Ghost daycares. That’s what we’re dealing with now.
An investigation by The Center Square has uncovered multiple Washington state childcare operations collecting massive taxpayer subsidies — while having no children. Zero. One West Seattle address received over $229,000 in nine months from state coffers. When reporters knocked on the door, the residents said plainly: “There is no daycare here. There never has been.”
Some of these phantom operations were pulling in over $20,000 a month. From taxpayers. For services that didn’t exist. For children who weren’t there:
Many Washington state daycare providers receive large taxpayer subsidies, but an investigation by The Center Square found several that had few, if any, children and at least one establishment that received hundreds of thousands of dollars despite residents at the listed address indicating it was not a daycare.
Yet politicians charged with overseeing the spending continue to publicly say there is no problem with improper payments to the daycares and, instead, have been criticizing journalists for investigating the potential fraud. No state official has announced an investigation or crackdown though the legislature instituted some reforms last session.
Washington state officials’ response wasn’t to investigate. It wasn’t to freeze payments. It wasn’t to demand accountability for a single dollar of the missing money. It was to attack the journalists who exposed it.
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown — another Democrat whose job is literally to protect the public from exactly this kind of fraud — issued a press release encouraging people to report journalists knocking on doors to a hate crimes hotline. A hate crimes hotline. For asking where the taxpayer’s money went:
Attorney General Nick Brown responded by encouraging anyone who would see a reporter “harassing” a daycare provider by knocking on the door, to report it to the hate crimes hotline.
“Showing up on someone’s porch, threatening, or harassing them isn’t an investigation,” noted Brown’s Dec 30, 2025, press release. “Neither is filming minors who may be in the home. This is unsafe and potentially dangerous behavior. I encourage anyone experiencing threats or harassment to either contact local law enforcement or our office’s Hate Crimes & Bias Incident Hotline.”
So now, in the state of Washington, showing up at the door of a business that is collecting public funds and asking legitimate questions about those funds is now being treated as a potential hate crime. The fraudsters get protection. The journalists get threatened. The taxpayers get the bill.
This is not a Washington state original. This is a pattern. Minnesota, California, and now Washington — all deep blue states, all with the same story. Fraudsters identify government childcare subsidy programs, set up fake operations, collect millions in taxpayer money, and count on state officials who are too ideologically committed to the idea of expansive government programs to ever admit those programs are being systematically looted.
The Biden administration’s COVID-era childcare funding expansion turbocharged this problem nationwide — pouring hundreds of billions into subsidy programs with minimal verification requirements, because requiring verification might discourage eligible recipients. The predictable result was an open invitation to every fraudster in America to set up a fake daycare, start collecting checks, and wait to see how long it took anyone to notice.
In Washington, the answer appears to be: a very long time. And when journalists finally did notice and started asking questions, the state’s top law enforcement officer sided with the people cashing the fraudulent checks.
The USDA under the Trump administration has already announced it’s going after states blocking federal fraud verification efforts. Washington should be at the top of that list.
When you take taxpayer money, you answer to the taxpayers. That’s not harassment. That’s accountability. And in a functioning state, the Attorney General would be leading the investigation — not threatening the people conducting one.
