A Memo to the Residents of Minnesota
To: Every Resident of Minnesota
From: Tom Berhane
Re: What's broken. What I'm going to do about it. And why it will work.
I'm not a politician. I didn't spend twenty years in the legislature working my way up to this moment. I'm a retired Special Operations Veteran, a Minnesota resident, and someone who has watched this state be mismanaged — not by bad luck, but by bad leadership — for too long.
I don't have a party machine behind me. I don't have donors to pay back. I have a VA disability rating, a fixed income, and nothing to prove to anyone except you.
That's why I can tell you the truth.
Minnesota is not failing because its residents are failing. The nurses, the tradespeople, the farmers, the parents working two jobs, the veterans coming home with no support system, the first responders who are stretched out thin— they are not the problem. The problem is a state government that has turned your tax dollars into a self-serving system that rewards insiders, ignores fraud, and leaves entire regions of this state behind.
That ends with me.
What follows is not a campaign promise list. It is a plan of action — 11 directives — written the way I learned to operate: with clear objectives, real accountability, and no room for excuses.
Read it. Scrutinize it. Hold me to it.
THE STATE OF MINNESOTA
WHERE WE ACTUALLY ARE
The fraud is staggering. Federal prosecutors have stated that as much as $9 billion may have been stolen from Minnesota-run Medicaid programs since 2018. A housing assistance program projected to cost $2.6 million annually ballooned to $104 million by 2024 — and the state kept funding it. An autism services program grew 3,000% in spending in five years. The state was warned. Repeatedly. Nothing happened.
Residents can't afford to live here. Minnesota has a shortage of 98,000 housing units. Permits are down 35% statewide since 2021. The state has the highest median cost for new homes in the entire upper Midwest. A registered nurse can't afford to live in the community she serves.
Greater Minnesota is being ignored. One mining project on the Iron Range has been trapped in permitting and legal limbo since 2005 - over 20 years - with no construction, no resolution, and no certainty for the workers and communities counting on it. That is a failure of governance regardless of where you stand on the project itself.
The federal government just changed the rules. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now law. It means no federal income tax on tips, no federal income tax on overtime — but Minnesota residents don't automatically get those benefits because this state has not opted in. The current administration won't act. I will on day one. At the same time, federal Medicaid cuts are coming, and up to 140,000 Minnesotans could lose coverage. A governor can't stop federal law — but a governor who runs a clean, accountable system protects far more residents than one who keeps losing hundreds of millions to fraud and noncompliance.
Men are dying and nobody in power is saying it out loud. 813 Minnesotans died by suicide in 2024. Men account for nearly 80% of those deaths. The male suicide rate is more than three times the female rate. Rural Minnesota's suicide rate is twice that of the Twin Cities. This has been trending upward for 20 years. The men most at risk — veterans, tradespeople, farmers, rural residents, first responders— are the same men least likely to ask for help and least likely to have access to it. This is not a footnote issue. It is a crisis. And it has been met with near-total silence from the people in charge of this state.
This is the situation. Here is my response.