The Rant and the Invoices

Rick Santelli leaves the floor on October 2. The question he asked in 2009 is the fraud docket since May.

February 19, 2009. Chicago Merc. CNBC had Santelli on the floor for a housing plan that would refinance the people who could not carry the note. He did not file a memo. He pointed at the traders and asked the country a question it still has not answered.

Why don’t you put up a website and let people vote on whether we subsidize the losers’ mortgages, or reward the people who can carry the water instead of drink the water?

This is America. How many of you want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay the bills? Raise your hand. President Obama, are you listening?

Nobody raised a hand. The traders booed. Within a day the White House offered him decaf. Within a week the clip had a name. He retires on October 2, a jobs-day Friday, after twenty-seven years in the booth. He will come back as a contributor. The question will not need a contributor deal.

2009 was a neighbor who still lived in the house. The docket since May is buildings that never opened, and offices that were not in a hurry to notice.

I laid down the pandemic scale in The Trillion Dollar COVID Heist and the autism-kickback machine in Kickbacks Over Kids. This is the update. The factory did not close. It changed products. The state pipe still has a city-hall desk. And one coalition still treats the mills as constituents.

Santelli was angry about moral hazard. An imprudent buyer. An extra bath. A note the government proposed to socialize. You can argue that case in good faith. You cannot make it for the week that just closed.

A federal grand jury in Massachusetts charged Erekle Gugava, a 33-year-old Georgian national in the country illegally, with laundering proceeds of a $1.3 billion durable-medical-equipment scheme. He paper-owned ND Medical Solutions in Pennsylvania for five months in 2025. Insurers paid about $6.5 million. He opened the accounts. He was the sole signatory. He moved the money overseas. He fled in July 2025. Prosecutors tie him to the same Russia-based organization behind Operation Gold Rush.

The same week’s pile included Yolanda Dale in Kansas City, charged with padding employee counts on ARPA childcare applications for at least $75,000; Andrew Langford in Maryland, whom a judge sent away for eight months after he drew more than $270,000 in disability while he ran two cleaning companies; and two South Florida men, Kenneth Kessler and Michael Gomez, whom a judge packed off for 33 months and 24 months after they billed Medicare $34.8 million for braces patients never requested.

And in Minneapolis, U.S. Marshals picked up Abdi Nur Salah, former senior policy aide to Mayor Jacob Frey, already pleaded out in Feeding Our Future, and walked him into Sherburne County on a bond violation after a summer that produced a blood-test refusal and a felony fentanyl case. His federal sentencing still sits on the calendar for October 1. Santelli’s last jobs-day hit is October 2.

That is not a neighbor with an extra bathroom. That is absence. No meal. No hour. No brace. No patient. A desk.

The factory changed products

On June 23 the Justice Department announced the first national health-care takedown under the new National Fraud Enforcement Division. Prosecutors charged 455 defendants across 56 districts, including 90 licensed clinicians, on schemes they pegged at more than $6.5 billion in false claims. CMS suspended 1,079 providers and revoked 1,403. The department says it stopped about $10 billion before the money left the building. Agents seized somewhere between $127 million and $182 million in cash and toys, depending on which release you read.

The number that matters is the Medicaid line. Prosecutors charged 295 defendants on more than $518 million in alleged false Medicaid claims, the largest Medicaid action in department history by bodies and by billed loss. That is the Minnesota volume game gone national. Behavioral health. Personal care. Transportation. Housing supports. Not just Florida brace mills.

The widget changed too. Catheters were 2025. Skin is 2026. Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald described the allograft pattern in plain English: buy the graft for $30 to $75, mark it up nearly fifty times, kick the difference back to the person who puts it on the patient. An Arizona book in that wave tied more than $2 billion in Medicare payments to one company’s product. A Texas wound-graft case landed at $906 million. The Middle District of Florida charged a $118 million wound-care crew. The pipe did not close. The SKU changed.

Gold Rush did not end either. The 2025 takedown crushed the catheter factory’s Medicare payouts. The organization kept a washer bench. Gugava is the leftover. Five months. A Pennsylvania LLC. Stolen identities of elderly and disabled Americans who found out when the explanation-of-benefits form arrived for equipment they never ordered, from a doctor they never saw, shipped by a company they had never heard of. Medicare can reject the claim. Medigap still pays, because the contract follows Medicare’s determination. The rings understood that clause better than the program officers.

Kessler and Gomez are the domestic rhyme. Seven Florida DME shops. Kickbacks for signed orders. Unsolicited braces. $34.8 million billed. More than $1.4 million in Kessler’s pocket, more than $2.3 million in Gomez’s. Thirty-three months and twenty-four months. A mill lives fourteen to eighteen months if nobody yanks the number. Those sentences still fit inside the business cycle.

