Walz Calls Medicaid Freeze Out for What It Is: Another Layer Of Trump’s ‘Campaign of Retribution’

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Feb 26, 2026

*Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a press conference on Feb. 3, 2026. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images) TPM illustration/Getty Images*

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz rolled out a sweeping new anti-fraud package he plans to ask his state legislature to pass just one day after Vice President JD Vance announced that the Trump administration would freeze $259 million in Medicaid funding for Minnesota. During a press conference announcing the package, which he claimed the Trump administration knew about, he called Vance’s actions “totally illegal and unprecedented” and another prong of Trump’s “retribution” campaign against Minnesotans.

The Trump administration has been alluding to enacting such a sweeping hit to blue states for some time. Trump announced earlier this year that it would be withholding some $10 billion in federal funding, approved by Congress, for child welfare programs in Minnesota and four other blue states. Trump hinted at more such retribution against blue states under the guise of amorphous claims of fighting fraud during his State of the Union speech Tuesday.

“We have decided to temporarily halt certain amounts of Medicaid funding that are going to the state of Minnesota in order to ensure that the state of Minnesota takes its obligation seriously to be good stewards of the American people’s tax money,” Vance said Wednesday, flanked by Dr. Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Vance also asserted during the press conference that other blue states would soon be swept up in the supposed “war on fraud” that Trump announced on Tuesday.

Much of Trump’s second term agenda — theatrical crackdowns on Medicaid fraud, violent mass deportation operations, efforts to gain access to the nation’s voter rolls — are all an attempt to lend an air of legitimacy to his broader goal: punishing elected officials and Americans who did not vote for him. Walz called this out directly on social media in the immediate aftermath of Vance’s announcement Wednesday.

He expanded on this notion when he announced the new anti-fraud package on Thursday, arguing that the Trump administration is just looking for ways to legitimize its targeting of Minnesota — both in terms of its lethal immigration enforcement in the state and the withholding of crucial federal resources for Minnesota’s low income and most vulnerable residents.

“No state has experienced this before. How does taking and punishing children and elderly have anything to do with fighting fraud when that’s not where this issue is taking place?” Walz said. “It does nothing, and they’ve given us no way to try and show that all the things they asked us to do, we’ve already done. They’re not even looking at that.”

Walz has acknowledged there are permissible causes for fraud concerns as evidenced by the years-long legitimate social services fraud investigations that he has encouraged be carried out in the state. But the administration has now twice used trumped up claims of rampant fraud in the state as a pretext for flooding Minneapolis with ICE agents and, now, cutting off funding.

“If you’re serious about fighting fraud, you can help us work on this package, get this package passed,” Walz said.

— Nicole LaFond

Some State Dems Want to Make It Harder for ICE Agents to Get Jobs Post-Trump

State Democratic lawmakers in at least four states have recently introduced bills that would ban people who worked as Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees during Trump’s second term from getting civil service jobs in their states, in fields like law enforcement and public education. The bills are all proposals and are expected to face some legal challenges if signed into law, but, as The Guardian reports, most of the state Dems who have introduced the legislation are confident the laws would prevail in court, if passed. The states include New Jersey, Maryland, California and Washington state.

“If you’re an ICE agent, you’re signing up to engage in unlawful conduct. You’re signing up to engage in racially profiling Latino communities. You’re signing up to engage in illegal detentions and deportations of people who have legal rights in this country, you’re signing up for the separation of families and children,” Dem New Jersey assemblyman Ravi Bhalla told the Guardian.

— Nicole LaFond

Mamdani Secures Release of Columbia Student Detained by DHS

Trump’s Conspiracy Theorist Pals Want Him to Declare Emergency to Take Over Elections

MAGA allies are circulating a draft executive order that they think would give President Trump power over voting and elections, according to a new report from the Washington Post — and they are, they say, coordinating with the Trump administration.

The 17-page draft reportedly rests on Trump’s allies’ repeatedly debunked claim that China interfered in the 2020 election. They hope to use that conspiracy theory as the basis for a national emergency to be declared, which they contend will give Trump new authority over elections, including the power to issue a national ban on things like states accepting mail-in ballots and the use of electronic voting machines.

“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” lawyer and Trump ally Peter Ticktin — a longtime Trump friend who was involved in some of Trump’s failed litigation against Dems around the 2016 Russia investigation — told the Washington Post.

“But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes,” he claimed to the Post. “That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

“What a gift such a clearly unconstitutional executive order would be!” David Becker, a former DOJ lawyer and the executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, wrote in a post on Bluesky. “Though divorced from legal and factual reality, it would enable the courts to invalidate this power grab well in advance of the election, and confirm the clear limits to fed’l interference in elections.”

Democrats have already been preparing to fight against the various ways in which Trump will interfere in the midterm elections — and this will likely be no exception.

— Khaya Himmelman