegal aliens living in the city.

It’s so stunning to see this man admit that he wants to take the hard earned dollars of the citizens of New York City and give the money to non-citizens who are in the country illegally, and yet is leading in the polls. Has everyone in New York City gone insane?

His candidacy is being driven by far left progressive hipsters in the city, but are they really the majority?

Townhall reported:

New York City’s sanctuary policies don’t go far enough for Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, who said on MSNBC’s “The Weekend” he wants to spend even more taxpayer money to help illegal immigrants if he’s elected…

“I would also commit to increasing the staffing of our law department by 200 to bring us back to pre-COVID levels, and to ensure that when we look at this city we are using every tool at our disposal to keep New Yorkers together, to keep families together,” the democratic socialist continued.

Mamdani emphasized the urgency of his plan, claiming “400,000 of our residents are right now in urgent risk of deportation.”

“The city knows that when it provides legal assistance to those same New Yorkers, their chances of going home increase 11-fold, and yet it has only assisted fewer than 200 of those New Yorkers,” he added. “That’s why also a cornerstone of our campaign is a commitment to increase funding for those very legal defense services by more than $100 million so we can ensure we’re taking every step we can to keep New Yorkers safe, to keep New Yorkers together, and to show the world that they are welcome in this city.”

Keep reading

Refugees In Holland Can Obtain Social Housing Within 14 Weeks; Locals Wait Up To 12 Years

The Netherlands is the second most densely populated country in Europe, and with surging mass immigration, has been experiencing a raging housing crisis for years.

However, despite this crisis, refugees can gain access to social housing in a mere 14 weeks, while the average Dutch citizen must wait up until 12 years. Now, efforts are being made to right this injustice for Dutch citizens with a new bill, but Council of State, the country’s highest legal advisory body, is criticizing any attempt to block housing access to refugees. The authority claims refugees should receive equal treatment, as required by the Dutch constitution.

Of course, the fact that there is no equal treatment currently, and that refugees are gaining access to social housing years before Dutch on waiting lists, does not appear to factor into the Council of State’s concerns, according to Dutch news outlet NOS.nl.

The minister behind the proposal, Mona Keijzer of the BBB party, says she is not backing down. Keijzer’s plan aims to create more affordable housing by ensuring that refugees, or “status holders,” no longer receive priority for housing solely because of their status

The Council of State argues that the proposal leads to unequal treatment, which is “contrary to the Constitution.” The Council has advised the cabinet not to submit the bill to the House of Representatives.

However, Minister Keijzer is not swayed by the advice.

“That’s kind of how the discussion is conducted in the Netherlands. And that’s a shame,” she said. Regarding the “unconstitutional” judgment, she stated, “The Constitution is not mathematics, it also states that I must take care of public housing for Dutch people.”

Keep reading

New Audit Reveals Shady Way Biden Increased Medicaid Spending

Those who reject the narrative that the budget reconciliation bill Congress enacted earlier this year “cuts” Medicaid have many places to look. After reports confirming federal spending on dead individuals and individuals in multiple forms of “free” health coverage simultaneously, federal auditors just revealed yet another example of Washington waste.

A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study quantified how the Biden administration allowed states to increase spending on Medicaid waivers. These policies, which the Trump administration should overturn, not only have the potential to cost taxpayers billions, but they have also expanded the welfare state yet again to cover far more than health care procedures.

Definition of Budget Neutrality 

The GAO study examined spending for Medicaid waivers, authorized by Section 1115 of the Social Security Act. Spending via these waivers, designed to promote state flexibility and innovation within the program, comprised about one-third of all federal spending on Medicaid, or $194 billion in 2023.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has long held that, for states to receive federal approval for their waiver applications, their Medicaid waivers must not increase costs to the federal government — that is, they must be budget neutral. But, as with the old axiom about beauty, budget neutrality lies in the eye of the beholder.

While the first Trump administration in 2018 issued guidance defining budget neutrality in ways that would protect taxpayers, the Biden administration undid that guidance in several key respects. The GAO report quantified the potential effects of those changes on federal spending — and, in one case, very clearly recommended that CMS undo one Biden-era policy.

