Blooming Kids Child Care Center in St. Cloud, Minnesota, has collected $7.29 million in state Child Care Assistance Program funds since 2018. A nearby worker told Fox News they've never seen children entering or leaving the building. The windows are tinted. The playground is barely there.
The daycare's CEO, Abdi Daisane, just won a seat in the Minnesota state legislature.
Daisane, a DFL candidate, defeated Republican incumbent Mike Conway in House District 14A on Tuesday, becoming the first Somali-born state lawmaker to represent the St. Cloud area. His victory speech included a portion delivered in Somali. The celebration did not include any remarks about his daycare's connection to one of the state's largest fraud settlements in recent memory.
Here's what that connection looks like. Blooming Kids received $598,251.62 in federal Child and Adult Care Food Program funds since 2020 through a sponsor organization called Partners in Nutrition. Partners in Nutrition no longer exists. It was dissolved after paying an $18.5 million civil settlement to the state of Minnesota for fraud.
The official settlement statement said Partners in Nutrition "knowingly defrauded the State of Minnesota out of millions of dollars in federal child nutrition funds during and after the COVID-19 pandemic." Millions of federal dollars earmarked for feeding children — routed through an organization that admitted to defrauding the system. Blooming Kids was one of the daycare centers receiving money through that pipeline.
Daisane himself was not named as a defendant in the settlement. His daycare was not individually accused of fraud. That's technically true, and it's also the kind of distinction that means less when your funding sponsor just paid $18.5 million to make a fraud case go away. The money still flowed through the same pipeline. The citations — over a dozen of them against the facility — still happened.
A daycare with tinted windows, a bare-bones playground, no visible children, and a dozen-plus regulatory citations. A funding sponsor that paid an eight-figure fraud settlement. And voters in District 14A looked at all of it and said: sure, send him to the statehouse.
Conservative commentator Matt Brodsky, president of Red Ax Strategies, summed up the reaction: "We are a lost state. We should cede it to Canada."
Minnesota's daycare fraud pipeline has been well documented. The state's $250 million Feeding Our Future scandal — the largest COVID-era fraud case in the country — exposed how child nutrition programs became vehicles for systematic theft. Partners in Nutrition's $18.5 million settlement is a separate case in the same ecosystem. Same state. Same programs. Same playbook.
Daisane will take his seat in January. The daycare will presumably keep collecting state funds. The settlement is paid, the sponsor is dissolved, and the new state legislator's facility has racked up over a dozen violations that nobody in his district seemed to mind.
Minnesota spent $18.5 million learning how the fraud worked. Then they elected someone from inside the machine.