Judge in Feeding Our Future Case Found Ilhan Omar’s Relaxed Provisions Made Food Program ‘Vulnerable to Fraud’

A judge who presided over the Feeding Our Future case out of Minnesota found that the child nutrition program’s relaxed enrollment provisions, originally introduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and touted to her Somali constituents, made its reimbursement system “vulnerable to fraud.”

Aimee Bock, the convicted Feeding Our Future ringleader, filed an addendum on Friday to her appeal that attached those program integrity findings from U.S. Magistrate Judge David Schultz.

Bock was the founder and executive director of Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit organization in Minneapolis that enrolled hundreds of other organizations as food distribution sites in the meal delivery program, despite many of the food distributors being bogus businesses.

While serving as a sponsor to these fake food suppliers, Feeding Our Future retained a 10%-15% cut of their reimbursement checks as an administrative fee. That sprawling conspiracy, which amounted to more than $240 million in stolen child nutrition money, became what’s now known as the largest-ever scheme to take advantage of federal COVID-19 relief programming.

Some officials have traced the scam’s origins back to legislation Omar sponsored in 2020 that drastically relaxed the free food program’s registration requirements in order to provide student lunches outside of the traditional school setting during the COVID shutdowns.

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Omar had proposed enrollment expansions to the federally funded U.S. Department of Agriculture program that would permit nonschool-based caterers to register through waivers and claim compensation for the cost of meals purportedly served. Eventually, the programmatic changes that waived away the standard restrictions on who could receive funding to provide meals were tucked into the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, a sweeping COVID relief package. The massive bill’s subsection approving the waiver exemptions explicitly named the MEALS Act and included Omar’s statutory language word-for-word.

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Federal and state GOP lawmakers have long suspected Omar of involvement of some kind in the Feeding Our Future scandal, which originated in the Minnesota Democrat’s congressional district and involved dozens of Somali immigrants from Minneapolis, where her legislative office is headquartered inside a Somali-focused community center that received redirected Feeding Our Future donations.

Minnesota Republican state Rep. Kristin Robbins, the chairwoman of the state’s House fraud prevention and oversight committee, said the food program beforehand was fairly safeguarded against fraud.

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Robbins, whose anti-fraud committee has been investigating Omar, recalled that the program went from serving normal numbers of students to “astronomical counts that didn’t even make sense.” She said one site was feeding more meal recipients than there were residents in that entire town.

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Omar’s office appears to have communicated with Bock when Feeding Our Future was actively defrauding the federal government, but the congresswoman has since refused to hand over records of their past correspondence. Court documents citing 2021 communications between Bock and congressional staffers in Omar’s office were entered as government exhibits in the fraud kingpin’s federal trial. The entries mentioned multiple texts and email chains, including an exchange requesting “Help with USDA Food Program.”

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