Tim Walz just got caught doing something to orphaned children that he has never once done to illegal aliens or Somali scammers.
The Trump administration has been quietly building the case – and now they're ready to talk about it.
What they found will make Walz's DNC speech the most damaging thing he ever said.
Minnesota Has Been Taking Foster Children's Social Security Survivor Benefits for Years
When a parent dies, Social Security sends survivor benefits directly to the child.
That money belongs to the child – earned by a deceased parent through a lifetime of payroll taxes.
Minnesota county welfare agencies have been intercepting those checks and keeping them to cover their own administrative costs.
Children in foster care, who already lost a parent, were losing their inheritance too.
In 2022, Minnesota counties collected $2.79 million in survivor benefits intended for more than 600 foster children and used it to reimburse themselves.
The children got nothing.
Administration for Children and Families Assistant Secretary Alex Adams – who ended the identical practice in Idaho before joining the Trump administration – had a name for it.
"States are taxing orphans at 100% of their benefits to offset government expenses," Adams told The Daily Signal.
"That's why it's called the orphan tax."
"It is literally the worst of the worst government I have come across."
The Trump Administration Named the Minnesota Orphan Tax and Issued a Deadline
In December, the Trump administration's Administration for Children and Families sent letters to 39 governors demanding they end the practice.
Ten states have already responded and changed their policies.
Minnesota has not.
Adams publicly challenged Walz to fix it with a single executive order – the same move Republican governors in Nebraska and Louisiana already made.
"Every governor has the ability to end this today through courage and executive action," Adams said. "I would challenge Gov. Walz in Minnesota to end this through executive action. Let's do right by these orphans."
Walz hasn't picked up the pen.
The Minnesota legislature adjourns May 18.
If Walz does nothing before that deadline, orphaned foster children in Minnesota wait at least another year.
Adams then aimed directly at Walz's most famous campaign moment.
"Governor Walz has talked openly about the dignity of receiving Social Security survivors benefits," Adams told Breitbart News, "and the Administration for Children and Families has advocated that that same dignity be extended to orphans in state foster care."
He didn't stop there.
"To the extent Governor Walz views this moral issue as a budget issue, Minnesota could easily close any perceived budget gap by eliminating even just a tiny fraction of the widespread fraud observed in the state."
That fraud is not a footnote.
More than $1 billion in taxpayer money was funneled through sham nonprofits and overseas accounts under Walz's watch in the Somali food program scandal – the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme in American history.
Walz found money for Somali nonprofits. He found money for illegal alien benefits. Somehow an executive order protecting orphans is beyond him.
Walz Thanked Social Security Survivor Benefits at the DNC While Minnesota Took Them from Orphans
At the 2024 Democrat National Convention, Walz told the country his father died of lung cancer and left behind a mountain of medical debt.
Then he said it out loud, in front of millions: "Thank God for Social Security survivor benefits."
He repeated that story on the campaign trail and in governor's races across every sympathetic crowd he could find.
The program he credited with saving his family is the same program his state has been raiding from children who had already lost a parent – children with no campaign stage, no political career, and nobody in the governor's mansion fighting for them.
Social Security survivor benefits average roughly $1,100 a month per child.
For a kid aging out of foster care with no family and no financial foundation, that money is the last thing a dead parent could leave behind.
Adams put it plainly: "Having the resources that their parents left for them might change the entire trajectory between success or failure in life. That's a down payment on a house. It helps with rent. It's an education."
Walz said it himself, on the biggest stage in American politics – he knows exactly what those benefits mean to a family that lost a parent.
He just never extended that same decency to the orphans his state has been quietly taxing for years.
Sources:
- Hannah Knudsen, "Exclusive – ACF Assistant Secretary Alex Adams Rips Tim Walz over Heartless 'Orphan Tax'," Breitbart, May 7, 2026.
- Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell, "How Trump Admin Is Ending 'Immoral' Orphan Tax," The Daily Signal, April 26, 2026.
- "ACF Notifies 39 Governors That States Are Diverting Foster Youths' Earned Social Security Survivor Benefits," HHS.gov / ACF, December 11, 2025.
- "Tim Walz DNC Speech Full Transcript," Axios, August 22, 2024.