When the topic of Somali daycare fraud arises, Nick Shirley’s independent investigations in the Minneapolis, Minnesota, area are often the first to come to mind. Minnesota has become a hub for this particular type of taxpayer theft, leading some to view it as a localized issue—a problem exclusive to Minnesota. But it’s not.
A reporter with a camera knocked on more than twenty doors in Seattle last week and found something a state agency with subpoena power, licensing authority, and a payroll has not managed to find in years: taxpayer-funded daycares with no children in them.
Katie Daviscourt of the Post Millennial visited addresses registered as Somali-run childcare facilities drawing money from Seattle’s Child Care Assistance Program. At one property — a house that looks less like a daycare than a showpiece — the operator has collected close to $2 million in public funds, running roughly $70,000 a month. She showed up midday. Not a child in sight. Another address pulls about $40,000 a month. A neighbor told her he had known for years it was a scam. Another facility takes in some $30,000 monthly; asked whether it was actually a daycare, a woman on the property declined to answer. At another, a man demanded to know whether the visitors were “Trump people” and told them to leave. Across two neighborhoods, more than $5 million in potentially misused funds.
WATCH:
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: TPM's @KatieDaviscourt investigated Somali home daycares in Seattle. Could there be millions of dollars of potential misuse of taxpayer funds?
When she knocked on doors, often no one answered and if they did they were hostile and defensive. Neighbors say they… pic.twitter.com/ixY5J4aFOU
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) September 21, 2026
Stop and sit with the neighbor’s comment, because it’s the indictment. A guy on the block figured it out years ago from his front window. The agency cutting the checks never did. That’s insane, but really, we know why that happened, don’t we? Democrats come to mind.
That’s not a mystery. It’s a design. Programs like this pay on paperwork. An operator registers an address, submits attendance forms, and the money moves. Nobody drives out to see whether the kids exist. Nobody counts cribs. Verification costs staff time and slows disbursement, and slow disbursement generates angry phone calls, while fraud generates nothing — no complaining customer, no victim who notices. The incentives all point one direction, and the people administering these programs have followed them for years.
We’ve watched this movie already. Minnesota’s Feeding Our Future scandal ran to a quarter-billion dollars in federal money claimed for meals never served, and it was caught by a whistleblower and eventually the FBI — not by the state agency that approved the sites. Minnesota’s own auditor has since walked through how tens of millions more slipped past. Four defendants pleaded guilty this summer to $2.2 million in stolen funds. Each time the pattern is identical: a low-scrutiny reimbursement program, an administrator afraid of being accused of racism, and a scheme that grows until an outsider stumbles onto it.
And each time, the initial reaction from the officials responsible is to attack the person who noticed. When Nick Shirley documented the same thing in Minneapolis, the story wasn’t the missing money — it became all about him. The left and Democrats circled the wagons around the foreign fraudsters and attacked the messenger as a “hater” and “bigot.” Expect the same in deep-blue Seattle. It is much easier to impugn a reporter’s motives than to explain why $70,000 a month went to a house with no children in it.
Here’s the point, and it isn’t complicated. Every dollar stolen from a childcare subsidy is a dollar that never reached a real working mother who needed daycare to keep her job. Democrats defending these programs from scrutiny isn’t compassion. It’s malpractice. It’s criminal.
Audit the rolls. Do unannounced site visits. Match attendance claims to enrollment records. Any program that can’t survive someone knocking on the door shouldn’t be issuing checks.
