Trump Threatens Child Care Funding Across the US After Bogus Social Media Claim

The Trump administration has reportedly frozen federal child care subsidies for every state in the U.S. after a right-wing social media influencer made a debunked video purporting to show fraud in Somali-run daycares in Minnesota this week.

On Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Jim O’Neill said that the agency had frozen all child care payments to Minnesota following the spread of a social media video claiming, with dubious evidence, to have uncovered over $100 million of child care fraud in the state.

Later, reports emerged saying that the administration was freezing funding for all states until they can provide supposed verification regarding their child care programs. One outlet, Reuters, reported that one official said that no funds had been frozen, however, and that the administration was only initiating probes into fraud in Minnesota.

Federal child care subsidies fund care for 1.4 million children across the country, with over half of children receiving subsidies aged less than five years old, according to HHS’s Office of Child Care. The reported cuts come at a time when families are already facing massive shortages and an affordability crisis of child care in the U.S.

The reports came after a video by a 23-year-old right-wing influencer, Nick Shirley, circulated social media this week. In the video, Shirley visits a dozen Somali-run child care centers with a man identified only as David, knocking on their doors and demanding to see the children.

The centers refused to let them inside for reasons many commentators attributed to the safety of the children, but the men nonetheless took it as proof that the centers are fraudulent.

The video was debunked by reporters, including local news outlet WCCO. WCCO visited one of the facilities that Shirley went to for his video and claimed was empty, and instead found that there were over a dozen children there, as well as several adult staff members. Further, workers shared surveillance footage from the morning of Shirley’s visit that showed children being dropped off at the facility for a normal day of child care.

Later, children were entering one of the child care facilities that Shirley claimed was empty in a CNN interview filmed with him outside.

Other cases were also debunked by reporters, and WCCO found that the licenses were active for 10 of the 12 facilities Shirley visited. In one case, WCCO found that Shirley had simply visited a facility while it was closed.

Nonetheless, one of the other facilities visited by Shirley reported that it faced vandalism early Tuesday morning as the result of the video.

O’Neill, who is also acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), praised Shirley’s work in his post announcing the freeze, and Vice President JD Vance said that Shirley had done “far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 [Pulitzer Prizes].”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) criticized the administration’s move, saying that defunding child care has always been the goal. “This is Trump’s long game. We’ve spent years cracking down on fraudsters. It’s a serious issue — but this has been his plan all along,” Walz said in a post on social media. “He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.”