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Trump freezes $10 billion in childcare social services funds for five blue states

January 6, 2026 | | Print Article

The Trump administration announced on Monday that it’s slashed $10 billion worth of social services grants to a handful of blue states because of all the welfare fraud that’s been uncovered.

Administration officials told the New York Post that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has frozen $10 billion in grants meant for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York.

The targeted grants came from the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF, $2.4 billion), the Social Services Block Grant ($869 million), and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) ($7.35 billion) program, according to the Post.

The freezing of the grants triggered immediate outrage from the left, with Josh McCabe of the Niskanen Center leading the charge:

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand followed up with a stern statement.

“To use the power of the government to harm the neediest Americans is immoral and indefensible,” she said. “This has nothing to do with fraud and everything to do with political retribution that punishes poor children in need of assistance. I demand that President Trump unfreeze this funding and stop this brazen attack on our children.”

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All this comes weeks after HHS sent letters last month to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob asking whether the billions they were forking over in welfare to immigrants were helping to unlawfully “fuel illegal and mass migration.”

Alex Adams, the assistant secretary of HHS’ Administration for Children and Families (ACF), defended this concern at the time by pointing to the interests of American taxpayers.

“American taxpayers generally fund these programs. We’re trying to get data from them that will help give us confidence that there’s not fraud,” he said.

He added that he had “legitimate reason to think that they’ve been using taxpayer dollars incorrectly.”

Indeed, in recent weeks, numerous cases of fraud in Minnesota have been uncovered, including fraud tied to the state’s assisted living program.

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Writing for City Journal, journalists Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo uncovered fraud tied to the state’s Feeding Our Future program as well.

“Using fake meal counts, doctored attendance records, and fabricated invoices, the perpetrators of the fraud ring [tied to Feeding Our Future] claimed to be serving thousands of meals a day, seven days a week, to underprivileged children,” Thorpe and Rufo reported. “In 2021, Feeding Our Future received nearly $200 million in funding.”

The pair also uncovered plenty of other fraud — all of it being committed by Somalis in Minnesota. For instance, the fraud also included Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program for children with autism.

The chief suspect, Somali woman Asha Farhan Hassan, “approached parents in the Somali community” and recruited their kids into autism therapy services regardless of whether the kids actually had the disorder.

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In a press release announcing Hassan’s indictment months earlier, then-acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Joe Thompson wrote that she and her partners had “paid monthly cash kickback payments to the parents of children who enrolled.”

“These kickback payments ranged from approximately $300 to $1500 per month, per child,” the press release continued. “The amount of these payments was contingent on the services DHS authorized a child to receive—the higher the authorization amount, the higher the kickback. Often, parents threatened to leave… and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks.”

Thompson noted in another press release that all these schemes — which, by the way, occurred under Gov. Walz — weren’t isolated.

“From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” he said.

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Vivek Saxena
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