Amy Klobuchar wants a waste and fraud czar.
The U.S. senator and DFL nominee for governor told me that one of her first acts if she’s elected will be appointing an “independent senior leader” who will work with agency commissioners to conduct a thorough audit of state government.
The senior leader will report to her and not the Legislature. Klobuchar sees the role as a way to confront fraud and waste posthaste as the Legislature works toward establishing the Office of Inspector General. The Inspector General Office does not have to be fully operational until September.
Klobuchar welcomes the inspector general but in the meantime said, “I don’t want to just sit there and like have some committee look at it. I want to get started right away. And I really have to because of this idea that we’re going to have to have a balanced budget.”
Klobuchar has represented Minnesota in the Senate for nearly 20 years. She has written four books, two of which are memoirs (the others are primers on antitrust law and – of all things – the financing of the Metrodome, which grew out of he senior thesis at Yale) and has been the subject of multitudinous profiles, especially when she ran for president in 2020.
In other words, when Gov. Tim Walz announced in January that he was not running for a third term, the DFL martialed support around someone with more familiarity to Minnesotans than even Walz himself.
With that in mind, unlike my profile of state House Speaker Lisa Demuth, the Republican nominee for governor, I focused on what she would do as governor in this piece. Her answers created a contrast with not just Demuth but also Walz.
Klobuchar dove right into policy specifics on auditing state government, holding forth on important, if unglamorous, matters like the prescriptive role of the Office of the Legislative Auditor. She also outlined a housing policy designed to help vulnerable Minnesotans living in manufactured homes, but would not impose requirements on local government, such as conforming to state zoning guidelines. The candidate was less specific on reckoning with Operation Metro Surge, but outlined two ideas for state action.
Klobuchar’s style painted a contrast with Walz, as well. Unlike the governor’s many comments, she did not use the interview to criticize Donald Trump .
“Klobuchar is a very intentional and cerebral politician,” said longtime Klobuchar chronicler Larry Jacobs, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota. “She is very analytic. Before she ran for governor, she spent a lot of time studying policy in Minnesota.”
Added Jacobs, “Her daily regimen is going to be one of intensity.”
Klobuchar wants a “top-to-bottom audit” of the state government to “root out fraud.”
She couched this deep-cleaning as not just revealing contractors that are defrauding taxpayers but “looking for duplicative programs and the ways we can save money and still deliver services because we are going to have some kind of deficit.”
Is Minnesota really going to have some kind of deficit?
Minnesota Management and Budget forecast in February that the state’s ample reserves mean a $477 million surplus into 2029, even though spending is outpacing revenue. But other budget watchers share Klobuchar’s concerns.
“Various warning signs suggest that the state’s budget challenges are more serious than these figures suggest,” wrote Laura Mortenson, communications director for the Minnesota Budget Project, a St. Paul-based nonprofit. These warnings include reduced federal dollars due the Trump policy bill and federal decisions to defer Minnesota Medicaid payments.
Klobuchar said she will not raise taxes. So, either this audit will find spending redundancies — or the Legislature may cut services next spring to deliver a balanced budget.
One task Klobuchar wants the “independent senior leader” to perform is to sift through audits produced by the Office of the Legislative Auditor, a part of government that — please! — is not to be confused with the new Office of Inspector General.
“The legislative auditor has made a bunch of reports over the last few years,” Klobuchar said. “They’re actually might be a gold mine of ideas right there.”
The Office of the Legislative Auditor produced a report this year on whether state bureaucracies act on their recommendations. Their findings show that Walz administration officials are not exactly marking these reports as spam, as a majority of the suggestions were taken up.
But there were key findings the state repeatedly ignored. For example, the Department of Human Services has not done the necessary monitoring or written the required evaluations of behavioral health grant recipients.
State Sen. Ann Rest, DFL-New Hope and chair of the Legislative Audit Commission, positively gushed when told of Klobuchar’s plan.
“WOW!” texted the retiring lawmaker. “I applaud this initiative promoted by Sen. Klobuchar as part of her overall plan to conduct an audit of state government. No better place than OLA reports over the last decade at least.”
As for other facets of the senior leader’s work, “duplication” sure sounds a lot like “redundancy,” the British word for layoff. Will the top-to-bottom audit mean layoffs of state employees?
“This may be the outcome,” Klobuchar said. “The outcome could be some reduction, but it’s not the goal. The goal is results. So, you may be better off having people working on approving housing projects and making sure we’re getting the money from the federal government. The audit is necessary to implement the goals that I have to bring down costs for people.”
Steven Schier, political science professor emeritus at Carleton College, said Klobuchar would use this audit to set the tone for her administration. “I think initially she will take aggressive measures, like firing workers and significantly slowing down payments,” to government contractors, Schier said.
Klobuchar seemed aware of the irony that, in moving to destroy duplication, she would work with Judy Randall, the current legislative auditor whose term ends next November, and the future inspector general and this senior leader. She said that “when the inspector general is eventually stood up” some responsibilities will be redirected there.
