Opinion | Nick Shirley’s fraud fever dream

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The “fraud” that internet influencer Nick Shirley thinks he exposed in the Minnesota child care system is a myth that does not and could not exist in real life. Shirley and much of the reporting that followed his childish video has resulted in dramatic raids and horrifying death threats toward providers, but it confuses two entirely different federal programs: the Child Nutrition Program (also commonly known as the school lunch program) and the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP).

The Child Nutrition Program is funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and administered by state departments of education like the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE). This program operates to provide lunch and in many cases breakfast to schoolchildren from low-income households. Many thousands of such children in Minnesota have relied on the program for decades to stave off hunger by providing one or two meals per day without cost to the children or their families.

During COVID lockdowns, schools were closed and needy children reliant on free meals lost a vital source of nutrition. In response, the federal government authorized the MDE to expand nutrition providers far beyond school districts to include nonprofits and even for-profit restaurants providing food to any children (and their families) that showed up to collect it. For reasons that are easily understandable in the midst of a pandemic, food recipients did not have to apply for the program at all, let alone verify their identities or document their need.

A 2024 legislative auditor’s report documents in excruciating detail how lax MDE oversight allowed the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, led by Aimee Bock, to exploit this wide-open system to create, promote, recruit and proliferate scam operations in which the children to whom they claimed to serve hundreds of thousands of meals simply didn’t exist. The result has been dozens of indictments culminating in dozens of criminal convictions. While almost all of those criminally charged (so far) have been East African, Feeding Our Future’s leader and the architect of the entire scheme — Bock — is a white woman.

The fraud model of Feeding Our Future that Shirley assumed doesn’t transfer to child care because the CCAP program works differently in ways that make it impossible for “fake day cares” to exist. CCAP funds are provided by the federal Department of Health and Human Services and are administered by the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF). Rather than being accessed by day care providers directly, CCAP funds must be applied for by parents, who have to provide documentation to county DCYF agencies of their children’s identities and ages and of their particular needs for child-care services in light of the parent’s employment schedule. Once a CCAP authorization is approved, the parents take the CCAP authorization to a licensed day care provider, who is then permitted to bill DCYF up to the amount of the CCAP authorization for day care services they actually provide to the parent’s children. Day care providers are required to maintain detailed attendance records, which are spot-checked during annual (sometimes semiannual) visits from DCYF inspectors. Day care providers must also meet detailed health and safety requirements in order to keep their licenses.

It is true that fraud does exist involving the CCAP program, and it usually comes in the form of billing for services provided to more children than are actually present on a given day. Fraud can also result from day care providers that pay parents to come to the center to watch over their own children in the center rather than watching them at home. But DCYF and its precursor DHS has investigated and successfully prosecuted such cases for many years, and they didn’t need Shirley’s help to find them.

Once you understand how the CCAP system actually works, Shirley’s indicators of fraud evaporate back into the cloud of ignorance and bigotry whence they arose. In the CCAP system, it is simply impossible to have “fake day cares” with no children like Shirley claimed to find because there would be no way to get a CCAP authorization for fake children and no way for a day care provider to bill the government without the CCAP authorization. And the fraud that does exist can be found in any area of the state; it is not unique to Somalis like Shirley claims. In fact, it is probably much easier to do in rural areas of the state, where DCYF enforcement resources are thinner than in the Twin Cities metro area.

The locked doors and unusual operating hours that Shirley identified are also easily explained. Locked doors are for the protection of the children within. Would you want your children cared for in an unlocked day care where any random person can come in off the street? Any day care that allowed Shirley and his posse in would likely lose its license and rightly so. And operating hours that start at 2 p.m. — like those of at least one of the day cares Shirley visited earlier in the day— are the natural result of serving a population of working parents that contains a lot of service workers and health-care workers in jobs that do not fit the white-collar 9-5 workday. Similarly, a day care located at the same location as a previous day care is nothing suspicious because the space vacated by a defunct day care likely has the health and safety features required for a day care license, limiting the startup costs of the new day care.

The bottom line is that neither Shirley nor the Minnesota Republicans who encouraged him appear to have any idea what they are talking about. CCAP is different from the Child Nutrition Program, and any effort to root out fraud in the system needs to be based on how the program actually works instead of being based on lazy assumptions and racial prejudices.