WATCH: State fails to investigate daycares with no children despite media reports

By Carleen Johnson
The Center Square

Many Washington state daycare providers receive large taxpayer subsidies, but an investigation by The Center Square found several that had few, if any, children and at least one establishment that received hundreds of thousands of dollars despite residents at the listed address indicating it was not a daycare.

Yet politicians charged with overseeing the spending continue to publicly say there is no problem with improper payments to the daycares and, instead, have been criticizing journalists for investigating the potential fraud. No state official has announced an investigation or crackdown though the legislature instituted some reforms last session.

The Center Square visited approximately three dozen daycares over the past six months that received hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and federal subsidies to provide daycare for lower-income residents, finding only a few that appeared to have children present.

According to fiscal.wa.gov, one daycare in West Seattle received more than $229,000 over nine months from July 2025 through March 2026, but the residents at the home repeatedly told The Center Square there was no daycare at the home, nor had there been.

“Is there a daycare operated from here?” a reporter from The Center Square asked.

“No,” the person who answered the door responded.

The resident also said there had never been a daycare at the address.

The issue has reached state and national attention after independent journalists and The Center Square visited daycares in late December 2025 and the first few months of 2026, finding a similar pattern of large state and federal payments and little evidence of children being cared for at the facilities. In many cases, homes were in disrepair with windows covered in dark blinds and no sign of children at the property.

Ongoing questions

The Center Square’s March visits revealed a similar pattern.

The state fiscal website showed a home-based daycare in Federal Way, receiving $223,247 in taxpayer subsidies and grants over nine months from July 2025 through March 2026.

The Center Square visited the home twice, including in early January, when the homeowner immediately called police. Reporters videotaped her as she refused to respond to questions posed by The Center Square and independent journalist Jonathan Choe.

Three Federal Way police officers arrived within seconds but told the woman that reporters were allowed to be on the sidewalk and urged her “to calm down.”

An officer entered the home and indicated there were three children inside but did not verify if those children were daycare attendants.

When asked about investigating these payments, the government officials charged with approving or overseeing the funds or investigating fraud have refused to commit to probe the issue, suggesting it was inappropriate for reporters to be “door knocking” on daycares.

Attorney General Nick Brown responded by encouraging anyone who would see a reporter “harassing” a daycare provider by knocking on the door, to report it to the hate crimes hotline.

“Showing up on someone’s porch, threatening, or harassing them isn’t an investigation,” noted Brown’s Dec 30, 2025, press release. “Neither is filming minors who may be in the home. This is unsafe and potentially dangerous behavior. I encourage anyone experiencing threats or harassment to either contact local law enforcement or our office’s Hate Crimes & Bias Incident Hotline.”

In late January, when the state auditor’s office was in the middle of a Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) annual audit over daycare subsidies, State Auditor Pat McCarthy said it was not her office’s job to conduct enforcement of individual facilities.

“No, that’s not what we’re doing. What we’re doing is an audit related to DCYF as to how the money is processed to the providers,” McCarthy told The Center Square. “What we do is we do this audit work and then we provide that information to the people that can do the enforcement, which would be the DSHS Fraud Investigative Unit or the AG’s Office Fraud Investigative Unit, and then they would determine who would actually take the next steps.”

McCarthy’s office in late March released an audit that found an estimated $37 million in questionable childcare subsidy payments distributed by DCYF using federal funds, revealing a lack of prepayment controls, but no confirmed evidence of fraud.

The audit examined a random sample of 59 of among hundreds of thousands of monthly childcare payments the department made between July 2024 and June 2025. More than a dozen of them had issues with improper payments, according to the audit. Auditors used that small sample to extrapolate the total “questionable” costs.

Gov. Bob Ferguson has declined to respond to questions about whether his staff are looking into potential fraud, telling The Center Square that he “would get back” to us on looking into it. Despite that promise in March, his office did not respond to a request for follow up.

