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Michigan Capitol Confidential began looking into the state Department of Health and Human Services after we got a tip that the department was willfully violating an administrative court ruling.
Months later, that investigation became public when a whistleblower filed a lawsuit claiming that the department, her employer, improperly tried to recoup alleged overpayments from thousands of Michigan residents — and that when she brought her concerns to supervisors, they retaliated.
Minnie Cordell had spent 28 years inside the machinery of Michigan’s health department, long enough to know when something was wrong.
Between 2023 and 2024, referrals for overpayments in the Michigan Combined Application Project exploded from 440 cases to 8,588, CapCon reported in March.
Cordell worked in the Overpayment Establishment Section, and what she saw troubled her deeply. State officials, having overpaid people in the Food Assistance Program, were trying to recoup the money through the Michigan Combined Application Project.
That technique, Cordell told her supervisors, ignored a 2020 ruling by an administrative law judge, who ordered the department not to recover any money in this way. The department, however, continued. As Cordell saw it in 2023 and 2024, elderly residents and disabled citizens, already living on the margins, were being pursued in a way a judge had ruled off-limits years earlier.
Cordell believed that the state was not following its legal obligations. She wrote to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in February 2024. She also contacted Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office. In August of that year, she filed a complaint with the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. She put her concerns in writing, climbed every available rung of the ladder, and waited for someone to act.
In February 2024, her supervisor allegedly handed Cordell a stack of roughly 240 referrals dating back to 2021 — a three-year backlog. No other employee in her position was assigned to handle a task that daunting. The message, her lawsuit suggests, was unmistakable.
Now Cordell is fighting back in Wayne County Circuit Court. Her 75-page lawsuit names the state of Michigan, the state health department and three supervisors by name. Her attorney estimates that as many as 14,000 vulnerable residents may have been wrongly pursued through seized tax returns and garnished wages.
Michigan’s health department isn’t running food assistance programs properly. If it doesn’t fix things soon, state taxpayers could be liable for a $300 million bill from the federal government.
Many news outlets recycle press releases and never set foot in Michigan communities. CapCon reports the news. We met Cordell, talked through her concerns, filed records requests investigating her claims, and followed the complaints to the courtroom.
