HHS Freezes Child Care Payments to Minnesota Amid Daycare Fraud Allegations
“I have activated our defend the spend system for all ACF child care payments across America, starting today, we require a justification, receipt or photo evidence before we make a payment.”
Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill announced the agency has paused child care payments in Minnesota due to alleged child daycare fraud.
Over the weekend, YouTuber Nick Shirley exposed the “Quality Lear[n]ing Center,” which has a license to have 99 children and receives millions of taxpayer money.
The video showed that the daycare, along with other facilities, is not operating, yet they receive so much money!
We have frozen all child care payments to the state of Minnesota.
You have probably read the serious allegations that the state of Minnesota has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to fraudulent daycares across Minnesota over the past decade.
Today we have taken three actions against the blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country:
1. I have activated our defend the spend system for all ACF payments. Starting today, all ACF payments across America will require a justification and a receipt or photo evidence before we send money to a state.
2. Alex Adams and I have identified the individuals in @nickshirleyy’s excellent work. I have demanded from @GovTimWalz a comprehensive audit of these centers. This includes attendance records, licenses, complaints, investigations, and inspections.
3. We have launched a dedicated fraud-reporting hotline and email address at https://childcare.gov Whether you are a parent, provider, or member of the general public, we want to hear from you.
We have turned off the money spigot and we are finding the fraud.
@ACFHHS @HHSGov
We have frozen all child care payments to the state of Minnesota.
You have probably read the serious allegations that the state of Minnesota has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to fraudulent daycares across Minnesota over the past decade.
Today we have taken three actions…
— Deputy Secretary Jim O'Neill (@HHS_Jim) December 30, 2025
O’Neill and Assistant Secretary Alex Adams went into more detail:
O’NEILL: I’m HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill, I’m here with Assistant Secretary Alex Adams. Alex oversees the Administration for Children and Families. Intrepid journalists have made shocking and credible allegations of extensive fraud in Minnesota’s child care programs. We believe the state of Minnesota has allowed scammers and fake day cares to siphon millions of taxpayer dollars over the past decade.
ADAMS: My office, ACF, provides Minnesota $185 million in child care funds each year. That money should be helping 19,000 American children, including toddlers and infants. Any dollar stolen by fraudsters is stolen from those children. Yesterday, I spoke directly with the Director of the Minnesota Child Care Services office. She could not tell me with confidence whether those allegations of fraud are isolated or whether there’s fraud stretching statewide.
O’NEILL: Today, we have taken three direct actions against the blatant fraud that seems to be rampant in Minnesota. First, I have activated our defend the spend system for all ACF child care payments across America, starting today, we require a justification, receipt or photo evidence before we make a payment. Second, I have just signed and sent a demand letter to Governor Walz. I required a full 360 review of these centers. This includes attendance records, licenses, complaints, investigations and inspections.
ADAMS: And third, we’ve launched a dedicated fraud reporting hotline and email [email protected] whether you’re a parent, a provider, a member of the public, we want to hear from you. Let me be crystal clear. ACF expects every state to uphold the highest standards of oversight, monitoring and accountability for federal dollars. Minnesota is no exception.
O’NEILL: We’re committed to holding bad actors accountable, regardless of rank or office, anyone who’s involved in perpetrating this fraud against the American people should expect to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law produced by the US Department.
Minnesota’s Child Care and Development Fund received $172 million from the federal government in 2024.
At the Quality Learing Center, a protester confronted Shirley, who fired back with facts.
The protester tried to shut down questioning, but Shirley revealed that the place teaches 99 children and has received $4 million in funding over the last two years.
Another daycare had a license for 102 children. It took in $2.66 million this year and $2.5 million last year.
But like The Quality Learing Center, the place is empty.
🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable
We ALL… pic.twitter.com/E3Penx2o7a
— Nick shirley (@nickshirleyy) December 26, 2025
DHS put boots on the ground in Minnesota on Monday to investigate over 30 sites suspected of fraud.
A person told CBS News that the investigations include a “little bit of everything,” including immigration enforcement.
