(Just The News)—In the wake of what appears to be billions of dollars worth of welfare fraud committed against 14 Minnesota Medicaid-funded welfare programs, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday directed two state agencies to investigate the potential misuse of taxpayer money in one program, Texas’ Child Care Services Program (CCSP).
So far, at least 98 people have been charged, including 85 Somalians, for their role in an alleged fraud scheme targeting 14 high-risk Medicaid-funded services through Minnesota Department of Human Services programs, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced last week. Sixty have already been found guilty, with some pleading guilty last month, The Center Square reported. The charges stem from a multi-year investigation.
In October, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz shut down all 14 programs and ordered a third-party audit of Medicaid billing at DHS. In December, he appointed a new director to implement a statewide fraud prevention program.
He did so as Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson announced additional indictments stemming from a multi-year investigation into a scheme defrauding DHS programs created to help disabled children and adults, including those diagnosed with autism.
Three programs were targeted by alleged fraudsters for years, which have nothing to do with childcare facilities: Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services (HSS), Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention Autism (EIDBI) and Integrated Community Services (ICS).
Less than a month after appointing a new fraud director, Walz announced Monday he is not running for reelection . Congressional hearings also are scheduled for next month to address extensive fraud allegations.
While several state-administered welfare programs in Texas do accept Medicaid funding, Texas does not have Medicaid-funded housing or similar programs that were created by the Walz administration. Texas is also one of several Republican-led states that chose not to expand Medicaid provisions.
Texas has also been the target of billions of dollars worth of healthcare fraud schemes involving Medicaid. In July, 55 people involved in a $15 billion healthcare fraud scam were federally charged in the Houston area, The Center Square reported.
Attorney General Ken Paxton claims the OAG’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit played a key role in the “largest health care fraud takedown in U.S. history.” Their efforts resulted in federal criminal charges brought against 30 defendants last July connected to more than a dozen fraudulent health care schemes in Texas.
“The schemes collectively accounted for more than $177 million in fraudulent billings, $1.7 million in illegal kickbacks, and the unlawful diversion of over 10 million opioid pills,” Paxton said last July. “Charges brought through MFCU investigations included conspiracy to commit health care fraud, unlawful distribution of controlled substances, and violations of federal anti-kickback statutes.”
Despite this, Abbott’s directive does not mention Medicaid fraud.
In a letter to the heads of the Texas Workforce Commission and Texas Health and Human Services Commission, Abbott directed them to investigate any potential fraud within the CCSP.
He acknowledged that the agencies “already have strong anti-fraud processes in place like routine audits of providers and in-person site visits to facilities to ensure the physical safety of Texas children and the good stewardship of state dollars.” Their “strong anti-fraud measures have shown results,” Abbott said, adding that Texas’ percentage of improper payment rates is 0.43% compared to Minnesota’s approximate 11%, citing federal data.
Despite this, he said, “more can be done” because “schemes like the ones uncovered in Minnesota harm taxpayers as well as other families and children waiting to participate” in the CCSP. “Waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars will not be tolerated and will be punished to the fullest extent of the law in Texas,” he added.
The TWC has broad authority under Chapter 301 of the Texas Labor Code to enhance fraud detection and prevention efforts, Abbott said. HHSC also has authority under Chapter 42 of the Texas Human Resources Code to regulate childcare facilities, he said.
Abbott directed the state agencies to “identify high-risk providers who participate in the [CCSP] and conduct additional site visits of those providers to ensure compliance with all applicable state and federal laws and regulations; “review current data collection efforts … to prevent, detect, and eliminate fraudulent activity;” ensure all providers participating in the CCSP “are accurately and verifiably reporting the number of children enrolled in the program;” review CCSP oversight processes for Local Workforce Development Boards to verify standards are uniformly upheld and take corrective action for those that aren’t; enhance access to the agencies’ online portal and hotline to make it easier for Texans to report fraud; and submit all completed provider fraud investigations to federal or state prosecutors.
The agencies were directed to provide a progress report to his office by the end of the month and a final report on their efforts by Feb. 27.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.