President Donald Trump’s administration announced Tuesday that it is freezing Minnesota’s child care funds after a series of fraudulent schemes in recent years.

Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Jim O’Neill said on the social platform

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz responded in an article on

“He is politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans,” Walz said.

O’Neil called out a right-wing influencer who posted a video Friday claiming to have discovered that daycares run by Somali residents in Minneapolis committed as much as $100 million in fraud. O’Neill said he asked Walz to submit an audit of those centers including attendance records, licenses, complaints, investigations and inspections.

“We turned off the money spigot and we discovered the fraud,” O’Neill said.

The announcement comes a day after U.S. Homeland Security officials traveled to Minneapolis to conduct a fraud investigation by visiting unidentified businesses and interviewing workers.

There have been years of fraud investigations that began with the nonprofit Feeding Our Future’s $300 million scheme, for which 57 Minnesota defendants were convicted. Prosecutors said the organization was at the center of the nation’s largest COVID-19 scam, when defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program intended to provide food to children.

A federal prosecutor alleged earlier in December that half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that have supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen. Most of the defendants are Somali Americans, they said.

O’Neill, who is acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also said in a social media post Tuesday that payments across the United States through the Administration for Children and Families, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, will now require “justification and a receipt or photographic proof” before the money is sent. They also launched a hotline and email address to report fraud, he said.

The Administration for Children and Families provides $185 million in child care funds to Minnesota each year, according to Deputy Secretary Alex Adams.

“This money is expected to help 19,000 American children, including toddlers and infants,” he said in a video posted on X. “Any dollars stolen by the scammers are stolen from these children.”

Adams said he spoke with the director of Minnesota’s Office of Child Care on Monday and she was unable to say “with certainty whether these allegations of fraud are isolated or whether the fraud is statewide.”

Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, said fraud would not be tolerated and his administration “will continue to work with our federal partners to ensure fraud is stopped and fraudsters are arrested.”

Walz said an audit scheduled for late January should give a better idea of ​​the extent of the fraud. He said his administration was taking aggressive steps to prevent further fraud. He has long defended his administration’s response.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, Minnesota’s most prominent Somali American, urged people not to blame an entire community for the actions of a few.