FBI Director Kash Patel already said the arrests connected to the “Feeding Our Future” fraud and Medicaid fraud are the “tip of the iceberg.”
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Lets be sure to bring in the lovely folks from IRS to go along with FBI, HHS auditors, ICE.
I believe I read that Treasury was involved.
I am sure that these government agencies will send out sternly worded letters demanding accountability. This will be followed by years of ignoring requests for documents, ignoring subpoenas, and long periods of silence.
Then, when alleged defendants finally make it to court, a Democrat judge (yes, John Roberts, there ARE Obama, Clinton, and Biden judges) will quickly shut the charges down. If they can’t, a jury of their political peers will find them not guilty.
Due Process (insert air finger quotes) is important, doncha know!
But not for J6 defendants.
That’s very darkly cynical. Let me offer an equally dark but upbeat (from my point of view) alternative to cheer you up. Once convicted and accounts/assets seized and sold to start reimbursement if the total found is short of what was fraudulently stolen then sentence them to restitution. IOW use the 13A exception for slavery of those ‘duly convicted’ and put them to work at roadside brothel in Nevada servicing the glory hole at $5 a go until they pay it off.
“Once convicted”
Say what?
Comey: Judge disqualified, state of limitations hit.
Letitia: Judge disqualified.
Smith: Heaven knows why he’s not in the docket but he isn’t.
There’s a lending library full of teflon armor for these people.
Yes, though I’m not convinced a bunch of imported Aliens tribes/clans running a series of frauds on the taxpayers have the same armor nor that these insular groups haven’t stepped on enough toes to pierce their poor, downtrodden refuge community shtick enough to cancel their ‘get of jail free card’.
I hate to say it, but I share your fears. The Dem’s have placed hundreds of political activists on state and federal courts. To them, the judiciary is another means to achieve political ends. And a huge percentage of our population today appears to see it the same way. The media talks about liberal vs conservative judges, when the real, and important, distinction is between political activists and true jurists (who try to interpret and apply the law as intended by its creators). We are beginning to witness grand and trial juries decide cases on the basis of political preferences rather than on the law and the facts. We were asleep while the progressives/Marxists captured academia, including many law schools’ faculties and administrations. I knew we were in trouble about 30 years ago when I read that Yale Law School sought to teach its students how to use the law to achieve preferred societal goals.
Again why is the federal government paying for childcare,!?!?!?! I won’t repeat all the arguments I made on the article about HUD but it amounts to the same thing.
I’m worried that I’m not going to have enough money to see me through. If taxes had been lower (and there wasn’t a H1B visa program to depress salaries) I would have saved more, I know what will happen to me if I run out of money and since I’m in a hated group it won’t be at all pretty.
Again, get rid of these programs than funnel billions to ungrateful people who won’t provide for themselves and the grifters who leach off these programs.
Two thoughts: (1) no taxpayer money should ever be spent on illegal aliens (except to find and deport them); and (2) government welfare programs have created mainly sorrow, by encouraging procreation outside of marriage and thereby leading to fatherless children who experience little happiness and too often inflict pain and loss on other, innocent people. Local charities are a much better means to assist the truly unfortunate among us, because their work does not encourage bad behavior, and they are able to identify and assist those who genuinely deserve assistance.
To think we used to have a media who did this s*t so people like you and I and Nick wouldn’t have to,
The media would be on it like white on rice if it were hordes of Afrikaners engaging in daycare/healthcare fraud at just 1/10th the level of the Somali scammers.
You can watch CNN, ABC, NBC, etc. all day and see no mention of the MN fraud situation. Therefore, it didn’t happen.
MN fraud has been a “thing” for over a decade. Crickets at CNN.
Nick Shirley does ONE amateur video, causes national viral sensation.
CNN reaction: “Who is Nick Shirley?”
Once again: The fraud isn’t the news — Republicans pouncing on the fraud is the news.