Biden Increased Spending Benchmarks

The Trump administration’s guidance required states to calculate base year spending through actual spending data, rather than trending forward historical data. In other words, if a state had managed to lower its Medicaid spending in recent years, it couldn’t cherry-pick some time in the past and trend that year’s spending forward, to start its waiver with a higher base level of spending.

GAO said this change, when applied to waivers submitted by Tennessee and New York, lowered those waivers’ total spending limits by a total of $232.6 billion, with the federal share of that reduction amounting to $122.5 billion. (Time will tell whether the two states actually hit or exceed the spending limits for their respective waivers, so the total savings could be lower.)

But the revised guidance issued by the Biden administration said it would establish base years by using a blend of actual and historical spending — a change that weakened the fiscal discipline imposed by the Trump guidance. With respect to waivers submitted by three other states — Arizona, Massachusetts, and Washington state — GAO said this change increased the limit on Medicaid spending by $28.4 billion, with $16.6 billion of that potential cost hitting the federal government.

And whereas the Trump administration guidance said the growth rate for future years’ waiver spending (most waivers run in five-year increments) would be linked to the state’s actual spending growth during the last waiver period or the growth rate included in the president’s budget, whichever is lower, the Biden administration linked all states’ spending growth assumptions to the growth rate in the president’s budget. For the Arizona, Massachusetts, and Washington state waivers, GAO said this change raised the limit on Medicaid spending by $8.5 billion, with $4.3 billion of that potential cost hitting the federal government.

Keep reading

Feds Charge Somalis with Massive $8.4 Million Medicaid Fraud

The U.S. attorney in Minnesota announced charges against eight Somali migrants connected to $8.4 million in Medicaid billing fraud hidden inside a state-funded housing program.

U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson announced Thursday that an investigation found that the eight suspects provided Medicaid with long lists of “clients” who they claimed to have worked with to enroll into Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Service and billed Medicaid for this work. But, investigators say that no such work was ever performed and the clients were fictional.

The HSS fraud only adds to the growing number of fraudulent and mismanaged state programs, including the hundreds of autism clinics that wasted tens of millions in state tax dollars, and the $250 million fraud in a coronavirus relief program that was supposed to pay for food for children.

“Most of these individuals did not receive the stable housing they so desperately needed,” Thompson said during a Thursday press conference said. “The money was just simply stolen.”

Keep reading

Judge Blocks Trump Admin From Banning Illegal Immigrants From Social Programs

A federal judge on Sept. 10 ordered four federal agencies to stop banning illegal immigrants from programs such as Head Start, which provides child care for poorer families.

U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy said the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, and the Department of Labor must halt, at least for now, efforts to remove illegal immigrants from the programs.

HHS and other agencies said in July they were reinterpreting a federal law called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which states that illegal immigrants cannot obtain “federal public benefits.”

Under previous interpretations, people accessing certain programs that lawmakers intended only for Americans and legal immigrants did not need to provide proof of legal status, officials said.

As Zachary Stieber reports for The Epoch Times, twenty attorneys general sued, alleging the new interpretation wrongly applied to programs that fell outside the act. In a motion for a preliminary injunction, or a block while the case proceeds, they also said that the government failed to provide “fair notice” to states of the change.

McElroy sided with the states, writing on Wednesday that “while reasonable policymakers can debate the merits of restricting access to programs to lawful citizens—and it is surely not this Court’s job to wade into that debate—the Agencies offer at best incomplete answers to serious questions.”

That appears to violate the Administrative Procedure Act, which lets judges block agency actions determined to be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law,” she said.

McElroy also pointed to the change in interpretation from decades of precedent.

“The Government argues that it has somehow interpreted this statute incorrectly for the nearly thirty years that it has been the law,” she said.

“In its view, everyone (from every past administration) has misunderstood it from the start—at least until last month, when the right way to read it became clear to the Government. The Court is skeptical of that.”

