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MN Child Care Funds Frozen 12/31 08:21
(AP) - President Donald Trump's administration announced on Tuesday that
it's freezing child care funds to Minnesota and demanding an audit of some day
care centers after a series of fraud schemes involving government programs in
recent years.
Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O'Neill said on the social
platform X that the move is in response to "blatant fraud that appears to be
rampant in Minnesota and across the country."
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pushed back on X, saying fraudsters are a serious
issue that the state has spent years cracking down on but that this move is
part of "Trump's long game."
"He's politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans," Walz
said.
O'Neill referenced a right-wing influencer who 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 Walz submit an audit of these centers that includes attendance
records, licenses, complaints, investigations and inspections.
"We have turned off the money spigot and we are finding the fraud," O'Neill
said.
The announcement comes one day after U.S. Homeland Security officials were
in Minneapolis conducting a fraud investigation by going to unidentified
businesses and questioning workers.
There have been years of investigations that included a $300 million
pandemic food fraud scheme revolving around 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 meant to
provide food for children.
A federal prosecutor alleged earlier this month 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 in the child nutrition,
housing services and autism program schemes are Somali Americans, according to
the U.S. Attorney's Office for Minnesota.
O'Neill, who is serving as acting director of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, also said in the social media post Tuesday that
payments across the U.S. through the Administration for Children and Families,
an agency within the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, will now
require "justification and a receipt or photo evidence" before money is sent.
They have also launched a fraud-reporting hotline and email address.
The Administration for Children and Families provides $185 million in child
care funds annually to Minnesota, according to Assistant Secretary Alex Adams.
"That money should be helping 19,000 American children, including toddlers
and infants," he said in a video posted on X. "Any dollar stolen by fraudsters
is stolen from those children."
Adams said he spoke Monday with the director of Minnesota's child care
services office and she wasn't able to say "with confidence whether those
allegations of fraud are isolated or whether there's fraud stretching
statewide."
Trump has criticized Walz's administration over the fraud cases,
capitalizing on them to target the Somalia diaspora in the state, which has the
largest Somali population in the U.S.
Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, 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.
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