The argument for not having the federal government pay for things like daycare and poverty programs makes sense, because of the cost of the federal bureaucracy. It would be more efficient if tax money wasn’t laundered through the feds and then sent back to the states. But, if you’re going to institute such programs from the federal government, the only method that makes sense is to block grant money to the states in proportion to the number of citizens in the state. So, if 2% of the 300 million citizens across the country need food assistance, and that costs $10K/year per person, then each state gets a proportional amount of the $60B program. Minnesota would get roughly 1.8% of the money based on the citizen population, or $1.08B/year. States with higher poverty levels would be incented to improve the plight of their citizens whereas states with low poverty rates can spend the money to improve their roads or to pay higher teacher salaries. You can’t administer a program from the feds with seemingly unlimited sums of money and expect there not to be rampant fraud.
But you are forgetting that these programs that run taxpayer money through the federal, then state bureaucracy, are employment programs for mostly Democrat and Marxist adherents.
Without these programs, where would these people find jobs?
/s
And of course any cuts to public sector workforce show up as ‘bad news’ due to increasing unemployment just as cuts to gov’t spending show up in a reduction to GDP.
Expect to see more legacy media/corporate media narratives in their economic ‘reporting’ that spin reduction in gov’t spending and reducing govt workforce as negative on an economic basis.
I feel like this should have been step one until Minnesota actually stops the fraud ; no federal money. It’s really only card the feds can play that will have any impact on the state actually doing their job.
Cue a district court judge in 3…2…1
It isn’t just Minnesota. Some of the actions taken by HHS apply Nationwide in particular the tip line and the no payment without showing HHS proof. Every State is gonna have to get ready to be ‘probed’ and hopefully the Feds adopt the philosophy of the poet ICE Cube when dealing with financial betrayal; ‘No Vaseline’.
should be helping 19,000 American children
I will bet you that some large portion of those 19,000 don’t exist. Lefties have been lying for years about just how many children (and others) are actually in need. All this fraud wouldn’t have helped anyone, anyway, because those needy children do not exist.
They use the Hamas body count techniques.
They use the planned parenthood body count method.
Oh good, so tomorrow morning around 9 am they will already have a leftist hack in a robe declare that they can’t stop a single dime of payments.
its a start
while the djt feds do the right thing and freeze the monies
san fran:
The mayor of San Francisco discreetly approved a bill to create a fund that may eventually grant each of the city’s eligible black residents $5 million in reparations.
Mayor Daniel Lurie quietly signed the incredibly divisive Reparations Bill just two days before Christmas.
The ordinance establishes a Reparations Fund, as recommended by the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC) in its 2023 report.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15423337/San-Francisco-mayor-sneaks-reparations-bill-just-Christmas-black-resident-city-5-MILLION-taxpayer-cash.html
They can figure out a way to pay for it. I would say “Let them eat cake,” but these morons won’t be able to afford flour and sugar.
.
it will be monies obtained via other states taxes
If the Mary Tyler Moore show were filmed today, Mary would toss her hijab into the air during the opening credits, only to be stoned to death as an infidel whore before it hit the ground.
Your comment is underappreciated,
“…starting today, we require a justification, receipt or photo evidence before we make a payment.”
Starting today.
Jesus H. Christ.
‘A journey of a thousand miles….’ The good news is we’ve gotten widespread acceptance that the good old days of a high trust society where the honor system and conscientious public employees who could be mostly relied upon to act as stewards for tax dollars are gone. Hopefully the drip,drip nature of the multiple lines of fraud and malfeasance across such a large number of States and federally funded programs will push more folks to recognize the problem and what it means for elections. See Fulton Co GA finally admitting that they didn’t follow election law to keep chain of custody on 315K 2020 early ballots.
“Learing Center” If there had been actual children there, it might have been a leering center.
The spelling on the sign was corrected.
Warning MAGA ECHO CHAMBER
My my my… someone sure thinks he’s biting and clever…. Lol pathetic 🤡
The ayotollah Omar must be brought to justice
A former Minneapolis police officer who fatally shot an unarmed woman who called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in the alley behind her home was released from prison on parole Monday, months after his murder conviction was overturned and he was resentenced on a lesser charge.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ex-minneapolis-police-officer-mohamed-noor-released-prison-fatally-sho-rcna35527
When does Chauvin get his turn?
Leave a Comment