Aimee Bock, the mastermind behind a $250 million child nutrition fraud scheme in Minnesota, has been sentenced to 500 months in prison, or 41.5 years. She’s also been ordered to pay more than $240 million in restitution.
Bock was the executive director of the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money to several existing and bogus nonprofits while falsely reporting the number of meals served to children and adults.
Federal prosecutors had been asking for a 50-year sentence in the case, and Bock, under sentencing guidelines, could have gotten 100 years in prison.
A jury found Bock guilty last year of seven criminal counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit federal programs bribery, and federal programs bribery.
The Scam
Feeding Our Future utilized two federal programs designed to help feed children and adults in daycare and after-school programs: the Child and Adult Care Food Program and the Summer Food Service Program. The organization served as the gatekeeper between the two programs and hundreds of nonprofits.
The nonprofits would submit meal counts to Feeding Our Future, which would then seek reimbursement from the federal government. However, some organizations padded the number of meals they said they were serving, and some didn’t serve any meals at all.
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The Justice Department has charged nearly 80 people connected to the fraud scheme.
What Did Minnesota Political Leaders Know?
The complete scope and details of the involvement of Minnesota elected leaders in the fraud scheme are still unknown. As the Daily Signal reported in February, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has been accused of helping leaders behind the scheme and profiting politically from the organization. He has said he did not help the leaders of the organization and did not profit from them.
Sen. Josh Hawley claimed in a hearing on Minnesota fraud that Feeding Our Future leaders met with Ellison at the end of 2021 and asked the attorney general for “help in getting investigators off their backs.”
“They complained to you for upwards of an hour about state investigators going after them, and they begged you to help them, and you agreed to it, amazingly, and we know you did because it’s all caught on tape,” Hawley said.
Hawley also accused Ellison of taking $10,000 from Feeding Our Future, referring to reports that Ellison received $10,000 in contributions from members of the organization.
Ellison called Hawley’s accusations “a lie.”
At that same hearing, Gov. Tim Walz was tongue-tied trying to explain why payments resumed to Feeding Our Future after the state’s Education Department stopped payments in 2021 over the alleged fraud.
Walz had claimed a court determined the Education Department didn’t have the authority to stop payments. However, as Rep. Jim Jordan noted, the state court released a blunt statement declaring Walz’s statement was “false,” and that the agency “voluntarily resumed payments.”
“So, the court is lying or you’re lying?”
“I can’t tell you, congressman,” Walz said. “I just simply know what the attorneys at the department believe, which is that it was a misinterpretation.”
Though one can question her credibility and motives for speaking out, Bock herself told Fox News in February, “Governor Tim Walz and AG Keith Ellison were fully aware of the $250 million child nutrition fraud and did nothing to stop it.”
She also recently told the New York Post, “I struggle to believe” Rep. Ilhan Omar didn’t know. “Omar sponsored the legislation that was exploited to make the scam possible.”
Dozens of members of the Somali community have been convicted of fraudulently billing the state for millions of meals never served.
Omar responded with a statement Wednesday to Newsweek, “Any claim that I had knowledge of this scheme is flat-out false.”
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is planning to announce “significant law enforcement action involving fraud in Minnesota” later this morning.
Ellison wrote in an op-ed for the Star Tribune published in April 2025, “I took a meeting in good faith with people I didn’t know and some turned out to have done bad things. I did nothing for them and took nothing from them.”
The Daily Signal contacted Ellison’s office for a response to Hawley’s accusations. Brian Evans, Ellison’s press secretary, told the Daily Signal that Ellison already addressed the meeting Hawley referred to in an op-ed for the Star Tribune published in April 2025.
In the op-ed, Ellison wrote that his “door is always open” to his constituents. The attorney general explained that in 2021, he “took a meeting in good faith with people I didn’t know and some turned out to have done bad things. I did nothing for them and took nothing from them.”
This story is developing and may be updated.
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