The four agencies, which had pointed to an order from President Donald Trump that directed officials to make sure that taxpayer-funded benefits are not going to illegal immigrants, did not respond to requests for comment.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat and one of the attorneys general who sued over the change, said in a statement that “with this victory, we are protecting children’s education, safeguarding critical health care, and preserving the safety net that keeps families afloat.”

Keep reading

Why “Don’t Let America Become the UK” Has Become a Warning for Americans

Many American conservatives are saying “don’t let America become the UK.” The reasons are well documented: unbridled illegal immigration, high levels of legal immigration and asylum seeking, and rising crime including rape, sexual harassment, mugging, stabbing, assaults, break-ins, theft, and sexual grooming of minors.

Housing and rental price spikes, unemployment, wage suppression, heavier burdens on taxpayers and public finances, and benefits paid to illegals, asylum seekers, and immigrants—many living fully or partially on welfare, add to the tax burden on citizens. Immigrants are also demanding that crosses be removed from churches and that the British flag be removed from public places. There is also the rise of Sharia councils creating a parallel legal system.

Protests have erupted that suppress British freedoms and values, some openly supporting Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, with calls for death to Britain. Conservatives also highlight bans on public preaching of the Christian gospel, hate crime laws used to arrest citizens for Facebook posts criticizing immigration or crime, and arrests for displaying the British flag.

Muslims now hold key political positions, including Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London (2016-present) and Shabana Mahmood as Justice Secretary in the UK Cabinet (2024-present). Humza Yousaf, of Pakistani heritage, served as Scotland’s First Minister from March 2023 to May 2024 before resigning. Additionally, 25 Muslim MPs were elected in the 2024 general election, making up almost 4% of the total 650 MP.

Immigration numbers reveal the same upward trend. Small-boat arrivals climbed from 28,526 in 2021 to about 38,000 in 2024, accounting for 86 percent of irregular entries (British government term for illegals). Total irregular arrivals rose from 38,600 in 2024 to about 44,000 in 2025, a 14 percent increase. Asylum claims nearly doubled since 2021, reaching 93,000 in 2023 and 109,000 in 2024, the highest since 2002.

Mainstream media, with its extreme liberal bias, often suppresses or misrepresents the numbers, while authorities in some jurisdictions falsify or reclassify crimes to make it appear that crime rates are dropping. This happens in the UK just as it does in the U.S. Media outlets claimed Trump was wrong when he said Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York had extremely high crime, although any sane person knew the crime rate, particularly murder and violent crime, was high, and citizen watchdog agencies along with primary source data supported the claims of higher crime rates.

UK crime data shows a decided increase since 2020. Sexual offences totaled 163,244 in 2020 and rose to 209,556 in 2025, the highest on record. Knife crime was just under 49,000 incidents in 2023/24 and rose to about 50,500 in 2024. London knife offences jumped from 12,786 in 2022/23 to 16,344 in 2024/2025. Knife homicides were 244 in 2022/23, and rose to 262 in 2023/24.

And for the privilege of these rising crime rates, UK taxpayers are footing staggering bills. The Home Office spent $5.9 billion on asylum in 2023–24, with another $8.0 billion projected for 2024–25. Welfare payments to non-UK nationals reached $9.4 billion, the equivalent of 1.26 million non-citizens collecting checks.

Asylum seekers get support while claims are processed, refugees receive full access once status is granted, legal immigrants qualify after residency, and EU settled status holders enjoy the same. Nearly $10 billion annually goes to foreign nationals.

Education adds another hidden cost. In 2023/24, 1.7 million pupils in England’s schools used English as an Additional Language, 20.8 percent of all students and up to 37 percent in some districts. With average per-pupil funding at $7,500, taxpayers spend $12.8 billion annually, plus $1.0–2.4 billion in language support, for a total of $13.8–15.0 billion.

This excludes translation services, special education, smaller class sizes, and new school construction in high-immigration areas. These costs are buried in the education budget, while the government promotes fee-paying international university students as an economic benefit.

