The Democrats who run my home state of Massachusetts think they’re lucky. Since the start of the year, they’ve faced a slew of investigations and stories about widespread fraud in state-run welfare programs. Coming on the heels of the fraud fiasco in Minnesota, Massachusetts Democrats initially feared they’d have to answer for tolerating the blatant theft of taxpayer money.
But the news cycle has moved on, consumed by the widening war in the Middle East. Still, voters should know how bad things are in the Bay State — and other blue states — because the bill will soon come due.
The fraud firestorm began in January, when state auditor Diana DiZoglio announced that her office had documented at least $12 million in stolen food-stamp funding in fiscal 2025. DiZoglio, one of the few Democrats who’s serious about stewarding the public’s money, also found $34 million in fraud over the past three years. As for the first half of 2026, the auditor has already found another $4.4 million stolen from food stamps and Medicaid. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts has made waves by prosecuting fraudsters across the state. In March, her office documented $9 million in stolen money since December.
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The numbers are bad, but the details are worse. In one of the U.S. attorney’s crackdowns in February, two Venezuelan nationals and a third U.S. citizen allegedly defrauded food stamps to stock their Boston restaurant with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of meat. In another case from March, six illegal immigrants, along with three others, were charged with stealing identities to perpetrate welfare fraud.
One defendant is an illegal immigrant who has allegedly lived under a dead person’s identity for more than two decades, using it to steal food stamps along the way. An employee at the state agency that manages food stamps flagged the issue and elevated it to a supervisor, but the defendant’s fraudulent application was still approved. In February, a whistleblower at the agency — the Department of Transitional Assistance — spoke of a “tone of normalcy” regarding fraud. Agency leaders apparently pressured staff to overlook the rampant abuse of taxpayer funds.
Having lived in Massachusetts almost all my life, none of this surprises me. It’s a one-party state, and the Democrats in charge have long refused to ask difficult questions about welfare programs. They equate taxpayer handouts with a generous spirit, and if people abuse the system, that’s better than being stingy. Never mind that taxpayers are being taken for a ride.
Massachusetts Democrats are hardly alone. All my state’s neighbors — except for Republican-led New Hampshire and Vermont — lose at least 10% of their food stamp spending to waste, fraud, and abuse. In New York, a recent federal audit found more than $23 million in Medicaid spending on deceased people. In Pennsylvania, the state inspector general found that the welfare fraud rate skyrocketed by 165% in 2025. The Keystone State is now the nation’s fourth-worst offender for fraud per capita.
Then there’s the blue bastion of California. In December, the state auditor concluded that the Department of Social Services should be “designated as a high-risk agency” given the exorbitant sums that fraudsters are stealing. The abuse of food stamps is so high that the state looks set to face a federal penalty of up to $2.5 billion. As for Medicaid, federal investigators audited the state’s program and found that nearly half of the enrollees in their sample were participating in managed care programs in multiple states. The investigators noted that California has ended enforcement policies that reflect federal requirements for combatting this issue. To a casual observer, it looks like California’s leaders want fraud.
To be sure, blue states aren’t the only ones in this boat. Many red states also have dangerously high error rates across welfare programs. Yet the only states with acceptably low error rates in food stamps, for instance, are Republican-led states in the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain region. In their major reform bill last year, President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress also put states on the hook for more welfare spending if they lose too much money to waste, fraud, and abuse. Virtually every GOP-led state is now getting more serious about protecting taxpayers and affordability. Blue states, meanwhile, are largely hoping these reforms get repealed.
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Massachusetts Democrats are a case in point. Despite the slew of negative headlines since the start of the year, and despite the federal reforms enacted last year, our governor and lawmakers have made little effort to get this crisis under control. Yet while the news cycle has shifted, welfare fraud isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the pain it will increasingly cause to taxpayers who are already struggling to make ends meet.
The question isn’t whether blue states will have to clean up the mess they’ve created — it’s when.
Tim Puglisi is an associate fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability.