“That didn’t age well”, the Tim Walz motto
By Easton Martin | December 28, 2025
In October 2023, Governor Tim Walz announced that Minnesota would provide 316 million dollars in direct funding to child care providers, framing the move as essential to keeping the state’s economy running and supporting middle class families. At the time, the announcement was celebrated as compassionate governance. In hindsight, it reads very differently.
Minnesota is now grappling with a series of large scale fraud cases tied to state administered social programs, including child care and related human services funding. These scandals have exposed systemic failures in many areas. Billions of taxpayer dollars were improperly claimed or outright stolen through shell organizations, falsified records, and lax state controls. Federal prosecutors have described Minnesota as a prime example of how good intentions paired with weak accountability invite abuse.
The problem is not that child care providers deserve fair pay. The problem is that the Walz administration repeatedly expanded funding pipelines without first demonstrating that it could properly police them. When a governor publicly boasts about injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into a sector already vulnerable to fraud, scrutiny is necessary.
This is what “did not age well” truly means.
