Independent journalist Nick Shirley has caused a political firestorm. His method was simple. Show up at the doors of Somali child daycare centers in Minnesota with a camera, ask how to enroll kids, then record as the workers scramble, threaten him, and struggle to explain why there are no children present. What he did closely resembles the work product last year from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Shirley opened the window on a massive fraud scheme, perpetrated by Somali immigrants upon the American taxpayers. What we’re learning shows why we need state-level DOGE projects to look for and get to the bottom of these grifts.
The infamous “Quality Learing Center,” with its misspelled sign, is a fitting symbol of the Minnesota fiasco. Within days of Shirley’s viral video, senators and Trump cabinet officials were releasing statements in response to the controversy. Under fire and national attention, Minnesota officials offered the excuse that the center had been shut down a week earlier, which is why there are no kids in attendance. But the next day, one of the center’s workers appeared on camera to assure us that the center was full of children.
Their scheme allegedly goes something like this: Somali parents would pretend to drop off children by checking them in at Somali-run daycare centers, but then take the kids home. The centers would bill the state for the entire day (and the state, in turn, bills the federal government), and then the daycare centers and the parents would split the funds.
There’s also possible false disability diagnoses, fake meals for children, and who knows what else. All told, the various Somali fraud rackets may have stolen $9 billion from taxpayers in Minnesota alone. In contrast, the country of Somalia’s entire GDP is $12 billion.
A federal probe has been initiated. The scandals have gained so much attention that Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, has decided not to seek reelection.
All well and good, but it should never have gotten this far. The evidence of crookedness was abundant long ago.
During COVID, a Minnesota nonprofit named Feeding Our Future claimed to distribute thousands of meals to school-aged children, but both the meals and the children were largely a lie. Instead, the nonprofit fraudulently billed the state for the nonexistent children’s meals and pocketed hundreds of millions of tax dollars. In the aftermath of what the Justice Department called the “largest Covid-19 fraud scheme in the United States,” 78 defendants were found guilty, 72 of whom were Somalis. More recently, in September 2025, eight more defendants were indicted for fraud and theft of hundreds of millions more, this time from the state Housing Stabilization Services program.
The scale of Feeding Our Future’s growth alone should have triggered immediate concern.
According to the organization’s Form 990 filings, Feeding Our Future reported roughly $3.4 million in revenue in 2019. By 2021, that figure had exploded to more than $250 million. More than 99 percent of that revenue came from government grants tied to federal nutrition programs.
And then there was the growth in fraudulent autism claims. From 2018 to 2024, autism service providers in Minnesota rose from 41 to 328, a 700 percent increase. During that period, payments to autism service providers increased by 3,000 percent, from $6 million to more than $190 million. Scammers opened fake clinics to diagnose autism, recruited parents to lie about their children having autism, and then gave them kickbacks for doing so.
Is there any connection between the Feeding Our Future scandal and the more recently highlighted fraudulent daycare centers in Minnesota?
A good place to start that query is that the mastermind of the Feeding Our Future fraud, Amiee Bock, is listed as the contact for more than forty tax-funded daycare centers in Minnesota.
What should be done about this seemingly community-wide fraud network among Somalis in Minnesota? Minnesota Congressman Tom Emmer has called for the denaturalization and deportation of Somalis involved in the scandal.
But another option is state-level DOGE programs. Florida, for example, has had great success with a DOGE-style system to crack down on waste within state agencies, and at the city and county levels. Established in February of 2025, the task force has aimed to eliminate 70 state boards and commissions and nearly a thousand government positions, audit county budgets for waste, flag high operating expenses at Florida universities, and return unused federal funds to DC.
Overall, DOGE efforts have led to $850 million in savings for the state. Imagine what we could do with such programs in willing states across the country. Florida’s novel idea might have saved Minnesota a lot of expense and embarrassment, and maybe saved Tim Walz’s career.
