This page covers Feeding Our Future v. MDE. In November 2020, the state’s largest meal sponsor sued the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), the department that had slowed its approval of the sponsor’s new sites. For fourteen months the oversight fight happened in the courtroom. The page has the original record, including the official hearing transcript, readable page by page, and the dated chronology around it.
The April 21, 2021 hearing is the most-quoted and most-misquoted event in the case. Three facts from the transcript and the court’s own written statement.
The hearing produced remarks, not a payment order. The judge said on the record that payments were outside his jurisdiction and that he would issue no rulings on the payment issue that day (transcript pages 31, 63 to 64).
MDE resumed payments voluntarily in late April 2021 and itself asked the court to deny the payment motion as no longer needed. The court’s written correction states no order ever required the resumption.
The contempt finding two months later (June 24, 2021, with $47,500 in sanctions and fees) concerned site-application processing under the December 2020 consent order, not payments.
From the November 2020 filing to the court’s September 2022 written correction. Events that also appear on the oversight page link to it.
The sponsor sues over unprocessed site applications, alleging among other claims discrimination in violation of the Minnesota Human Rights Act. It first files in federal court on November 11, 2020, then dismisses that case on November 20 "pursuant to the parties’ agreement to pursue the matter in state court" and files in Ramsey County District Court, which the Legislative Auditor dates the same day. Under state law, representing MDE is a mandatory function of the Attorney General’s Office, which defends the department.
Before the court rules, the parties agree to an order requiring MDE to handle site applications "reasonably promptly." The stipulation becomes the yardstick for the contempt finding six months later.
MDE issues a serious-deficiencies letter and suspends payments. Feeding Our Future asks the court for an order compelling payment and for sanctions. The court’s written correction dates the letter March 30, 2021. One press review says the stop-pay issued March 29, and this page follows the court’s date.
The FBI had already contacted MDE in February 2021 about allegations it had received involving the sponsor, the same month a Partners in Quality Care co-founder tipped the agency about Bock. In April, in the same weeks the department is being pressed in court over payments, MDE gives the FBI its fraud suspicions, per the Legislative Auditor. Emily Honer, then in MDE’s nutrition division (its director since August 2023), told House investigators her own conversations with the FBI began in March 2021. She had reported concerns to USDA in summer 2020, escalated to USDA’s inspector general that October with no response, and obtained USDA sign-off on the serious-deficiency notices in March 2021. The FBI formally opens its investigation in May 2021. The department is simultaneously defending its payment stop and referring the sponsor to law enforcement.
Counsel for Feeding Our Future tells the court about $20.5 million in held claims. The state tells the court about "very concerning" calls from three site operators saying they had not provided meals for which the sponsor had been paid. The judge calls the calls "unsubstantiated allegations" on the record. The judge says payments are outside his jurisdiction, issues no rulings on the payment question, and warns state counsel about the department’s position on reimbursing. The most-quoted remark is readable in the transcript on this page at page 64.
No order requires it. MDE later says it removed the stop pay "in light of the Judge’s remarks on its legal strategy," and itself asks the court to deny the payment motion as no longer needed. Feeding Our Future’s contempt motions over site applications were still pending, and the court’s only contempt finding came in June. Per later charging documents, most of the money moved during the period payments continued.
While MDE "was attempting to put the brakes on the charity’s operations," Sen. Omar Fateh speaks at a gala at Safari Restaurant and "rallied to the charity’s cause," per the Pioneer Press, which reviewed video of the event. Sahan Journal reports he criticized the department’s decision to pause funding and said in the video that he had met with state officials about it. Fateh has not been charged with any crime; his campaign said he did not know about the allegations until the search warrants became public. He returned 11 donations totaling $11,000, seven of them from people named in the warrants.
MDE determines that Feeding Our Future has corrected its serious deficiencies and defers them, per the Legislative Auditor. The department later tells the court the deficiencies were resolved as of this date. The payment motion is denied as no longer needed because MDE had already resumed paying.
The court finds MDE in civil contempt of the December 2020 consent order it had agreed to. The order’s own numbers show 144 site-ID applications between November 30, 2020 and April 13, 2021. One was approved, and the other 143 were denied in a single letter on April 29, 2021. Every one took more than 30 days, 129 took more than 45, and 72 took more than 80. MDE defends its two-step site-ID process and cites an unprecedented volume of pandemic-era applications. The court rejects the explanation, noting the department never asked to modify the order it had agreed to. The sanction is $35,750 plus $11,750 in stipulated attorney fees. The order concerns application processing, not payments.
