Donald Trump's tour of retribution continues as his administration now targets child care and other programs that serve hundreds of thousands of households in California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. The five Democratic states are in Trump's crosshairs.
As Mary Trump said in December, "We are at this point now where his physical health, his cognitive decline, and his lack of psychological health are all intersecting and it's sort of this perfect storm that is accelerating the deterioration of all of them." She's not wrong.
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration plans to freeze $10 billion in funding for child care subsidies, social services and cash support for low-income families in five states controlled by Democrats, claiming widespread fraud throughout those states, without citing evidence, after a major welfare fraud scheme in one of them.
Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois and Colorado will be cut off from around $7 billion in funding for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash assistance to households with children, according to two people familiar with the matter. The five states will also lose access to nearly $2.4 billion for the Child Care Development Fund, which supports child care for working parents, and around $870 million for social services grants that mostly benefit children at risk, the people said.
The funding pause could jeopardize programs that serve hundreds of thousands of low-income households in the five states.
The planned freeze appears to build on the administration’s pause last week in $185 million in annual aid to Minnesota day care centers after investigators said that more than a dozen welfare fraud schemes in that state had led to billions of dollars in taxpayer losses.
No evidence has suggested that the other four Democratic states suffered similar widespread welfare frauds, but Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which is in charge of disbursing the funding, suggested that the fraud cases in Minnesota led to the freeze.
“Democrat-led states and governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” Mr. Nixon said in a statement. “Under the Trump administration, we are ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars are being used for legitimate purposes.”
The planned freeze, reported earlier by The New York Post, is the latest in the Trump administration’s pattern of interrupting federal dollars to Democratic-run cities and states, leveraging disbursement of congressionally approved funding to punish perceived enemies and political opponents.
On Truth Social this morning, Trump wrote, "California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP."
If they were really after fraud, the administration only needs to look at Donald J. Trump. The funds were approved by Congress, but Republicans seem OK with Trump ignoring that branch of government. It's obvious what he's doing.