Federal concerns

On May 12, Vice President JD Vance threatened to withhold federal Medicaid funds from any state that fails to crack down on fraud, after blocking $1.3 billion in reimbursements for 800 California hospices suspected of defrauding taxpayers. The crackdown part of a broader White House initiative concerning fraud.

Washington state Rep. Travis Couture, R-Allyn, and Rep. Josh Penner, R-Orting, offered amendments to a bill during the 2026 session to add rules that would prevent potential fraud in daycare subsidy payouts.

House Bill 2253, sponsored by Rep. Adam Bernbaum, D-Port Angeles, sought to make the licensing process smoother and more efficient for providers and DCYF. It passed the House with nearly unanimous support.

But when the legislation got to the Senate, Human Services Committee Chairwoman Sen. Claire Wilson, D-Federal Way, filed an amendment. According to Couture, the amendment stripped out fraud prevention measures that both parties and DCYF had agreed on in the amendments that passed the House.

As to reporters including TCS looking into alleged daycare fraud, Wilson said during a January 2026 interview that any allegations about Somali-run daycares are “rhetoric and really racist.”

When asked to explain why a home daycare provider would receive a quarter million dollars over five months in subsidies, Wilson said they could be receiving funds from several sources.

“There are things like complex needs funds, there are equities funds, there’s early learning facilities funds, there are many dollars,” she said.

Reforms

Couture said common-sense reforms were removed from his bill.

“One of the amendments was simply saying that if you got caught doing fraud as a daycare provider, that you couldn’t have a license to be a daycare provider anymore. She (Wilson) wanted to strip that out,” Couture said. “That’s completely nuts and insane, and it just draws more questions about why there is so much fight back from the Democrats on anti-fraud measures?”

A Democrat-backed bill concerning subsidy payments to providers – SB 2689– ended up being approved during the 2026 session, mostly along party lines.

The law requires DCYF to “adopt rules that allow child care providers to claim daily subsidy payments as follows: for a child who has attended for 16 or more days in a calendar month, a provider may claim payment for the full number of authorized days; for a child who has attended 9 to 15 days in a calendar month, a provider may claim payment for the full number of authorized days, or for 15 days, whichever is fewer; and for a child who has attended 1 to 8 days in a calendar month, a provider may claim payment for the full number of authorized days, or for 11 days, whichever is fewer.”

Supporters argue this will ensure providers aren’t being reimbursed for an entire month for a child who may have only attended for a few days.

In a May 22 interview about ongoing questions with daycare subsidy payments, Couture told The Center Square that DCYF, under the leadership of Secretary Tana Senn, is “a mess.”

“DCYF has the reverse-King Midas touch as I call it. Everything they touch turns to crap,” said Couture, R-Allyn. “Many of the policies that are broken at DCYF were caused by Secretary Tana Senn herself.”

DCYF has repeatedly declined The Center Square’s requests for an interview with Senn.

During a May 21 meeting of the DCYF Oversight Board, Senn told members that daycare providers have received death threats due to media coverage of potential fraud.

“This had real impacts on providers and families,” Senn said.

The Center Square attended the meeting to question Senn, but she gave her remarks via video and was not at her office when TCS went there following her presentation to the Oversight Board.

Provider transparency

The Washington Department of Commerce last month provided a complete list of taxpayer-funded daycare providers’ names and locations, reversing an earlier decision not to reveal the information for providers receiving funds to create more than 2,000 new childcare spaces through the Early Learning Facilities (ELF) program. The action happened after The Center Square questioned why the information wasn’t public.

The recipients received a combined $57.8 million in state grants in April, to expand, renovate or upgrade facilities to create more childcare slots, but the original list did not include the names and business locations for many of the providers.

Commerce initially cited privacy protections based on state law after the concerns. Then the agency released the entire list detailing names and addresses for award recipients, pointing to “new guidance” from the attorney general’s office.