After the contempt order, MDE tells the sponsor it will process 143 of the 149 site-ID requests it had denied in April (the Legislative Auditor counts a wider set of requests than the 144 applications inside the contempt order’s date window), and a department declaration filed this day reports site IDs issued to 128 of them. The sponsor’s site network keeps growing through the rest of 2021.
Ellison takes a constituent meeting that, he later wrote, included people who were later charged. He says he made no promises and took nothing, and that his office got its first indication of the investigation’s scale from the FBI in January 2022. His office says the FBI had asked that the investigation not be disclosed in the state lawsuit. His own words are on the shared-record page.
The FBI executes search warrants across the Twin Cities. MDE suspends reimbursements to the sponsors named in the warrants. The warrants give the department a documented basis to suspend payments again, nine months after it voluntarily lifted its 2021 payment stop.
The Attorney General’s office, while still MDE’s defense counsel, opens a civil charities investigation of Feeding Our Future and petitions the Dakota County court to supervise the nonprofit’s announced dissolution. The lawsuit against MDE ends without trial.
After the first indictments, the governor says MDE’s hands were tied by a court order to resume payments. The Minnesota Judicial Branch, in a statement authorized by Judge Guthmann, calls the characterizations inaccurate and says no order ever required MDE to resume payments. The governor’s office releases this transcript and the contempt order the next day.
The official court transcript of the April 21, 2021 motion hearing, released by the Governor’s office in September 2022. The bookmarks jump to the passages most often quoted. Use the buttons or arrow keys to turn pages.
Loading the transcript…
Motion hearing, April 21, 2021, before the Honorable John H. Guthmann · Ramsey County District Court, Second Judicial District · Case 62-CV-20-5492 · Reported by the official court reporter (certificate dated April 30, 2021). The reporter’s certificate notes the hearing was held by Zoom during the pandemic and that "there may be word(s) that were misheard by the court reporter or not heard at all."
Open the PDF · The DocumentCloud copy · Official court transcript released by the Governor’s office on September 23, 2022 in response to the court’s written correction, and hosted on DocumentCloud since September 26, 2022. Local copy saved July 11, 2026.
Was MDE slow because it was suspicious, because it was overwhelmed, or because it dropped the ball? Below is everything the record says, including what no court or auditor ever decided. The by-year money table at the bottom shows when the dollars moved.
The lawsuit was filed over slow site approvals in fall 2020. Whether that slowness was scrutiny, overwhelm, or dropped balls is the question underneath everything on this page. Here is everything the record says.
Emily Honer, now MDE’s nutrition director (since August 2023), told House investigators in a transcribed interview (she was not sworn in, but was told the law required truthful answers) that her concerns began "in the summer of 2020, going into the fall," discussed "at least weekly" with her director. Her team took the concerns to USDA and "did not get support." It then filed a formal complaint with USDA’s inspector general. MDE says that was October 2020, but the Legislative Auditor could confirm only "October or November 2020," noting the exact date is unclear. The lawsuit arrived in November 2020, after the complaint.
Three pieces, all looking back after the fact. Honer, describing fall 2020 to House investigators, said "part of the lawsuit was that me and my team were taking time to look at the applications and asking questions about the validity of the information." The government’s civil forfeiture complaint (the filing to seize assets) quotes MDE employees as saying MDE "began more carefully scrutinizing new site applications submitted by Feeding Our Future" as the money and site counts surged. And MDE’s commissioner, responding to the Legislative Auditor in 2024, put it as cause and effect. After MDE raised concerns about new sites and unexplained claim increases, "Feeding Our Future filed a lawsuit against MDE."
Not suspicion. MDE’s position in court in late 2020 was that pending applications "remained pending because Feeding Our Future had failed to provide MDE with complete and accurate information about the sites." After a November 24, 2020 conference call with the judge, MDE approved 39 of 51 summer-program applications by December 9. On December 22 it denied roughly 68 sites under the federal 50,000-children-per-day cap, the same day it agreed to the consent order. No contemporaneous 2020 document has surfaced in which MDE says it was delaying because it suspected fraud.
