During the State of the Union address, President Trump announced a “war on fraud” initiative, citing the scandal surrounding Somali-run daycares in Minnesota. But other states deserve scrutiny too.
Specifically, National Review looked into daycare programs in Washington State and found that Somalis are vastly overrepresented in childcare services relative to their share of the population. While this doesn’t necessarily indicate malfeasance, a deeper investigation found suspicious finances and operations in a number of taxpayer-supported entities, as well as limited transparency and government oversight.
To cite just a few examples, an entity registered with the state as dissolved received thousands in government funds, caretakers licensed for only a few children report hundreds of thousands in earnings or sales, and nonprofits receiving six-figure grants don’t even have working phone numbers.
While Washington State is home to some of the largest Somali communities on the West Coast, its approximately 15,000 residents of Somali descent represent a fraction of Minnesota’s estimated 76,000, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau figures. With more than 8 million Washington residents, individuals of Somali ancestry amount to less than a quarter of a percent of the state’s population. But they are significantly overrepresented in childcare-related services. According to a 2024 report from the nonprofit Child Care Aware of Washington, 6.7 percent of Washington childcare providers list Somali as the primary language. A database from the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) — which oversees childcare — shows that 249 of the state’s 6,857 licensed child-care providers list their “primary language” as Somali, about 20 times the amount that would be representative of the Somali share of the population.
However, the exact figures are unclear, since daycares can remove information about their operating languages from the state database. When National Review began investigating in December, the number of licensed daycares that publicly listed Somali as their primary language on the DCYF database stood at 283, while over 500 identified Somali as one of their “spoken languages” — but those numbers have fallen as the stories of rampant fraud in Minnesota grew into a national scandal. One nonprofit organization focused on childcare in Washington says it operates group communications with more than 600 Somali childcare providers and assistant teachers — and if that’s the case, then at least one out of 25 Somali-descended individuals in the state works in child services.
The growth of childcare services generally has been encouraged by the state. Washington State’s population grew by nearly 1 million people over the past decade, but childcare capacity remained mostly static, leading organizations such as the Center for American Progress to claim that a majority of the state’s residents live in a “childcare desert.” To address this, the state passed the “Fair Start for Kids Act” in 2021 to allocate more than $1 billion toward childcare-related initiatives, and it expanded the financial assistance available to childcare-related services. As a result, daycare is a lucrative business with limited oversight. The state subsidizes up to $4 per child per hour for small “family home care” providers, a classification that includes almost all Somali-primary-language daycares in the DCYF database; these facilities can be licensed for up to twelve children. At this rate, a year of full-time care for four children would bring in over $33,000 in taxpayer dollars, while watching a dozen children would gross $99,840 in annual subsidies alone. But some providers earn much more. Kismaya Family Childcare, for example, is licensed to care for nine children but reported upwards of $750,000 in sales in 2025. The state paid Kismaya just over $120,000 in 2025, but its business entity was administratively dissolved in 2023, according to the state’s Corporations and Charities Filing System (CCFS) registry, so it’s not clear where that money ended up.
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