Minnesota Day Care Scandal: A Wonksplainer

Short version, it's a day that ends in 'Y', and is more Trump horse hockey!

Minnesota students, parents and teachers protesting cuts to childcare in March

If you’re like us, over the past few days you’ve scrolled past stories about Somalis being accused of day care fraud in Minnesota like not today, Satan. But now Trump has frozen all federal childcare funding to every single state over allegations of fraud at child care and autism centers in the state, and sent Homeland Security and the FBI to crawl all over Minnesota looking for fraud. Guess we had better Wonkvestigiate!

First off, just as the takeover of Washington DC was putatively predicated on the robbery of Big Balls there, Trump was obviously already planning this all along. It was foretold starting on page 476 of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, which cites Head Start, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), childcare assistance, and anything that prevents teen pregnancy or helps low-income mothers not stay home as social ills.

Because in such programs, “Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities.” Any funding that is going to child care, says the Mandate, should go instead to promoting the rhythm method for birth control, and promoting women staying home. And teen pregnancy prevention, all that does is “promote sex, promote prostitution, or provide a funnel effect for abortion facilities.”

The fact that these people are so damn enthusiastic about teenagers being forced into motherhood by any means necessary sure does look extra super creepy next to all of those Epstein files! Guess Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene are the only two Republicans on the planet who aren’t pedophile apologists. And even Greene was BFFs with Matt Gaetz, for shit’s sake!

We digress. Within months of retaking office, Trump DOGE’d Head Start, until a judge told him in September that he can’t do that. And in July, Secretary of Health and Human Services Bobby Brainworm Junior announced all undocumented immigrant children would be banned from the program.

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SEE ALSO:

Sorry They're Eliminating Your Toddlers' Head Start, Rural Trumpers (And Everyone Else's Too)

Then They Came For The Head Start Kids, And We Said F*ck You, No Kid Is 'Illegal'

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During the 40-day government shutdown, the regime also cut off federal funding for childcare, even though emergency funding could have been used for it. But Head Start and preschool programs are also wildly popular. Nearly 80 percent of voters support Head Start, including 74 percent of Republicans. Even Ronald Reagan was a huge fan! What to do?

Seems the plan is, just as it was with DOGE, to attack childcare by crying FRAUD. With a side of collective punishment and scapegoating an immigrant minority, as he is known to enjoy.

The flimsy excuse this time is a video made by Nick Shirley, a 23-year-old YouTube “independent journalist” with an anti-immigrant history. Shirley was at the Capitol on January 6 too, and once visited Kyiv to make pro-Russia propaganda videos about Ukraine stealing the US’s money and buying sports cars with it, which he later claimed was “satire.”

And so Shirley, at the direction of Minnesota Republicans, recorded himself and a friend going around to different Somali-owned day care centers in Minnesota screaming “WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN?!”

Not pictured, a posse of masked goons behind him.

Shirley then pretended to be scandalized that the daycare centers would not allow some random screaming man in their doors.

Watch if you want:

And the vice president of the United States, who is somehow JD Vance, retweeted the video with, “This dude has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 @pulitzercenter prizes.”

This latest fraud conspiracy theory sure hits MAGA’s favorite sweet spots: Tim Walz, who has long advocated for making daycare and pre-K more available and affordable, plus immigrants, and also the prostitution whores who put their children in daycare so they can go out and prostitute some more, whorishly. And Somalis in Minnesota in particular! Trump and the Right have nonstop targeted Rep. Ilhan Omar with racist slurs and gross incest insinuations for years. And autism centers are being closed down also. So many of the regime’s birds with one stone!

Predictably, now Minnesota’s daycare centers are being harassed and vandalized. Won’t anybody think about the children?! A center featured on Shirley’s video, which actually really does care for children, even had its brick wall to the outside smashed in, and was ransacked. And what do you know, turns out none of the day care operators featured in Shirley’s video have been charged with fraud. (We will get to the fraud.) Zero.

Nevertheless, Trump ranted racistly yesterday on TruthSocial:

Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90%, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia. “Congresswoman” Omar, an ungrateful loser who only complains and never contributes, is one of the many scammers. Did she really marry her brother? Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness. Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!

A scammer who only complains and never contributes! That man projects so strongly it makes you wonder if he ever married his own brother.

And of course any mud Republicans can sling at Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, they’ll grab. Walz is up for re-election as governor this year, and the prospect of a Vance/Walz re-match in ‘28 surely chills Republican nuggets.

So now all childcare funds are frozen everywhere while the regime investigates “fraud.” And Kelly Loeffler announced on X that ALL small business funds to Minnesota are being frozen, too. The old DOGE-style Grinch taking the entire Christmas tree to fix one light again.

There is quite likely some actual fraud in Minnesota, though the $9 billion Trump is claiming, with no evidence at all (of course), seems a bit overblown. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) during COVID pushed out billions in funds to small businesses, with an emphasis on speed over any kind of prior diligence, leading to an estimated $300 billion in fraudulent payments nationwide. That was A TRUMP PROGRAM, by the way.

But also Minnesota was already on it, and had been investigating such frauds going as far back as 2019, as in from the get-go, and the state had already uncovered $218 million in alleged fraud. And in January the state already had 62 investigations underway of other frauds locals had been suspecting of doing with federal money.

And last March, Aimee Bock and Salim Said, a white woman and Somali-American man, were convicted in federal court for running a scam charity called Feeding Our Future that was supposed to turn federal funds into food to needy children and didn’t, which recruited mostly Somali immigrants as accomplices to do scams along the lines of the one former North Carolina Republican candidate for governor Mark Robinson and his wife Yolanda were allegedly running with that dirty daycare center with no books or toys they had.

Also in March, Tim Walz sent a fraud prevention bill to the Minnesota House, but the Republicans there promptly blocked it.

And Walz took other steps to try to deal with the fraud Trump engendered with his quick rollout of COVID checks. Walz appointed one Tim O’Malley as head of program integrity to ferret out fraud in the state all day long. He created a fraud investigative unit in Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and he hired outside auditors to go through the state’s books looking for any suspicious activity.

And when it came to Feeding Our Future, 76 other people also got indicted in connection with the scam, after the Minnesota Department of Education passed along tips to the FBI. But the FBI specifically told state authorities not to investigate, because the FBI was already investigating. Makes sense that federal programs being defrauded of federal money is a federal law-enforcement issue! And in July, the FBI raided five businesses in the Twin Cities which had allegedly committed Medicaid housing assistance fraud, and began investigating autism centers there.

So, what more could Tim Walz and the Democrats in Minnesota have possibly done that they did not do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tim Walz knows what’s up. It’s not like Trump is ever subtle.

Not to mention that Trump is an adjudicated fraudster his own self! One more sack of crap to throw on the pile of his eternal flame of bullshit.

And that is all we have to say about that.

[Common Dreams / Minnesota Star Tribune]