(Zero Hedge)—Somalia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Abukar Dahir Osman, is facing growing scrutiny over his connections to the Ohio healthcare company Progressive Health Care Services Inc. This comes as federal investigations into suspected Somali-linked welfare fraud, stretching from Minnesota to Washington, Ohio, and Maine, continue to intensify, with allegations that some entities (daycares, healthcare, or transportation service companies) were merely front operations to extract taxpayer funds.
The most entertainingly ironic outcome is the most likely
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 1, 2026
The story surrounding Osman is certainly a strange one, with the news and analysis outlet Horn Diplomat publishing a report titled “Ethics Questions Surround Somalia’s UN Envoy, as U.S. Healthcare Fraud Scandals Heighten Scrutiny.”
Here’s the report:
Public corporate filings and professional records have raised questions about transparency and potential conflicts of interest involving Abukar Dahir Osman, Somalia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations.
The scrutiny comes as Somalia prepares to assume the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council on January 1, 2026, a role that places the country at the center of global diplomatic decision-making on peace, security and sanctions.
Ohio state corporate records show that Osman was listed as the statutory agent for Progressive Health Care Services Inc, a Cincinnati-based home healthcare company, while simultaneously serving as Somalia’s top diplomat at the United Nations.
Filings with the Ohio Secretary of State, electronically submitted on October 22, 2018, identify Osman as the company’s agent. He had been appointed Somalia’s UN ambassador in June 2017, creating an overlap of nearly two years between his diplomatic role and his involvement with a U.S. healthcare provider operating within Medicaid-funded systems supported by U.S. taxpayers.
Professional records, including publicly available LinkedIn information, indicate Osman served as Managing Director of Progressive Health Care Services Inc. from 2014 until May 2019, alongside his UN posting in New York.
The overlap has drawn attention because the U.S. home healthcare sector has repeatedly been identified by federal authorities as one of the areas most vulnerable to fraud, abuse and improper billing.
That vulnerability was highlighted by a sweeping fraud scandal in Minnesota, one of the largest public-assistance fraud cases in U.S. history. In an investigation reported by The New York Times, federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program designed to keep children fed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to that reporting, law-enforcement officials said fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora, where individuals established companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars in social services that were never provided. Federal prosecutors have said 59 people have been convicted so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayer funds was stolen across three major investigations—an amount exceeding Minnesota’s annual corrections budget.
Prosecutors and state officials have emphasized that such crimes reflect the actions of specific individuals and organizations, not communities as a whole.
Against that broader backdrop, regulatory and compliance records show that Progressive Health Care Services Inc.was subject to billing and compliance scrutiny in 2019. No publicly available court records show that Osman has been charged or convicted of any crime, and no judgment has established criminal liability against him.
Transparency advocates say the timing of the revelations has intensified attention.
“When a country is about to assume the presidency of the Security Council, unresolved questions about financial disclosures and overlapping roles inevitably draw closer scrutiny,” said a governance expert familiar with UN ethics standards.
Somalia’s assumption of the council presidency will place its UN mission in charge of setting agendas, chairing meetings and representing the Security Council before the wider UN membership.
There was no immediate response from Osman or Somalia’s UN mission to requests for comment.
The United Nations maintains an internal ethics framework governing conflicts of interest among senior officials, though oversight of permanent representatives largely depends on disclosures made by member states themselves.
Observers say the case underscores a broader debate over whether diplomatic status should shield officials from scrutiny when regulated industries and taxpayer-funded programs are involved.
As one X user pointed out, “2026 is off to a great start: Somalia (most corrupt nation on Earth) chairs UN Security Council, WHO run by Ethiopia’s Tedros, WTO by Nigeria’s Okonjo-Iweala. Global governance brought to you by the bottom of the Corruption Index. Time to #DefundTheUN?”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
