A DHS Whistleblower on Fraud in Minnesota

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota says $9 billion or more in taxpayer funds may have been stolen across 14 state welfare programs since 2018. Minnesota’s Department of Human Services is responsible for administering these programs. According to a DHS whistleblower, “the lack of guardrails” in place at the department “was pretty shocking.”

That whistleblower, Faye Bernstein, went on the record in an interview with Manhattan Institute investigative reporter Ryan Thorpe. A self-described Democrat, Bernstein says welfare fraud in Minnesota “is definitely not something that the Republicans are making up.”

Read their full conversation, including Bernstein’s take on a new audit of her department, here.

This weekend’s historic winter storm granted millions of American children a reprieve from school on Monday—but not in New York City. Even before the storm hit, Mayor Zohran Mamdani had ruled out the possibility of a traditional “snow day,” explaining that the city would rely on remote learning options if inclement weather interrupted normal school operations.

“Mamdani may have been the face of the decision, but he wasn’t its author,” writes John Ketcham. “The real culprit behind the disappearance of snow days is the scheduling inflexibility caused by new holidays and the city’s contract with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).”

Read here to see why Ketcham thinks traditional snow days should make a comeback in New York City—and how to make that happen.

This past Sunday marked the beginning of the 16th annual National School Choice Week. As Danyela Souza Egorov notes, school choice proponents have much for which to be thankful: 30 states now have some form of school choice program, including 12 with universal school choice laws.

But plenty of work still remains: “School choice has faced lawsuits in Ohio, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Utah,” she writes. And though public opinion is turning toward Republicans on education, resistance to choice is still strong among political leaders in deep-blue states like New York and California.

The Manhattan Institute is proud to serve as the Principal Institutional Partner for the Sun Valley Policy Forum’s 2026 Winter Summit in the iconic resort town of Sun Valley, Idaho on February 11, 2026.

We are thrilled to join Joe Lonsdale and MI senior fellow Christopher F. Rufo for an evening on principled leadership and the future of American institutions in an AI-driven era. Please click here to learn more about the Sun Valley Policy Forum and our partnership and to purchase tickets at a discounted rate for friends of the Manhattan Institute.

Meet Saikat Chakrabarti. A progressive Democrat running to succeed Nancy Pelosi in Congress, he began his career in Silicon Valley at Stripe. He became a multimillionaire by his mid-twenties and eventually quit tech to volunteer for Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. He later cofounded the PAC Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, which recruited hundreds of progressive candidates for Congress.

“Chakrabarti believes, among other things,” Sanjana Friedman writes, “that we should abolish ICE, implement a wealth tax to pay down the national debt, and end ‘federal attempts to target transgender students’—apparently a reference to the Trump administration’s 2025 executive orders and regulatory actions that have rolled back transgender protections and conditioned federal education policy on compliance with its views on gender.”

Read more about him and his views.

Everything is bigger in Texas, including, apparently, the convention centers. Eight cities and counties are building new or renovating existing convention centers in the Lone Star State, with huge price tags.

Consultants say the centers will pay for themselves, but that won’t happen, if history is any guide. Charles Blain, a Houston-based writer, reviews the plans and warns that the convention centers could become “massive money pits” that will keep taxpayers on the hook long after the public officials who approved them are gone.

“Unfortunately, based on the experiences in the Iron Curtain countries, the USSR, Cuba, and Venezuela, most people will learn nothing from this laboratory test. They will make excuses, they will blame landlords and capitalism, and given another opportunity, they will do it all over again.”

Photo credit: MediaNews Group/St. Paul Pioneer Press via Getty Images / Contributor / MediaNews Group via Getty Images