by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News July 21, 2026
More than $1 billion in federal Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota have been frozen over suspected massive fraud, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Tuesday.
“We are not sending Medicaid dollars out the door until we have confidence that they are being spent lawfully and appropriately,” Kennedy said at a press conference.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Before the Medicaid money is released, Kennedy said that California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz “need to provide documentation that these payments are legitimate.”
Kennedy blamed the Biden-Harris regime and the Democrat leadership in both blue states for alleged misuse of taxpayer dollars.
“Instead of protecting your money, they open the floodgates to theft,” Kennedy said. “They dismantle basic program integrity and oversight.”
Kennedy said that Biden era HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra “looked the other way while fraud, waste, and abuse exploded.”
“The scammers got paid,” Kennedy said. “The taxpayers got stuck with these enormous bills.”
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said it is deferring more than $860 million in Medicaid payments for California and over $200 million for Minnesota. The hold will be in place while federal officers review “high-risk Medicaid claims” and document deficiencies.
CMS officials suspect the questionable spending in California is rooted in in-home services. Over the past two federal fiscal years, California’s spending in these programs went up 24%, while the rest of the country’s average was 12%, according to CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz.
“So California increased spending at twice the rate of the average of the rest of the entire nation,” Oz said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
According to CMS, California’s frozen funds include $221 million in associated claims involving individuals, which Oz describes as “unsatisfactory immigration status.”
Newsom responded to Kennedy’s announcement in a post to X, calling it a “recycled political stunt,” and insisting that California is being targeted for political reasons — not due to fraud.
In Minnesota, the funding involves 14 high-risk areas that were identified as suspect because of vulnerabilities or evidence of fraudulent activity.
Walz’s office responded in a statement to the New York Post, saying that the “Trump Administration is cutting more money in healthcare than they’ve prosecuted for fraud.”
Last month, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced 455 people were charged for $6.5 billion in healthcare fraud schemes.
The Justice Department said this was the “greatest combined federal and state effort in combating health care fraud in history,” charging individuals who used taxpayer-funded programs to pay for luxury lifestyles.
