WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump's administration announced on Tuesday that it’s freezing child care funds to Minnesota after a series of fraud schemes in recent years.
Acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Jim O’Neill announced on the social platform X that the step is in response to “blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country.”
“We have turned off the money spigot and we are finding
the fraud,” he said.
O’Neill said all payments through the Administration for Children and Families, an agency within the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, will require “justification and a receipt or photo evidence” before money is sent. They have also launched a fraud-reporting hotline and email address, he said.
The announcement comes after years of investigation that began with the $300 million scheme at the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, for which 57 defendants in Minnesota have been convicted. Prosecutors said the organization was at the center of the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud scam, when defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program intended to provide food for children.
A federal prosecutor alleged earlier in December that half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen. Most of the defendants are Somali Americans, they said.
O’Neill also called out a right-wing influencer who had posted a video Friday claiming he found that day care centers operated by Somali residents in Minneapolis had committed up to $100 million in fraud. O’Neill said he has demanded Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz submit an audit of these centers that includes attendance records, licenses, complaints, investigations and inspections.
Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, has said fraud will not be tolerated and his administration “will continue to work with federal partners to ensure fraud is stopped and fraudsters are caught.”
Walz has said an audit due by late January should give a better picture of the extent of the fraud. He said his administration is taking aggressive action to prevent additional fraud. He has long defended how his administration responded.
Minnesota’s most prominent Somali American, Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, has urged people not to blame an entire community for the actions of a relative few.
