Children sleep during nap time at Minnesota Child Care in Minneapolis, one of the centers featured in a recent viral video. | Renee Jones Schneider/Star Tribune/Getty Images

The video was designed to grab attention.

Posted the day after Christmas, it shows right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley exposing what he says are a series of fraudulent day care centers in Minnesota. He rings doorbells, pulls on doors, and sometimes claims to be a parent hoping to register his child, “Little Joey.” When he’s not admitted, he claims the centers are fake, with no children inside. All the while, a ticker at the bottom of the screen tallies up millions of dollars in alleged graft.

“When I look at the world as a whole, and I look at fraud, the Twin Cities is ground zero,” one of Shirley’s associates said at one point. “The fraud is worse here than anywhere else ever in history.”

The video does not actually provide direct evidence of fraud. State investigators visited the centers Shirley highlighted and found children at all but one, which was not yet open for families. But Shirley’s purported exposé, viewed over 3 million times, has started a wave of outrage among right-wing lawmakers already focused on allegations of social services fraud in Somali immigrant communities in Minnesota.

Now, the Trump administration has announced a freeze on federal child care funding to five blue states, including Minnesota, along with increased reporting requirements for all states. Providers around the country fear they may have to close their doors and lay off staff, and parents are worried about how their lives might be upended if they lose child care.

“Having disruptions like this is really counterproductive for children, for parents who are trying to go to work, and for the really underpaid, and stressed, and strained child care workforce,” said Amy Matsui, vice president of child care and income security at the National Women’s Law Center.

How did unsubstantiated claims of child care fraud go from a YouTube video to influencing federal policy in a matter of days? The answer lies at the intersection of actual pandemic-era fraud cases, a right-wing media ecosystem eager for anti-immigrant content, and a longstanding conservative antipathy toward subsidized day care. But the politics of early childhood in America are also changing, and the White House response to Shirley’s video could create blowback that the Trump administration didn’t anticipate.

Minnesota’s welfare fraud scandal, explained

The current controversy over child care centers in Minnesota has its roots in 2022, when federal prosecutors charged 47 people with fraudulently siphoning funds from a state program meant to feed hungry children during the pandemic. The scandal soon expanded to include providers charged with fraudulently billing the state for housing........

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