The move that changes the expected value is not the podium. On May 13, CMS imposed the first nationwide moratorium on new Medicare hospice and home-health enrollments, including the ownership changes operators use to walk patients across the hall onto a fresh billing number, and stacked it on the February freeze for DME suppliers. Three national moratoria at once. CMS had never done that. The tell in hospice is the live-discharge rate. One Anaheim shop in the agency fact sheet billed $9.1 million with a live-discharge rate near 85 percent against a national average near 17 percent. In a real hospice, the patients die. In these shops they live forever, and the invoice does too. Los Angeles remains ground zero. The White House later claimed 1,076 California hospices pulled off the Medicare file. Prison is maintenance. Exclusion is the choke.

The pipe still has a city-hall desk

I will not rebuild Kickbacks Over Kids here. The load-bearing facts have not moved. Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program went from roughly $600,000 in 2018 to more than $400 million by 2025. On May 21, in Minneapolis, the department charged 15 people on more than $90 million in intended loss and called the autism piece the largest of its kind it had ever filed. Shamso Ahmed Hassan and Hanaan Mursal Yusuf, Smart Therapy Center and Star Autism Center: $46.6 million claimed, about $21 million paid, kickbacks of $300 to $1,500 per child per month, proceeds pointed at property in Kenya. U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson’s line that half or more of the fourteen high-risk Medicaid books may be dirty remains a working hypothesis, not an audited national rate. Minnesota Reformer later put spending on those books at $20.3 billion from 2018 through 2025.

The new fact is the desk.

Abdi Nur Salah was a senior policy aide to Mayor Jacob Frey while Feeding Our Future ran. A grand jury indicted him in September 2022 with the Safari Restaurant group. Frey fired him when the charges landed. In January 2025, Salah pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud. Prosecutors called him a “minor participant.” The minor participant registered Stigma-Free International, a nonprofit that kept meal sites inside the federal Child Nutrition Program after USDA moved to block restaurants from enrolling directly. Willmar. Mankato. St. Cloud. Waite Park. St. Paul. He took a little more than $1 million. The guidelines said 21 to 27 months. He agreed to restitution north of $1 million and forfeited an LLC account and two properties, including the old Kelly’s 19th Hole in Brooklyn Park. His brother, Abdulkadir Nur Salah, co-owned Safari Restaurant. Prosecutors say that shop pulled more than $16 million in fraudulent meal money and sat in Aimee Bock’s kickback chain. Abdulkadir’s guidelines ran nine to eleven and a half years. Both brothers are Somali nationals. Deportation sits on the table after the sentence.

The trial brief is the sentence that does not fit in a plea bargain. When the Minnesota Department of Education started scrutinizing Feeding Our Future, prosecutors wrote, Salah “used his political influence to lobby politicians to pressure MDE not to shut down Feeding Our Future and sites under its sponsorship so that he and his co-conspirators could continue to carry out their fraudulent scheme.” The exhibit list included 2020 emails with Council Member Jamal Osman about Stigma-Free. The witness list included Frey, on the city’s outside-employment policy. After the plea, a Frey spokesman called it one of the deepest betrayals of public trust in the state’s history. Believe the statement. Then look at the desk. The mayor did not sign the meal claim. A policy aide built the workaround and, if the government has it right, leaned on the agency that was supposed to close the tap.

He pleaded in January 2025. He walked around on a conditional bond for twenty months. In July the state patrol took him off I-94 at 5 a.m. and charged him with refusing a court-ordered blood test. On August 16, Minneapolis officers found him in a running car in a no-parking zone and charged him with felony possession of fentanyl. On September 4 a federal judge looked at that summer and the Marshals took him to Sherburne County. Detention argument: September 9. Sentence: October 1.

“Minor participant” means relative to Safari and Bock. Relative to a city policy shop, a million dollars and a lobbying campaign is the job. The national story is vendor fraud. The Minnesota story keeps producing vendors who also had a relationship with the shop that was supposed to notice. That relationship is the campaign.

The coalition that needed the tap

A coalition that treats benefit enrollment as a political machine will treat vendor integrity as a threat to the machine. That is not a theory of every Democrat. It is the governing record in the jurisdictions that grew the hottest books after 2018 and 2020.

House Oversight staff reports this year, an interim in March and a final in June, say Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison had warnings years earlier than they told the public. Whistleblowers described retaliation. The phrase the reports keep reaching for is compassion over compliance. Take the source for what it is: a Republican-majority committee. Then look at the MDE paper, which does not need a press conference.

The department declared Feeding Our Future in serious deficiency and stopped payment. Nine days after an April 21, 2021 court hearing, MDE lifted the stop. The judge later issued a public statement: he never ordered the state to resume payments, at that hearing or any other. The reimbursements that followed were voluntary. The money kept moving for roughly eight more months, until FBI warrants in January 2022. The reports name the motive. Operators threatened a racial-discrimination suit. The state folded. That is not a paperwork error. That is a political calculation about who you are afraid to offend.

Walz has given shifting answers about when he knew. Ilhan Omar’s MEALS Act belongs in the same paragraph, not as a character study, as a doorway. It let for-profit restaurants into the federal nutrition program and blessed grab-and-go rules that made meal counts unverifiable. Stigma-Free and Safari walked through that door. I wrote the media half of this in The Media’s Guard Dog Role. Nick Shirley’s locked doors did more in a week than a decade of “waste, fraud, and abuse” talking points. The coverage arrived after the video, not after the deficiency letter.