The volume claim is documented, though never audited. Honer told House investigators that before COVID her office received very few applications a year. The surge from Feeding Our Future and Partners in Nutrition meant "my staff could no longer keep up with it just manually," and she built a tracking spreadsheet in the winter of 2020-21. The Legislative Auditor lists the factors MDE officials cited for hesitancy. They were pandemic waiver complications, thin USDA guidance, the sponsor’s litigation and publicity campaign, and MDE’s belief that it lacked rulemaking and investigatory authority. The auditor responded, "we also believe MDE could have taken more decisive action sooner."
At the first federal trial, a defense attorney said Honer had told federal agents in March 2022 that upper MDE management was worried about the lawsuit and told her to stop looking into problems. Honer testified she did not recall saying that. In her 2026 House transcribed interview (she was not sworn in, but was told the law required truthful answers) she answered directly. Asked whether she was ever instructed to stop investigating or reporting on Feeding Our Future after racism allegations were made, she said, "I was not." At the department level, the Legislative Auditor found that MDE officials said "the threat of legal consequences and negative media attention affected MDE’s decisions about the regulatory actions it did and did not take."
The only court ruling on the delay, the June 24, 2021 contempt order, went against MDE. It found the timing "can only be viewed as a clear violation" of the consent order and noted MDE never asked to change the order for good cause, even after its own serious-deficiency findings. But MDE’s internal appeal panel twice upheld the underlying denials. The court expressly declined to rule on whether the two-step process was legal. And after the raids, the courts dismissed Feeding Our Future’s appeals as no longer needed. The Legislative Auditor excluded the litigation’s legal merits from its scope. So the delay was sanctioned, the denials were never overturned, and the motive question was never decided by anyone neutral.
No court, and not the Legislative Auditor, ever determined why MDE was slow on site applications between September and November 2020. The evidence that the slowdown was fraud scrutiny came later, looking back. At the time, MDE’s position in court was that applications were incomplete or inaccurate.
Records reviewed: The June 24, 2021 contempt order, the Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA)’s June 2024 special review (which excluded the litigation’s legal merits from scope), Emily Honer’s January 2026 House Oversight transcribed interview, the government’s civil forfeiture complaint, and the trial coverage cited on this page. As of October 11, 2026.
| Calendar year | Received |
|---|---|
| 2018 | $307,253 |
| 2019 | $3,487,168 |
| 2020 | $42,681,790 |
| 2021 | $197,932,695 |
| Total | $244,408,906 |
This site’s own calculation from the complaint’s table shows that the $197.9 million received in calendar 2021 is roughly 81 percent of everything Feeding Our Future received across its existence. Everything after the December 22, 2020 consent order falls in 2021 plus the last nine days of 2020. The Legislative Auditor’s state-fiscal-year cut shows the same shape, rising from $4.8 million in FY2020 to $140.3 million in FY2021. No court or auditor has attributed a dollar amount to the lawsuit period as a cause. The table shows when the money moved, not why.
The legal position MDE brought into this case was set years earlier, in litigation over a different sponsor. A court told the department in 2017 that its application-review criteria had no legal footing. When Feeding Our Future’s applications arrived in 2020, the criteria still had none.
Years before Feeding Our Future’s growth, MDE denies another nonprofit sponsor’s request to expand from a single site to multiple sites, on financial-viability grounds. The fight over that denial produces the legal landscape the 2020 lawsuit is filed into.
The department’s internal appeal panel finds its review process "inconsistent with federal regulations" because it set forth no specific financial-viability criteria, used an inconsistent methodology, and communicated confusingly. On remand MDE announces new financial ratios and denies again on June 16, 2016. A second panel upholds that denial, and Partners in Nutrition appeals to the Minnesota Court of Appeals.
The new sponsor’s first application to the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), filed in early 2017, is denied for failing to demonstrate financial viability, administrative capability, and program accountability. Feeding Our Future appeals five days later.
