Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has sharply criticized the Trump administration Tuesday over its decision to pause federal child care funds to the state after an influencer’s video went viral alleging widespread fraud there in government programs.
“This is Trump’s long game,” Walz, who was on the Democratic ticket against Trump in 2024, wrote on X. “We’ve spent years cracking down on fraudsters. It’s a serious issue – but this has been his plan all along. He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.”
The comments came as the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was freezing child care payments to the state.
In a post on X, HHS credited the stop to allegations from a video by right-wing content creator Nick Shirley, which claimed daycare centers run by people of Somali descent in Minnesota are responsible for “potentially the largest fraud scandal in U.S. history.”
In the video, which state Republican leadership said they assisted in creating, Shirley travels to what he says are empty centers where he claims fraud is taking place, though it’s unclear when in the week Shirley was visiting the facilities, and some observers in the state say the video is not well-evidenced enough to be considered accurate factual reporting.
State officials say all the centers in the video have been visited in the past six months and fraud was not discovered.
The manager of one of the centers in the video told the Minnesota StarTribune that while children are not visible from the outside, they were in fact present when Shirley visited, but that doors to the center are locked for safety.
Despite these caveats, Republicans have quickly latched onto the claims in the video, folding them into the president and the MAGA movement’s regular demonization of Somali people and immigrant communities at large.
Vice President JD Vance claimed in an X post last week that immigrants were “stealing both money and political power from Minnesotans,” while GOP Majority Whip Tom Emmer has called for the denaturalization of Somalis engaged in fraud.
Federal agencies including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have also begun investigating allegations tied to the video.
State officials have been cracking down on government program fraud in Minnesota for years, and 57 people have been convicted as part of the $300 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme, which came to prominence in 2022.
In an op-ed earlier this month, Walz said the state had implemented “systematic changes” in recent years, including replacing state leaders, sending individuals to jail, hiring a former state police chief and FBI agent to oversee program integrity, and bringing in an outside firm to audit payments.
“What is not helpful is the president of the United States demonizing an entire community or pardoning someone single-handedly responsible for $1.6 billion in fraud,” Walz wrote in the StarTribune, a reference to Trump’s recent commutation of private equity executive David Gentile’s prison sentence.
“If there were a silver bullet to solve this issue, we wouldn’t be seeing similar issues in these federal Medicaid programs in red and blue states across the country — including multi-million-dollar fraud schemes in Ohio, Arizona, Nebraska, Texas and Pennsylvania,” he added.
In response to Walz’s comments, a White House social media account called Walz a slur for developmentally disabled people.
Federal officials have said there’s even more wide-ranging fraud afoot in Minnesota.
This month, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, who is leading an ongoing series of fraud cases, suggested that social services fraud across 14 federally supported programs in Minnesota could top $9 billion. The governor’s office has called this “speculating” and “sensationalism,” given that the cases in question include about $11.6 million in alleged fraud.
Prior to the Minnesota video going viral, the Trump administration has cracked down on Minnesota’s Somali population, the largest in the country.
The Treasury Department is investigating business people use to wire money to family members in the country, after a report from a conservative news outlet alleged such funds support militant groups.
Trump has called for immigrants from Somalia — including his longtime critic Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar — to “be thrown the hell out” of the U.S., alleging they have “destroyed our country.”
