The state of our nation’s children is dire: homelessness is rising rapidly among infants and toddlers, child poverty has nearly tripled in recent years, more than half of Americans live in a child care desert, children’s uninsurance is on the rise reversing decades of progress, and the federal government recently passed the largest cut in history to Medicaid and food assistance, which millions of children depend on for health care and nutrition. Countless children across the country already do not receive the services they are eligible for and entitled to. And what are the nation’s leaders doing about this? Weaponizing the specter of fraud in federal programs by looking under rocks for scandal and harming children in the process.

The true scandal, however, is the federal government’s failure to address child well-being and ensure all children and their families have access to the services they need, deserve, and for which they are eligible under federal and state law. In Fiscal Year 2025, the share of spending on children fell to a mere 8.57%, meaning that for every $100 spent by the federal government, just $8.57 went toward meeting the needs of children. And the Trump Administration is inflicting real harm on millions of children by withholding and threatening to eliminate federal funds they depend on for health care, child care, and their well-being. 

Children lose at every level when funding freezes or threats of them disrupt the support they rely on, and when officials spend their time debating minimal levels of fraud instead of addressing real needs. The Administration’s efforts have unfairly taken food from children, limited their access to education, and made it more difficult to receive health care. 

Long-standing policies and procedures throughout all federal programs already address fraud risks, including government-wide reviews for improper payments and requirements to take corrective actions to address their findings. Fraud requires intentional deception, while improper payments are payments that should not have been made, were made in the wrong amount (too little or even too much), or that lacked sufficient supporting documentation. The purposeful conflation of fraud and improper payments creates a disproportionate response to minimal levels of wrongdoing in our government programs and results in children not getting the benefits they need.

Child Care

Federal funding for child care flows to states through the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), which includes the discretionary Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and the mandatory Child Care Entitlement to States. The federal government and states have regular review processes in place and are continually sharing lessons learned and system improvements to tracking spending in child care under these programs, which has resulted in over 96% of federal child care payments being made correctly under CCDF. 

The true emergency in child care are the millions of children and their families who are not receiving services they are eligible for, and the poverty-level wages that professionals are paid to care for our children. Child care provides families with the opportunity to work or study; supports an early learning workforce; and supplies crucial infrastructure for the U.S. economy. However, of the nearly 6.3 million children ages 5 and under whose families qualify for CCDBG, fewer than 840,000 receive it (or approximately 13%). Only one-third of eligible Head Start and 11% of eligible Early Head Start children receive services. Child care continues to be an enormous expense that many families cannot afford. In 2024, the cost to a family of child care for two children in a center was more than annual mortgage payments in 45 states and the District of Columbia, and the cost of child care for an infant at a center was more than in-state tuition at a public university in 41 states and D.C. 

Consulting with providers and families to find out what their experiences are offers the best way to determine whether federal programs such as CCDF are operating as they should. Child care providers in Michigan are doing just that — conducting their own audit to find out what their providers and teachers do to keep the child care system running. So far this audit has revealed that underpaid early educators are footing the federal government’s unpaid bills: the government owes providers hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments that are late or  caught in red tape and current federal subsidy payment rates are inadequate, forcing providers to personally finance the purchase of equipment, food, and other necessary supplies.  

The Administration also has fired significant numbers of federal child care staff this year, and unspecified new requirements for all states to justify their child care spending have already resulted in missed payments to providers. A proposed rule by the Department of Health and Human Services would roll back important policies that make running a child care business viable and care affordable for families. These efforts cumulatively hurt children, their families, and child care providers and professionals without delivering efficiencies that the Administration professes to be searching for.  

Medicaid 

In 2025, more than 9-out-of-every-10 Medicaid payments were made correctly, according to federal audits of the 56 state and territorial programs. This data is available because the federal government and a multitude of state partners have long-standing and wide-ranging efforts to identify and reduce improper payments in federal programs, and Medicaid is no exception. For decades, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and state Medicaid programs have carried out federal requirements to regularly improve the integrity of their programs under the Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) and Medicaid Eligibility Quality Control (MEQC) programs. Under PERM and MEQC, CMS and states continuously run three-year-long cycles of Medicaid audits, make reports to Congress, and agree on corrective action plans to prevent and reduce improper payments. Overwhelmingly and consistently, this process has revealed that the vast majority of Medicaid payments are made properly — 93% in FY 2025 — and the vast majority of identified Medicaid improper payments are due to insufficient documentation — 77% in FY 2025 — which, according to CMS, is not indicative of fraud or abuse. 

