Friends and neighbors,

On Wednesday, the Minnesota Senate passed its first bill of the 2026 legislative session: Senate File 3596, a $40 million bill to pay people's past-due rent and utilities. I voted against it, and I want to explain why.

My first issue with this bill is a matter of principle. Paying people’s past-due rent is a bad policy decision that carries with it a number of unintended consequences. I know a lot of people felt genuine fear and anxiety over the last couple of months, and reasonable people can debate if the responsibility for this rests more with the inflammatory rhetoric used by leaders in Minnesota or with the federal leaders overseeing the operation. But the reality remains that government paying people’s overdue rent and utilities is not a good idea from a public policy standpoint.

My second issue is one of priorities. Minnesota has a serious, rampant fraud problem on our hands. This is the number one issue I hear about pretty much everywhere I go. The governor has mostly ignored it and deflected responsibility. Even his recent actions have been small potatoes. We have been pleading with our friends on the other side of the aisle to address this. Yet here we are, half-way through March, and the Senate has taken up zero fraud bills. That should be our number one priority, and we are getting nothing from the Senate Democrat majority.

Third, there is no requirement in the bill that the payments go only to legal residents. That's going to be a hard sell to a lot of Minnesotans who are already frustrated with how the state is spending money. I know a lot of folks who continue to struggle with Minnesota’s high cost of living. That’s where we should be targeting our relief effort.

This program would absolutely be a target for people with bad intentions, though it is worth noting that Republicans successfully added several amendments to act as guardrails against fraud, including one amendment that requires that 5% of funds be dedicated to detecting and preventing fraud. We also added amendments to require applicants to actually document that they qualify instead of taking the applicant’s word for it, and to require detailed reports every 30 days.

Other amendments we offered to improve the bill were not successful. I offered one to prohibit people on the sex offender registry from getting payments. We tried to use the money for direct property tax relief instead. And we tried to limit eligibility to only legal residents. Each of those would have improved the bill even further.

I don't doubt some families are genuinely struggling right now, and I am sympathetic to that. But this bill felt like pandering in many ways, and the problems with it were too large to ignore.

Thank you for staying engaged. If you have any questions, reach out any time.

Sincerely,
Senator Bill Lieske