(The Epoch Times)—Minnesota is facing heavy scrutiny after the Trump administration accused bad actors in the state of exploiting federal funds from child-focused programs for personal gain.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Dec. 29, 2025, that 98 people—85 of Somali descent— were indicted in welfare fraud cases in the state.
Minnesota was home to the “largest COVID-19 fraud case” in America, as 78 defendants—72 of Somalian descent—were accused of pocketing $300 million to $400 million dollars of “Feeding Our Future” funds that were supposed to provide children free meals during the pandemic.
Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, the mastermind behind the “Feeding Our Future” scandal, was sentenced to 28 years in prison in August.
The Trump administration last month announced it would freeze $185 million in federal funds to Minnesota until the scandal-plagued state could prove that the money was being used properly.
Even though federal funds have temporarily dried up in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, prospective child care providers are still able to obtain child care licenses.
The Epoch Times investigated how to open a day care in Minnesota, with a focus on the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, which have the highest concentration of Somali residents in the United States.
Licensing Applications
The State of Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families manages licensing applications for child care centers and charges a nonrefundable fee of $500 to apply. Prospective small business owners can receive a license in approximately three to six months.
Aspiring providers have two routes to obtain a license: open a child care center or provide services at their own home.
An in-home day care license is hundreds of dollars cheaper and requires potential providers to go through their local county for a small fee. Some may even be eligible to receive a grant of $2,000 for startup costs.
Aspiring child care providers seeking licensure in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, which oversee applications in Minneapolis and St. Paul, have to pay a nonrefundable $50 application fee.
Before an application can be submitted, future business owners must first attend an orientation.
Ramsey County requires in-person orientation, which is offered once a month, whileHennepin County allows people to take a 30-minute online orientation and submit their application immediately. Hennepin County’s online orientation can be completed in four separate languages: Somali, Spanish, English and Hmong.
The orientation presentation explains the “many benefits” provided to licensed providers, including food programs, eligibility for loans and grants, and small business tax benefits.At the end of the orientation, the county provides an email address to request the six-page Family Child Care Application Form. The document, which is not available to download, asks a series of questions relating to the applicant, which will be used to help conduct a background check.
Background Check
Hennepin County charges $49.10 for a background check per provider.
The background check form requires applicants to list specific information about their living situation, such as who could be around children under their care, and add references.
The check does a deep dive into a person’s entire criminal record, which includes a juvenile record for people under the age of 28.
Additional checks include where the person has lived in the past five years and if they’ve received government benefits.
Training
Licensed providers must attend several hours of mandatory training before they are granted their license, according to requirements by the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families.
The mandatory training includes a six-hour course titled “Supervising for Safety for Family Child Care” and a four-hour course on child development and learning and behavior guidance. Other required training includes “Pediatric First Aid & Pediatric Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation,” “Reducing the Risk of Sudden Unexpected Infant Death,” “Reducing the Risk of Abusive Head Trauma,” and “Basic Education for Safe Travel” if transportation will be provided.
The classes are offered by the state and amount to $219 total, although some of the courses are free.
Additional adult caregivers must go through the same training, but people who identify as a “helper” are not required to do so.
Other courses are offered for providers who plan to take care of infants and children under school age.
Processing and Approval
The processing period can take up to half a year, depending on how many applications are going through the system and if an applicant makes mistakes on initial forms.
The Epoch Times contacted Hennepin County for information on how many applications were denied in 2025 and did not hear back by the time this report was published.
Once approved, the licensed provider attends a small group meeting on how to “prepare your home and begin your child care business,” including requirements for space, sleeping, equipment, and safety.
Grants
Minnesota offers training for providers seeking child care assistance funds and lets people apply through the state’s Provider Hub.
A licensed provider in Minnesota has access to the Provider Hub and is eligible to participate in the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), which uses federal funds to help low-income families pay for child care.
CCAP, which has 23,000 children enrolled in Minneapolis, uses federal money from the Child Care and Development Fund.
Child care providers apply for smaller grants, provided by the state, using the Child Care Aware Grants Program, which gives up to $1,000 for family child care and $2,500 to centers.
Applications for regional grants open once a year, but “soon-to-be licensed” providers can also apply for startup grants of up to $2,000 for family child care and $3,000 for child care centers.
Funding Freeze
Due to widespread fraud allegations in Minnesota, not all grants are available.
The Trump administration announced on Dec. 30, 2025, that it was freezing child care funding in all 50 states after Minnesota day care centers run by Somali residents became the epicenter of alleged fraud scandals.
The freeze impacts the Child Care and Development Fund, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the Head Start program, and refugee assistance programs.
In 2025, the federal government provided nearly $2.4 billion to the Child Care and Development Fund, $7.35 billion to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and $869 million the Social Services Block Grant.
Minnesota received 7.7 percent ($184.9 million) of the money allocated to the Child Care and Development fund in 2025, according to data provided by the Office of the Administration for Children and Families.
The state received 3.5 percent ($262 million) of the funds from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in 2025, according to the state’s budget.
“Funds will be released only when states prove they are being spent legitimately,” Health and Human Services (HHS) Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said during the announcement.
Controversies
Minnesota and its Somali population has received heavy criticism after allegations of widespread fraud surfaced in the state.
YouTuber Nick Shirley went viral after posting a video which featured a series of Somali-run day cares, seemingly empty, despite receiving federal funding.
The Epoch Times confirmed that Quality Learning Center, which was featured in Shirley’s video, closed shortly after a viral video showed its sign misspelled Learning as “Learing.”
The scandals led Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to drop out of his bid for reelection on Jan. 5, even though he blamed the alleged fraud on “an organized group of criminals,” as opposed to the state’s oversight.
“Every minute I spend defending my own political interest would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences,” Walz wrote in his announcement that ended his bid for a third term as governor.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