The court reverses the Partners in Nutrition denial as "based on erroneous theories of law and arbitrary and capricious." It holds that MDE may not impose requirements beyond the federal rules without first adopting formal rules, and notes that "MDE has not promulgated any administrative rules in relation to the CACFP." The decision stands after the Minnesota Supreme Court denies review on October 17, 2017. Per the Legislative Auditor, MDE did not appeal, and the department later approves the expansion. The opinion, later published at 904 N.W.2d 223, is the notice the Legislative Auditor would cite seven years later.
After the sponsor supplies more information, and after what the Legislative Auditor describes as clarification from the Court of Appeals about the financial-viability standard, the panel approves the application MDE had denied in April. Feeding Our Future stays largely inactive until mid-2018.
MDE tells the Legislative Auditor it believed it lacked rulemaking authority under state law. It neither attempts CACFP rules nor asks the Legislature for the authority, though statute directs the department to propose needed legislative changes. When Feeding Our Future’s pandemic-era applications arrive in 2020, the review criteria a court had said needed legal footing still have none.
Feeding Our Future’s complaint counts 41 proposed sites that MDE refused site IDs between September 8 and November 20, 2020, and ten more pending past thirty days. MDE answered that the applications were incomplete or inaccurate. The Legislative Auditor later records the factors officials cited for the department’s hesitancy. They were COVID-19 waiver complications, thin guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the sponsor’s litigation and publicity, and MDE’s belief that it lacked rulemaking and investigatory authority. The lawsuit follows within weeks.
The Legislative Auditor wrote, "Because the criteria did not exist in state law when MDE reviewed Feeding Our Future’s applications, MDE believed it had limited authority to require Feeding Our Future to take specific actions or to outright deny the organization’s applications." Officials also told the auditor they expected the sponsor to sue over any denial.
The review rejects the belief as a justification, saying "A lack of detail in federal law or USDA guidance does not relieve MDE of its legal duty to deny a sponsor’s application if it believes the sponsor cannot meet CACFP performance standards." If MDE thought it needed more authority, the auditor said, the department "had an obligation to seek legislative action to obtain that authority."
The auditor stops short of saying criteria written into law would have stopped anything. The auditor also flags that state criteria require USDA approval and cannot be the sole basis for denying an application. Writing the criteria into law would have supplied the legal footing MDE said it was missing. Whether the department would have used it is not a question the record answers. The reforms that eventually wrote parts of this into law are listed on the oversight page.
The hearing had three roles in this civil case. They were the judge, the state’s counsel, and the sponsor’s counsel, with page numbers for what each said.
Presided over the civil case. At this hearing he read the federal regulations against the state’s payment stop, while stating that payments were outside his jurisdiction and issuing no payment ruling. He later authorized the written correction stating that no order ever required MDE to resume payments. He told Newsweek the litigation before him "never involved the payment of public funds."
Argued the state’s position, citing an administrative stop pay pending claim validation, financial-viability concerns, and the "very concerning" calls from three site operators who said they had provided no meals for which the sponsor had been paid. The state presented no bank records, and a later FBI affidavit explained MDE had no access to them.
Opened the hearing with "Gloves are off" and told the court $20.5 million in claims were being held. He argued the state could withhold funds only after a fair-hearing finding of a knowing submission of a fraudulent claim, which had not been alleged. Four years earlier he had represented Partners in Nutrition in the 2017 Court of Appeals case that reversed MDE’s financial-viability denial. Assistant Attorney General Martha J. Casserly appeared for MDE in both cases. The government’s own pretrial filing describes his role as counsel without alleging misconduct. Whether he has been charged is stated on this page, with the records reviewed.
Representing a client in litigation is not misconduct and is not alleged to be.
The transcript also lists as present Aimee Bock (Feeding Our Future, then its executive director) and, for MDE, Emily Honer and another department staff member.
Rhyddid Watkins has not been charged with any crime in the records reviewed.
Records reviewed: Justice Department (DOJ) and US Attorney (District of Minnesota) press releases and charging documents in the Feeding Our Future cases, the government’s pretrial filings that describe his role, and the Star Tribune and Sahan Journal case trackers (including Sahan Journal’s list of everyone charged, 81 people as of October 8, 2026). As of October 11, 2026.
People charged but not convicted are presumed innocent, and amounts labeled alleged come from charging documents, not proven losses. Method and corrections
Written by Dan Swenson, an attorney who serves on the Nowthen City Council, in his personal capacity. It is not an official publication of the City of Nowthen or any other government.