By refusing to pay more than $250 million in federal funds it owes Minnesota’s Medicaid program this month, the Administration made clear it does not actually understand how Medicaid works. Medicaid is a jointly financed federal-state partnership in which the state estimates costs, pays claims, and reports its costs to the federal government. The federal government provides its share of the costs — generally 50-83% of the state’s expenditures — to the state on a rolling basis, making it possible for the state to continue paying claims. As a result, CMS’ deferral of payments to Minnesota’s Medicaid program simply makes it more difficult for the state to pay for care being provided for its 1.3 million Medicaid enrollees, including nearly 600,000 children, whose need for care continues. The Administration’s approach also makes it more difficult for the state to fund its ongoing program integrity efforts — the same efforts that ensure the overwhelming majority of Medicaid payments are made properly. What Minnesota and other states really need from their federal partners are increased coordination and support for their continuous and rigorous program integrity activities. Abruptly stopping payments to the state does nothing more than jeopardize the integrity of a critical safety net program, the trust and partnership between the federal government and states, and the health of more than half a million children in the state of Minnesota. 

When implemented carefully, joint federal and state program integrity efforts strengthen Medicaid by ensuring that eligibility determinations are made correctly, enrolled providers meet federal and state requirements, and payments are made in the correct amount and for appropriate services. However, when baseless allegations are used as a weapon to freeze essential Medicaid funds, it can cause great harm to children and other populations that rely on Medicaid and impede the multitude of ongoing federal and state efforts to improve program integrity. 

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) 

Though the public narrative used to justify deep cuts to SNAP in H.R. 1 focused on “reducing fraud,” the law’s statutory trigger penalizes states for exceeding a payment error rate — a measure that captures administrative inaccuracies, not intentional wrongdoing.

Even if a family receives less than they’re entitled to, this still accrues to the error rate. Underpayments in SNAP can occur when income is miscalculated, deductions (such as child care or shelter costs) aren’t properly applied, a caseworker makes a data entry error, or documentation isn’t processed in time for the correct benefit level to be issued. Because many SNAP households have fluctuating earnings, even small timing discrepancies can affect the benefit formula.

Though SNAP overall has high payment accuracy, nationally, about 1.7% of total SNAP benefits were underpaid — meaning eligible families were shortchanged compared to what federal rules say they should have received. In most states, underpayments make up a much smaller share of the total error rate than overpayments, but they are present everywhere. In human terms: when policymakers cite the “error rate,” they are talking about a number that includes cases where families were denied part of their food assistance. The same metric used to justify crackdowns also captures mistakes that hurt children and families.

Prior to the passage of H.R. 1, 12% of eligible people already did not receive the SNAP benefits to which they were entitled. With states soon to be financially penalized for higher error rates under H.R. 1, they are expected to tighten verification, increase documentation requirements, slow approvals, reduce benefits, or drop out of SNAP entirely. Those steps may reduce measurable errors, but they will also make it harder for otherwise eligible children and their families to put food on the table. Continued Congressional attacks on SNAP could make it even harder for states to deliver SNAP benefits to eligible children and families.

Meanwhile, Congress and the Trump Administration have failed to permanently address skimming — actual fraud being perpetrated against SNAP beneficiaries. Skimming is a type of theft in which criminals target the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards that SNAP participants use to steal their benefits. In this scheme, the thieves install illegal devices on point-of-sale terminals (or similarly capture card data from an ATM or swipe machine) so that when a SNAP recipient swipes their card, the skimmer captures the card number, PIN, and other data. The criminals then use that information to duplicate the card and drain the victim’s SNAP account, leaving families without the food assistance they depend on. Unlike most improper payment errors, which generally are accidental administrative mistakes, skimming is actual fraud, which Congress and the Trump Administration have both failed to take permanent steps to prevent. Because EBT cards generally lack the security protections of typical debit or credit cards, beneficiaries often have no built-in legal recourse to recover stolen benefits — which Congress should provide. 

Conclusion

If lawmakers are looking for a scandal, they should focus on the benefits their constituents are eligible for but not receiving — an access gap that will only widen under H.R. 1 and the exaggerated claim that millions of Americans are stealing from their own benefit systems.

The Administration and Congress could be spending their time and resources improving critical safety net programs for the children and families who need them — improving health coverage rates for children, supporting child nutrition programs, and partnering with states to conduct program integrity efforts. But that’s not what’s happening, to the detriment of millions of families across the country. The Administration’s distracting actions that deprive children and families in need are the true scandal.