A federal immigration dragnet that resulted in the death of Minneapolis demonstrators Renee Good and Alex Pretti and over 2,000 Minnesotans detained and deported is rarely mentioned by Klobuchar (or Demuth) on the campaign trail. In their recently unveiled public safety plans, neither candidate mentions the violence that visited Minnesota’s streets in January.
Asked what the state should do in the enforcement action’s aftermath, Klobuchar said, “I’d start with something that may not require a law but is strongly supporting the investigations of our state and local law enforcement into the shootings” of Good and Pretti by federal immigration officers.
Klobuchar said she pressed U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche to provide information to the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). In July, the Trump administration supplied information on the killings to the state of Minnesota and Hennepin County.
But in a court filing last week, the BCA said the federal government is still withholding evidence, including the recorded statements of immigration agents involved.
As for forward-looking laws, Klobuchar said she would support a measure requiring ICE to have a warrant before entering the site.
The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution already requires a warrant before law enforcement can forcibly enter anywhere, noted John Boehler, policy counsel at ACLU Minnesota. But a state law — like one DFL senators proposed earlier this year — could provide clarity by, for example, necessitating that ICE has a warrant to visit state-owned property.
Otherwise, Klobuchar said, ICE-related legislation “is best coming from the federal level,” alluding to state laws — like a California ban on immigration agents wearing masks — that were shot down in court.
Immigration lawyers agree St. Paul has a limited number of cards to play.
But Eunice Cho, senior legal advisor at the James H. Binger Center for New Americans at the University of Minnesota, said one step the state could take would be to prevent prisons and jails from cooperating with ICE on holding detainees or transferring them to federal officials.
Cho noted that a growing number of states, including Illinois, have such laws on the books.
As of December, eight Minnesota counties, including Sherburne and Kandiyohi, have agreements to work with ICE.
Boeheler at the ACLU argued work with local law enforcement is “driving the massive detention numbers we’re seeing.”
I did not ask Klobuchar about a statewide law to ban cooperation with ICE and did not get a response from her campaign about her position by my deadline.
Besides the obvious that comes with one candidate running on the DFL Party platform and the other on the Republican one, the biggest contrast I see between Klobuchar and Demuth is what they mean when they say “affordability.”
Demuth’s affordability plan focuses on tax cuts. Klobuchar, meanwhile, has put out plans to use state government tools toward lessening the expense of housing and healthcare.
I asked Klobuchar about housing because the states’ role may undergo a transformation. Plus, Klobuchar has a “laser focus,” she said, toward meeting her precise goal of building 100,000 new dwelling units across Minnesota.
Klobuchar’s ideas come amid what Anne Smetak, co-executive director of the Housing Justice Center, a St. Paul-based legal nonprofit, called “the long arc of affordable housing policy.”
Beginning in the 1920s, Smetak summarized, the federal government built housing itself and played the role of landlord. By the 1970s, public housing was falling out of favor and vouchers were given to both landlords and tenants.
In the 1980s, Smetak said, federal and state actors broadly established the policies still around today — tax credits to private real estate developers to both build and set aside units for low-income residents.
But the complexity of these tax credits, plus a nationwide affordable housing shortage, has prompted advocates, including Smetak, to argue that “more direct funding and government involvement will be needed” to solve the problem.
Klobuchar said she is against at least one such aggressive approach — state zoning laws that would stop local governments from stopping new housing construction. “I don’t think we’re going to need that,” she said. “I think there are going to be so many incentives.”
One incentive is a state housing tax credit toward private investment in housing that Klobuchar wants to make permanent.
Klobuchar also has carrots for cities. They should be rewarded when it comes to state funding, she said, if they agree to build more housing.
And instead of imposing new state rules, Klobuchar, on her campaign website, proposes “to work with cities” to reduce paperwork and set consistent deadlines on permit applications.
Despite this more indirect funding and intervention, Smetak said there are positive aspects to Klobuchar’s plan — particularly her attention to the owners of manufactured homes.
Klobuchar pointed out that many manufactured home owners are renting the ground beneath them and can be susceptible to usurious fees, and she wants new state protections.
Also, Klobuchar proposed that Minnesota compete for grant money from the 21st Century Road to Housing Act that Congress passed in July toward the repair and preservation of manufactured homes. The new federal law also increases loan limits toward building federally insured manufactured homes and accessory dwelling units.
“We want to be in the front of that line to get funding,” Klobuchar said.
Like Smetak, Margaret Kaplan, associate director at the Center for Urban & Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota, said there is much to like about Klobuchar’s proposals. Kaplan noted its focus on manufactured homes and a proposal to outlaw price fixing algorithms that landlords use to raise rent.
Kaplan, though, wondered if Klobuchar’s carrots are sufficient.
“If you have a community where there has been significant opposition to the creation of affordable housing, giving them money or some incentive may not be enough,” she said. “What kind of incentive is necessary in order for a community to accept this idea that everybody needs a place to live?”
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