Minnesota Daycare Subsidy Bombshell Follows Federal Raids
Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program, or CCAP, paid more than $67 million in public childcare subsidies over the past eight years to nine daycare providers, according to a review of state records by KSTP. Several of those providers were confirmed to have been raided by federal authorities last week.
The numbers have raised new questions, but there is still no public charge sheet and no clear answer yet on how much, if any, of the spending could be tied to fraud. Even so, the state data is hard to ignore. In the last two publicly available years, payments to those nine centers more than doubled, climbing from about $8 million in 2023 to more than $16 million in 2025. During that same stretch, the number of children served stayed steady.
That kind of growth has pushed the issue into the spotlight. Former state lawmaker Phil Krinkie, who is also a small business owner and a member of the Taxpayer League of Minnesota, told KSTP, “I think voters are very frustrated with the entire situation. I don’t think it’s Republican or Democrat — they’re just frustrated,”
The political fight around the program is already heating up. The Minnesota House Republican Caucus said on X, “Just last week, Democrats killed a bill to increase oversight and fraud penalties for child care providers receiving high amounts of CCAP funding, like these nine providers,”
Federal agents issued 22 search warrants at day care and autism centers in Minnesota last week, but officials have not publicly detailed every location involved. Fox News Digital reached out to the FBI, the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families. Only HHS replied, saying, “ACF does not comment on ongoing litigation.”
Former Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson said the size of the warrants suggests investigators are trying to figure out whether public services were actually delivered. She told KSTP, “Whether it’s a business, a school, a nonprofit — if something grows that much, you know, makes sense to ask why is it growing that much and how could it grow so fast,”
She added, “These are federally and state-funded programs,” and then spelled out the main issue plainly: “The question is, ‘were services billed to the government that weren’t rendered?’”
CCAP is meant to help families who cannot afford childcare. It is run through Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families, which also supplied the data KSTP reviewed. Fox News Digital said it reached out to the agency for comment and more details, but did not get a response in time for publication.
According to KSTP, the agency also did not respond to the outlet’s records request, forcing the news organization to go through state Rep. Kristin Robbins, who chairs the House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee. Robbins made the same request and received records, documents, and data from DCYF.