Child care providers and Minnesota Democrats gathered Wednesday to warn that an estimated 20,000 children could be affected by the federal child care funding freeze announced Tuesday.
The press conference was arranged after U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said the federal government has frozen all child care payments to Minnesota after claims of child care center fraud resurfaced over the weekend.
Gov. Tim Walz responded Tuesday on X, saying President Donald Trump is “politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.”
Amanda Schillinger, director of Pumpkin Patch Childcare & Learning Center in Burnsville, said Wednesday that more than 20,000 children in more than 4,000 programs across the state could be affected by the freeze.
“Their families will not be able to go to work because they don’t have child care; our child care center and others like us will have to close our doors. Seventy-five percent of the children in our program qualify through the state for child care funding,” she said. “We can’t afford to continue to operate if we lose 75% of our enrollment without child care assistance funding. Our center will close within a month.”
Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn, DFL-Eden Prairie. (Courtesy of the candidate)
Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn, DFL-Eden Prairie, co-chair of the House Children and Families Committee, said Wednesday that she takes fraud seriously and is “working every day to improve our systems, hold those criminals accountable and move our state forward.”
“That’s why it’s incredibly frustrating to me that Donald Trump and Republicans want to use this as a political vehicle to cut funding entirely to our state,” she said. “It’s irresponsible at best, and it’s despicable at worst, to cast blanket dispersions on those caring for our littlest Minnesotans, particularly those of Somali American descent. Imagine if a few people stole food from one of the nation’s largest grocers, and instead of strengthening their safeguards, they just decided to stop selling food entirely.”
Maria Snider, a St. Paul child care center director with 15 years of experience with child care assistance, said there are randomized audits to check for fraud “all the time.”
“They come. They ask you for your attendance records. It is extremely detailed. Any information that you don’t provide to them on that day, you cannot go back and say, ’Oh wait, I forgot this one,’ or, ’Oh, maybe this one was wrong. Can I correct it?’ There’s no room for that. They’re looking at very detailed things, like, for example, if you have an ’x’ instead of an ’A’ for absent, that’s considered a ding against you, that’s something that they’ll write you a letter that says, ’This is a citation for suspected fraud for an ’x’ instead of an ’A.’ So imagine my surprise at this narrative that it’s so easy to scam child care assistance,” she said.
Attorney General Keith Ellison said his office is “exploring all our legal options to ensure that critical child care services do not get abruptly slashed based on pretext and grandstanding.”
“This hasty scorched earth attack is not just wrong, it may well be illegal, and my team and I remain committed to protecting the people of Minnesota to the fullest extent of the law,” the Wednesday statement said.
The federal freeze comes after Nick Shirley, a right-wing YouTuber, posted a video Friday alleging millions of dollars of fraud at some of Minnesota’s day care centers. The video has received millions of views on his YouTube channel and X account.
State officials have responded to the claims in Shirley’s video, saying on-site visits have been conducted and children were seen at the centers, and that investigations into some of the centers have not uncovered any fraud.
“It’s my understanding that some of these more recent allegations of fraud are based on the idea that there aren’t any children in these centers and that there are falsifying attendance records to gather taxpayer dollars for children who aren’t actually attending the program, but when DCYF (Minnesota Department of Youth Children and Families) investigators go and check on health and safety visits, they usually see children at the center,” Kotyza-Witthuhn said Wednesday.
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At a press conference Monday, Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, said her caucus has been “working to expose fraud for years, including working with Nick Shirley and agency whistleblowers to get the information out to the public.”
In a statement from a House GOP spokesperson on Wednesday, the caucus provided some clarification about its involvement with Shirley for his video.
“Some of the information they used, including day care locations, (Child Care Assistance Program numbers), violations, etc., came from caucus staff who found it in the official DHS licensing database and other publicly available sources,” the spokesperson said.