Healthcare is another manipulated figure. The government estimates $1,295 per migrant annually. At least 1.5 million non-UK nationals receive free NHS care, including asylum seekers in hotels, refused applicants, dependents, and 1.26 million Universal Credit claimants, bringing the cost to $1.9 billion.

Keep reading

Politico Is Doing Insurance Companies’ Bidding, And It’s Obvious Why

n February, I analyzed how Politico functions as a glorified patronage racket, whereby “reporters serve as a publicity rag for K Street and get paid handsomely for doing so.” Six months later, another such article serves as Example No. 8,579 (or thereabouts) of this swamp machine in action.

In this particular case, Politico published an advertisement — I mean, article — about a potential extension of Obamacare’s enhanced insurance subsidies, which expire at the end of the year. That story ignored sizable evidence of fraud associated with the subsidies, while including not a single quote from a critic or skeptic of such an extension. It looks like a not-too-subtle attempt from Politico to cheerlead for the insurance industry — i.e., its corporate subscribers.

Big Signs of Fraud

The article focused largely on Florida and highlighted that state’s sizable enrollment in Exchange coverage, particularly for households claiming very low incomes, which qualify for the biggest subsidies: 

Florida is one of 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid, so it’s more difficult for some low-income residents to qualify for the government health insurance program. The enhanced subsidies ensure that people who would be eligible under an expansion — those making just above the federal poverty level, with incomes between about $15,600 and $21,600 — can get Obamacare coverage, typically with no premiums. Two-thirds of the 4.6 million Floridians on Obamacare plans are in this gap…

But there’s one big fact Politico omitted: According to one study, while there are nearly 3.1 million Obamacare enrollees claiming income just above poverty in Florida, estimates derived from the Census Bureau suggest that only about 630,000 households actually have incomes in that range. (Disclosure: While I have done work for the Paragon Health Institute, which published the study in question, I had no involvement with this particular report and am writing this article on my own behalf.)

In other words, by one organization’s estimate, more than 2.4 million enrollees — over half of Florida’s total Exchange enrollment — are potentially fraudulent. These individuals may have overstated their income because households with income below the poverty level don’t qualify for subsidies at all, or conversely, they may have understated their income if they make two or three times the poverty level, so they can qualify for bigger subsidies. Alternatively, people could have been enrolled in “free” coverage without their knowledge by insurance brokers seeking commissions, an offense one Florida-based insurance executive pleaded guilty to this April.

Yet Politico mentioned none of this. It advertised the total enrollment in the Florida Exchange, and the billions of dollars in enhanced subsidies that went to Florida, without noting either the significant questions about enrollment discrepancies in Florida’s Exchange population or the fraud — totaling $133.9 million, according to the Justice Department — that one Florida-based individual has already admitted to.

Keep reading

HHS splurged more than $22B on grants for migrants — including cash for cars, home loans and startups

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ramped up grants for migrants from 2020 to 2024 — which included cash assistance to buy cars, homes and even build credit for startup businesses, according to a shocking watchdog report that found taxpayers were left on the hook for $22.6 billion.

HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) — which came under fire last year for having lost track of 32,000 migrant kids in the US — handed out the high sum to a host of nonprofits, effectively acting as a “giant magnet” for those crossing the US border and claiming asylum, auditors from the money monitor OpenTheBooks revealed exclusively to The Post.

Tasked with settling migrants, asylum seekers and other refugees in America, ORR drastically increased the number of noncitizens eligible to receive funding over the bulk of President Joe Biden’s term, with more than $10 billion shelled out to grant-receiving organizations just in fiscal year 2023.

That coincided with all-time records being set for southern border crossings into the US, with 2.4 million apprehensions by Customs and Border Protection over the same period.

Non-governmental groups bilked taxpayers for up to $1.7 billion in services including dollar-for-dollar matching savings plans for cars, homes, college educations or startups; small-business loans of up to $15,000; loans to repair credit history of up to $1,500; “cultural orientation,” “emergency housing support,” legal assistance and Medicaid care.

Some programs were only available to migrants or refugees who had been living in the US for several years, who were employed or who were making around double the federal poverty level or less, among other stipulations.

Keep reading