Agriculture Secretary suspends $129 million to one state because of fraud allegations against another office.

The Secretary of Agriculture sent a letter on Friday to the Governor of Minnesota and the Mayor of Minneapolis. The letter said that, effective immediately, $129 million in federal funding to the state and the city was suspended. The reason given was systemic fraud. The thirty-day clock for justification was attached.

Hon. The fraud the Secretary is talking about is real. There has been a federal investigation in Minnesota into a SNAP benefits scheme, with arrests, with indictments, with people going to prison. That part is real.

The trick is what the letter did with that real thing.

The letter does not freeze the agency that committed the fraud. The letter freezes all federal funding to the state and the city. The state SNAP program. The city’s child nutrition contracts. Farm research grants. Conservation cost-shares. Money that has nothing to do with the fraud the Secretary is angry about goes into the same envelope and the envelope is now sitting on a desk for thirty days.

This is the part where you notice the trick. You take a real thing that everybody agrees is bad. You attach to it a much bigger thing that you’d like to do anyway. You say the bigger thing is justified by the smaller one. You count on most of the room not reading carefully. By the time the lawyers catch up to the letter, eleven days from now, the kids who get the lunches at the school in the city you’re punishing have been on a different lunch line for a while.

You ever notice how the people who say we’re going after fraud are usually going after a budget line that has very little to do with the fraud they’re naming. The fraud is the alibi.

The Governor of Minnesota, who is also a former teacher, said publicly that this was an attempt to break the program in order to claim the program was broken. The Mayor of Minneapolis, who is also Jewish, did not need to be educated on the older form of this trick.

A federal judge, by the twentieth, will have temporarily blocked most of the freeze. The lunches will continue, as of this morning. The next governor whose state has a fraud case in any agency will get the same letter on the same letterhead and the same thirty-day clock and at some point the federal government will, by the simple and effective mechanism of withholding paychecks, make a list of the states that get federal money and the states that don’t.

That ought to concern you.