Here Comes the Money Flood
On Acton Line, Caleb Whitmer maps the geography of a Minneapolis fraud
In 1927, the Mississippi River broke its banks and inundated 27,000 square miles of the American South. The Great Flood, as it came to be called, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, rearranged the politics of an entire region, and gave John Barry the title and subject of Rising Tide. Floods, Barry showed, are never only about water. They are about engineering, about institutions, about the moral imagination of a people who decide what to build, what to abandon, and whom to save.
Nearly a century later, a different kind of flood washed through Minneapolis. No levees broke. No homes were lost to the current. The water, in this case, was money. A torrent of federal dollars released in the name of feeding hungry children during the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time the waters receded, something on the order of a quarter of a billion dollars had been diverted into the pockets of a sprawling conspiracy of restaurateurs, nonprofit operators, and middlemen who invented the hungry children, invented the meals, and very nearly invented their way into permanent immunity from scrutiny.
On the latest episode of Acton Line, my colleague Caleb Whitmer sits down to walk through what he has been calling, with a wry precision the subject deserves, the story of “fraud and flood.”
The temptation, when reading about a fraud of this magnitude, is to reach for the language of villainy. Here are the bad actors; here is the prosecutor; here, in the satisfying final act, is the verdict. Whitmer resists that temptation, and so does the conversation. The story he tells is less courtroom drama than civic anatomy. How, he keeps asking, did a federal program designed in compassion become a vehicle for plunder? What does it say about the architecture of American welfare administration that the fraud was so easy, so brazen, and so invisible to the people charged with watching it?
The answer is uncomfortable, and it has nothing to do with the unique wickedness of any individual. Floods of money, like floods of water, find every crack. Loosen the oversight in the name of urgency and during the pandemic, urgency was the universal solvent.
There is a long Catholic tradition, running through St. Thomas and reaching back to Aristotle, that distinguishes between pity and mercy. Pity is the sentiment that recoils at suffering; mercy is the virtue that orders one’s response to it. Pity, undisciplined, can do tremendous harm. It writes the check without asking who is cashing it. Mercy, by contrast, has eyes. It asks the unfashionable questions: Who is this for? Is the help reaching them? Are we, in our hurry to do good, building the next scandal?
Whitmer’s analysis, and his conversation on Acton Line, is in this tradition. He is not interested in scoring points against the welfare state, nor in defending it from its critics. He is interested in the harder thing, in what a serious Christian engagement with public administration looks like when the cameras are off and the spreadsheets are open. His analysis is the kind of work the Acton Institute exists to support: patient, granular, morally serious, and refusing the lazy shortcuts of either populist outrage or technocratic complacency.
The 1927 flood, Barry argued, marked a turning point in American political life. It exposed the limits of local response, accelerated the growth of federal authority, and set in motion a chain of consequences that ran through the New Deal and beyond. What the Minneapolis fraud affair will turn out to mark is harder to say. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a renewed seriousness about the design of public programs. Perhaps, more darkly, a further erosion of the trust on which any welfare state, modest or expansive, finally depends.
Listen to the full conversation on Acton Line: “Caleb Whitmer: Fraud and Flood — Cataclysmic Money in Minneapolis.” The video is here.