City hall is the municipal rhyme. Frey fired Salah after the indictment. That is the defense. A senior policy aide built the nonprofit workaround during the scheme. That is the charge.

This is the DSA logic even when the membership card is not on the table. I ran the national audition in The Horribles and the housing version in The DSA’s Housing Trojan Horse. Decommodified housing, sanctuary as identity, welfare as belonging. A faction that talks that way will not aggressively police the vendors who staff the belonging. New York housing money with no citizenship guardrail and Minnesota waiver Medicaid are the same sequence: expand first, verify later, call the verifier cruel. That is not a slur for every Democrat in the House. It is the governing incentive in the shops that built the mills.

The contrast is tools versus lip service. This administration stood up a Fraud Division, put the vice president on a task force, froze new hospice and home-health enrollments nationwide, used FMAP deferral as a whip (more than $2 billion on California, more than $500 million on Minnesota), and sent 562,000 flagged PPP and EIDL loans totaling $22.2 billion to Treasury after those files sat through the prior administration. June 23 put Todd Blanche, RFK Jr., Mehmet Oz, and Kash Patel in the same room. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi had already treated the Minnesota charging cadence as a priority instead of a headache. Blanche has not put it back on the shelf.

Republicans and Democrats helped design the 2020 PPP on-ramp. The contrast that matters is 2024-26 enforcement against 2019-24 permission. A press release after the FBI search is lip service. Stopping payment when the deficiency letter lands is interest. MDE had the letter and turned the tap back on.

Joe Thompson built the Feeding Our Future case and said the quiet part: industrial-scale, not a handful of bad actors. He is not a prop. The failure is the state that kept paying after its own people flagged the invoices.

Almost half the budget is social programs

David Harsanyi is right on the composition. FY2025 federal outlays ran about $7.0 trillion. Defense took roughly 13 percent. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid together took about $3.25 trillion, call it 46 percent. That is the honest “almost half.” The narrower means-tested stack, Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, TANF, EITC, housing, child care, runs $1.2 to $1.3 trillion. Real money. Not half the budget. Fraud does not sit on top of those outlays. It is already inside them.

There is no official “welfare fraud rate.” GAO publishes improper payments: overpayments, missing files, ineligible recipients, unknown payments. Fraud is a subset. FY2025 rates on the books that matter:

Medicare Fee-for-Service 6.6 percent. Part C 6.1 percent. Part D 4.0 percent. Combined, about $57 billion. Medicaid 6.1 percent, $37.4 billion, and CMS says 77 percent of that is insufficient documentation, “generally not indicative of fraud.” Believe the caveat. Then say the next sentence. Missing files include visits that never happened. SNAP 10.9 percent. SSI 11.6 percent. Unemployment insurance 14.9 percent. EITC 32.7 percent, $21 billion, and that rate has not been under 23 percent in twenty years.

A serious range on the health and means-tested stack is high-single-digit to low-double-digit improper, with true fraud inside the band and a handful of books running far hotter: waiver Medicaid, hospice, DME, pandemic leftovers, the EITC channel. GAO’s older government-wide fraud estimate of $233 to $521 billion a year is all federal obligations, 2018-2022 method, not a welfare percentage. The White House Fraud Ledger’s $230 to $246 billion “uncovered” since January 2025 is their rollup. SBA referred $22.2 billion. Referral is not collection.

Social Security retirement does not belong in the same sentence as a burrito-stand hospice. Flatten those two and you hand the other side the first ad. Santelli already drew the line. Carry versus drink.

Five things move the percentage. Enrollment kills and ownership-change rejects. FMAP used as a whip instead of a subsidy. Breaking the clause that makes Medigap follow a dirty Medicare determination. Treating EITC and SSI as the quiet high-rate books they are. Sentences that last longer than the mill.

Taxed Enough Already was never a seminar on the Laffer curve. It was value. The check came uncoupled from the work. Transfers are now the dominant activity of the federal government. A midterm that says “cut the safety net” dies before the first early-vote mailer. A midterm that says stop paying for water that was never carried has the empty daycare, the aide, the five-month shell, the freeze, and the party that turned the tap back on after its own deficiency letter.

OASDI is carrying, in the payroll-tax sense. A hospice that bills the newly dead is drinking. EITC at one dollar in three improper is a lot of drinking inside a program sold as work. A coalition that needs the drinker as a voter will always find a reason the verifier is the villain.

Salah’s sentence is October 1. Santelli’s last jobs-day hit is October 2. Do not overwork the calendar. Listen to the question.

How many of you want to pay for the meal that was never cooked, the brace that was never worn, the hour that was never delivered? Raise your hand.

The list since May is the answer. Some of them finally are. The offices that treated the mills as constituents never were. The sentences still are not.

Are you listening?