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Notes -
It looks like the recent expose on child care center fraud has led to actual action in response: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/12/30/hhs-freezes-childcare-payments-minnesota/87965467007/
My question is: If a 23 year old guerilla journalist (who was not particularly rigorous in his methods) was able to blow this up, then why didn't legacy media go after this low hanging fruit? I have my own ideas (mostly ideological capture of the media) but I'd like to consider alternative explanations so I'd be interested in hearing your ideas about the failures of traditional journalism here and/or the decision by HHS to cut off funding generally.
Additionally, given that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and Defense are the lion's share of the federal budget, and much of the recent fraud has been Medicare/Medicaid fraud to the tune of billions, how much will this affect attempts at welfare reform? From both sides, both the people pushing UBI and the people trying to eliminate or reduce welfare generally.
Did the 23-year-old’s videos actually provide enough proof of fraud that it led to this defunding, or did they provide just plausible enough evidence to give the administration an excuse to do what they already wanted to do anyway?
It seems to me that Trump and his administration have a few goals that this defunding meets: 1) shrink government spending (at least in some areas), 2) emphasize criminal actions by immigrants, and 3) hurt Trump’s enemies. This nicely does all three. It decreases welfare spending, shows Somalian immigrants in a very negative light, and makes Tim Walz look like an enabler of massive fraud. I think it’s probable that at least one of the daycare centers in those videos will turn out to be completely legitimate when all the facts come to light, and it’s possible that the same will hold true for all of them.
Again, why is proof the standard here? It shined a light they couldn’t be left unaddressed. Even if we get some legitimate institutions, there’s the bigger question perhaps even worse:
Why are we tax payers funding millions to give free daycare to immigrant populations that we didn’t even ask to import?
The amount of spotlight on “legal” handouts to “legal” immigrants that is absolutely outrageous to middle class Americans getting squeezed is the real scandal. The fraud is just an extra exclamation point on how much the governing elite hates you.
Now of course there are plenty of counter perspectives to the above paragraph, but the point is that it is a legitimate framing of a SUBSTANTIAL part of the population, and the point stands that the media has been complicit in completely ignoring it at best.
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