By At some point you have to wonder if Democrats are in on it. In Oregon it certainly seems that way. Prosecutors allege that members of Tren de Aragua abducted a woman, tortured her with a power drill to extract her debit card information, shot her, and left her for dead. Investigators later traced the suspects not to a shadowy hideout on the margins of society, but to a residence formally listed as a “drug rehab facility,” one that was receiving roughly $2.3 million a year in Oregon Medicaid reimbursements.
What police described as a drug den was, on paper, part of the state’s addiction-treatment infrastructure. Neighbors reported constant traffic, suspected drug use, and repeated police visits. Yet the facility remained eligible for public funds, drawing millions from a Medicaid system.
Business records and lease agreements later linked the operators of the facility to a broader network accused of siphoning tens of millions of dollars from public health programs and laundering the proceeds overseas, including through Rwanda. The scale of the alleged fraud dwarfed the Oregon payments alone, placing the case squarely within a pattern of organized exploitation rather than isolated misconduct.
Despite the severity of the allegations, the response from Democrats in charge of overseeing state institutions has been muted. Payments stopped quietly. Offices were found abandoned. No public accounting followed. The case did not trigger a sweeping audit of similar providers or a broader reckoning with how Medicaid dollars are approved, monitored, and reclaimed when abuse is suspected.
The only journalist who has pursued the story in depth has said state officials were informed directly of the details and chose not to act. That indifference, he argues, is not accidental but systemic—an outgrowth of a failing liberal governing culture more concerned with maintaining ideological narratives than enforcing basic standards of accountability, writes RealClearInvestigations.
In that light, the episode is less a shocking anomaly than a window into how modern liberalism in many ways has become a vast money laundering machine for taxpayer dollars. Oregon’s Medicaid system, like those in other deep-blue states, operates at massive scale, distributing billions of dollars through layers of contractors, nonprofits, and residential providers. Oversight is thin by design, premised on the belief that barriers to entry are themselves a form of injustice. The result is a system that is easy to enter, difficult to monitor, and politically inconvenient to police.
Ngl, I always thought it was a cop out when I heard politicians talking about “waste, fraud, and abuse”, assumed this stuff was sort of marginal and around the edges. I was wrong. It seems that a substantial percentage of our spending programs are just straight up fraud. https://t.co/6sD6cjkVuW
— Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) February 7, 2026
Critics argue that this environment has created a perverse incentive structure. Public money flows rapidly. Verification lags behind. Enforcement is treated as optional, or worse, as morally suspect. In such a system, fraud is not merely possible—it is rational. Organized actors with experience exploiting welfare and health programs elsewhere need only adapt their paperwork to local rules.
Oregon in the current year: Tren de Aragua members abduct woman and torture her with a power drill to steal her debit card info, turn out to be living in a drug den that is listed as a “drug rehab facility” receiving $2.3 million/year in Oregon Medicaid funds. Owners have likely… pic.twitter.com/7YiGjFuaVg
— Blake Neff (@BlakeSNeff) February 6, 2026
The human costs of that failure are easy to miss amid balance sheets and reimbursement codes. In this case, they are impossible to ignore. A woman was tortured and nearly killed. Neighborhoods absorbed the consequences of a facility that existed largely as a financial fiction. And taxpayers funded it all.
To everyone paying attention, the broader lesson is unavoidable. In parts of modern blue-state America, from Portland to Minneapolis, leaders have no interest in protecting public institutions from fraud, so long as it benefits their political party. They have grown detached from the public they say they are meant to serve. Programs intended to provide care and stability increasingly resemble money grabs for criminals, with some of the money flowing back to the Democrats themselves.
For a long time, waste and fraud seemed like something conservatives just said. Now, it’s clear that it’s something much more than on the margins—it may even be keeping the Democrats financially afloat.
WOW: Democrats enter the 2026 midterms buried in debt—DNC starts the year with just $14M cash on hand but $17.5M in debt (net negative ~$3.5M), while the RNC boasts $95M cash on hand and zero debt, giving Republicans a massive ~$100M financial advantage. pic.twitter.com/oeXIcrWvcY
— RedWave Press (@RedWave_Press) February 2, 2026
Should we really be surprised the fundraising dried up after DOGE was implemented?
[Read More: China Accused Of Testing Nukes]
