State Rep. Elliott Engen, R-White Bear Township, has labeled the Minnesota Democratic Party an “organized crime syndicate” as the state faces a social-services fraud scandal and impeachment proceedings have been filed against Gov. Tim Walz.
His remarks come amid federal investigations into alleged fraud in Minnesota’s housing, food aid, child care and Medicaid programs. Prosecutors have estimated that nearly half of the roughly $18 billion spent on 14 programs since Walz took office in 2018 may have been lost to fraud.
“It’s not even about Republican gains or Democrat gains,” Engen told North Ramsey News. “I’d like to see true reform. So, I hope that this really opens up people’s eyes to how we don’t have a representative government right now.”
Engen, who represents District 36A and is a 2026 candidate for state auditor, described Walz as a “puppet” of a political machine.
“You have an organized crime syndicate that’s operating and masquerading as a representative government,” he said. “And for far too long they’ve prioritized themselves while pretending to care about everyday folks. And so I’d like to see people win who have the best interests of reform at heart and want to go in there and not operate within that broken political system and just be a cog in the machine, but rather take a sledgehammer to it and bring about that reform, make it work for people again.”
Engen said Republicans could gain politically if they focus on reform while addressing the fraud.
“If Republicans accurately hit that message, and yes, they will 100% see massive, massive victories,” he said. “But it’s also incumbent upon us to not just point at the fraud and the failures of the Walz administration and those within it, but to also provide solutions to how we’re going to stop this and prevent it from ever happening again.”
Meanwhile, Walz is facing formal impeachment proceedings in the Minnesota House of Representatives.
State Rep. Mike Wiener, R–Long Prairie, filed articles of impeachment accusing the governor of “knowingly concealing or permitting widespread fraud within Minnesota state-administered programs” and failing to act despite repeated warnings, audits and reports of abuse.
The scandal includes high-profile cases such as the $250 million Feeding Our Future scheme and alleged Medicaid fraud.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer told the New York Post that he hopes Walz ultimately “leaves office in cuffs.”
Engen said Walz’s conduct may be criminal and accused state officials of obstructing oversight.
“In any civilized society that upholds its own laws, he would be wearing an orange jumpsuit,” he said. “But not just him, it’d be his commissioners who are actively retaliating against whistleblowers who are trying to prevent all this fraud and corruption. It would be the attorney general who is pledging to fight for the prosecutors in the Feeding Our Future case and fight against the state agencies that he has a constitutional duty to work on behalf of as the state prosecutor, the chief prosecutor here in Minnesota. There are so many that should be implicated in this, but Tim Walz is amongst them.”
Walz ended his reelection campaign amid the fallout, rejected calls to resign, and said stepping down would happen “over my dead body.”
Engen said Walz should resign but predicted he would remain in office.
“If he resigned today, then (Lt. Gov.) Peggy Flanagan would take his place as the face of a political machine that’s still going to be operating with the same insiders, the same self-serving bureaucrats that have organized this fraud to occur in the first place,” he said. “I think he should resign. I think if he had any dignity or self-awareness, he would save whatever semblance of base he has left, but he won’t. He’ll limp along. He’ll try to continue that ‘Republicans are mean and bad, and Trump is horrible’ act, as he’s been doing for his entire tenure now.”
Engen said the Democratic political machine allowed the fraud to persist.
“That was Tim Walz being ousted by the same political machine that’s trying to do a bait-and-switch re-brand with a new candidate so that it can continue chugging off,” he said. “Tim Walz is not the puppet master, he’s just a puppet.”
He said Walz’s removal from the ticket was driven by political risk rather than accountability.
“The corrupt political machine has been not only financing their own reelection campaigns and making the political class and their friends very wealthy off of this fraud for a long time, but they have no interest in performing that system,” he said.
“They’re just going to hide behind another smoke-and-mirrors attempt to keep it going. So that’s why he was shoved to the wayside, because he posed an electoral risk. But now that he’s off the ticket, they think that that’s going to resolve the fraud issue as a leading driver heading into the 2026 elections. I think Minnesotans are much smarter than that.”
Engen said oversight failures by the state’s Democrats allowed fraud to continue largely unnoticed.
“There’s not going to be any accountability for themselves,” he said. “It’s obvious that they can’t police themselves without subjectivity. That’s why all of this fraud that’s been ongoing for quite some time is just now seeing the national spotlight, because they’ve done their absolute damndest to make sure that it was swept under the rug.”
Public attention increased after a video by independent journalist Nick Shirley showed allegedly vacant child care centers receiving public funds.
“If it wasn’t for a 22-year-old YouTuber, there wouldn’t be a House Oversight Committee hearing going on right now about the extent of the fraud here in Minnesota,” Engen said. “But once it really resonated with everyday folks who are not in the political know, they’re not ingesting politics 24/7, they’re just trying to work hard, put food on the table, and 64% of Minnesotans are living paycheck to paycheck, they are not ingesting this stuff all the time.”
Engen credited independent reporting for drawing attention to the issue.
“That short little video just showing how much fraud there is, and how obvious it is, got people fired up to want to make a change, because we all knew that politicians and the government in general are less trustworthy than gas station sushi,” he said. “Everybody knows that intrinsically, but this is such a magnitude that they didn’t even maybe comprehend prior that it’s going to inspire change.”
Engen also criticized mainstream media coverage, calling out the Star Tribune and other outlets for allegedly downplaying fraud until national attention forced action.
“It’s activism masqueraded as journalism, and they’re not very good at hiding the ball with it,” he said. “If they were, wouldn’t the Star Tribune be closing its Minnesota plants and outsourcing its printing to Iowa, because their readership is absolutely minuscule.”
Notably, the Star Tribune’s CEO Steve Grove previously served as Walz’s commissioner of employment and economic development.
“I think a lot of people are just hoping that the Star Tribune goes completely online so that they could save some money on toilet paper,” Engen said.
“But unfortunately, it is just a ragtag propaganda outlet that nobody wants to subscribe to, read or engage with. It is just another political tool of the left. I think global media had to recognize the need to save face and talk about fraud once it was so glaring and so obvious and widely being reported on a national scale that in not doing so, it would give away their game. But it was too little, too late, and they always, even in their headlines, made it more amenable to Democrats.”
With federal investigations ongoing and dozens of individuals charged, Engen said the 2026 elections will be pivotal.
“It’s incumbent upon us as public servants who want to bring integrity back to the system to educate people as to just how bad it is, because there are still folks out there who don’t know,” he said.
“And if we do that, we do our jobs of educating people. Then they will choose to reform their state government themselves. They will retire people who have engaged in all of this, have allowed it, have enabled it, and have benefited from it, and instead bring back trust and integrity to their state governments.”
Engen urged voters concerned about vulnerable populations to support Republicans.
“The Democrats here in the state who are hesitant or otherwise wouldn’t tend to vote Republican, my pitch to them is that if you truly do care about the most vulnerable amongst us, whether it be children with autism, people struggling with substance use disorder treatment, people that need long-term care, people that need causing stabilization services, if you truly care about those people, you need to vote Republican in 2026,” he said. “As it’s currently positioned through a Democratic government, that money will never reach those people.”
