• What Happened: Mississippi State Auditor Chad White testified before Congress that the same child care and nonprofit fraud exposed in Minnesota is happening in Mississippi, and Congress did nothing in response.
  • Why It Matters: White says federal programs pushing money to states, nonprofits, and child care centers have fundamental flaws that make fraud easy and that oversight of sub-grantees is virtually nonexistent.
  • Bottom Line: White says only state and federal leaders can fix the problem, but so far nobody with the power to act has been willing to do so.

Mississippi State Auditor Chad White went to Washington, told Congress exactly what was wrong, and watched them do absolutely nothing about it. Now he is saying it out loud so the rest of America can hear it.

White testified before Congress that the same child care and nonprofit fraud being exposed in Minnesota is running rampant in Mississippi. Federal programs pushing money down to states, nonprofits, and child care centers are riddled with structural flaws that make fraud not just possible but easy. And the people responsible for stopping it have not been paying attention.

"I testified before Congress and I told them that all sorts of federal programs that were pushing money down to the states, to nonprofits, child care centers, all sorts of organizations were broken," White said. "The Department of Human Services is not monitoring its sub grantees, its nonprofits, to ensure that the dollars are reaching needy folks, that those programs had fundamental flaws that made fraud very, very easy."

Congress heard him out. Then they did what they always do.

"So what did Congress do in response to that testimony? Well, they did what they typically do, which is nothing at all," White said.

The specific failures White identified are infuriating in their simplicity. Nobody is verifying whether children are actually showing up to the child care centers collecting taxpayer money. Nobody is checking whether those centers are reporting what they are legally required to report. Nobody is making state agencies publicly account for where the dollars are going.

"Whether these kids are actually in the child care centers or if we're just paying them for existing, there's far too little attention being paid to whether the kids are actually learning anything," White said. "This has all got to stop."

White is clear about the limits of his own role. As auditor he can expose the problem but cannot fix it. That responsibility falls to state leaders and ultimately the federal government.

Minnesota grabbed the headlines. But Minnesota is not the exception. It is the example. The same system, the same broken oversight, and the same missing accountability exist in states across the country. Chad White tried to tell Congress that. They ignored him.

The American taxpayer deserves better than a government that only acts when a YouTuber goes viral.