: A trio of Republican senators are moving to overhaul how federal childcare funds are distributed after what they call ‘mass fraud’ in Minnesota exposed a system that paid providers before verifying children were ever in the room.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, joined by Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rick Scott, R-Fla., is introducing the Payment Integrity Act, legislation that would require states to distribute federally funded childcare dollars based on verified attendance — not enrollment claims.

‘Programs in Minnesota for welfare and childcare were designed to channel resources into protecting vulnerable children, but were treated like an open ATM by criminals,’ Cruz told Fox News Digital.

‘The mass fraud in Minnesota shows that American taxpayers can no longer rely on local and state politicians to prevent abuses, because those politicians often have electoral and partisan incentives to look the other way. My legislation reduces the risk of the waste and fraud we’ve seen and ensures that resources are provided to children and families who need it.’

The bill would reverse a 2024 Biden administration rule requiring states to pay childcare providers before attendance verification. Under Cruz’s proposal, providers would be paid only after services are confirmed — shifting from enrollment-based payments to attendance-based billing.

Cruz’s bill comes as the outspoken Texan led a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on alleged Somali fraudsters last week. There, lawmakers heard directly from David Hoch — a journalist seen accompanying blogger Nick Shirley to addresses proclaimed to be Somali daycares.

‘There are few crimes more morally repugnant than stealing from vulnerable children. Every dollar stolen is a meal not eaten, a doctor’s visit missed, and a future diminished,’ Cruz said, adding that such fraud ‘plunders our children’s potential.’

Gesturing towards a photo of the ‘Quality Learing Center’ in Minneapolis during the hearing, an allegedly fraudulent childcare provider Cruz called ’emblematic’ of the crisis, he said the fraud was occurring not in ‘some distant or lawless place, but in the heart of America’s Midwest.’

Co-sponsor Lee said that support for childcare should ‘go to real kids, not empty rooms.’

‘Fake childcare operations are stealing funding from the ones who are actually taking care of America’s children in need. Our bill will address this massive fraud by granting funding based on actual attendance rather than reported enrollment, and allowing states to pay retroactively instead of in advance,’ Lee said, adding such ‘diligence’ should have been the law all along.

The Payment Integrity Act also puts into law January rule from Health and Human Services that established attendance-based billing procedures

That rule, according to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s deputy Jim O’Neill was also spurred on by what has been happening in Minnesota.

‘We’ve seen credible and widespread allegations of fraudulent daycare providers who were not caring for children at all. The reforms we are enacting will make fraud harder to perpetrate,’ O’Neill said in a statement.

The Payment Integrity Act officially amends the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act signed into law by President George Herbert Walker Bush, to include such ‘attendance-based billing.’

‘Nothing in this subchapter shall be construed to require a lead agency to make a payment to a child care provider prior to the provision of child care services,’ the bill reads, a direct reversal of the pre-payment system Cruz says allowed fraud to flourish.

Lawmakers are jetting from Washington, D.C., without a deal to prevent a partial government shutdown. 

Their departure comes after the Senate was unable to send a full-year funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to President Donald Trump’s desk. 

Senate Democrats doubled down on their demands for stringent reforms to immigration enforcement and bucked multiple attempts Thursday to keep the agency open.

With both chambers now on their way to a weeklong recess, the agency is expected to shutter at midnight Friday. Unless a deal is struck before lawmakers return, DHS will be shut down for at least that period of time.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., made the call to send lawmakers home and noted that if negotiations made a breakthrough, they would be on 24-hour notice to return. But talks, for now, are somewhere between baby steps and stuck. 

‘What it appears to me, at least at this point, is happening is the Democrats, like they did last fall, they really don’t want the solution,’ Thune said. ‘They don’t want the answer. They want the political issue.’ 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his caucus blocked an attempt to pass the original DHS funding bill and a subsequent two-week funding extension. 

Their resistance comes after the White House unveiled the legislative text of the administration’s counteroffer, which several Senate Democrats balked at Thursday morning. 

‘The administration doesn’t actually want to reform ICE,’ Schumer said. ‘They never do it on their own. That is why we need — we are fighting for — legislation to rein in ICE and stop the violence.’

Senate Democrats have demanded a stringent list of reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They weren’t persuaded by border czar Tom Homan that operations in Minneapolis would be drawn down as negotiations continue.

It was a déjà vu moment from months earlier, when Thune repeatedly tried to peel Democrats away from Schumer during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history but failed to break their blockade.

While there was optimism that negotiations were moving in a positive direction earlier this week, those hopes appeared to have shattered. 

‘At this point, it seems clear that the Democrats are going to walk away from that bipartisan conversation,’ a senior White House official said. ‘They’re going to shut the department down. They’re going to deprive Americans of critical services such as FEMA, such as TSA and what will be the third partial government shutdown of this Congress.’

Senate Democrats received the legislative version of Republicans and the White House’s counteroffer Wednesday night, but many said it was ‘not sufficient,’ and several Democrats leaving a closed-door meeting Thursday morning said a deal remained out of reach.

Given the stagnation in talks, Thune opted to go ahead with the scheduled recess, but made clear to lawmakers that if there was a breakthrough they would need to return.

‘Obviously, we’ve made it clear to people that they have to be available to come back and vote,’ Thune said. 

Talks of another counteroffer to the White House are in the works. Some Senate Democrats hope that the upcoming recess and likely closure of DHS will serve as a wake-up call to Republicans. 

Complicating matters is that several members of the House and Senate are expected to travel to Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference.

‘I still think the Republicans are in a bubble and do not understand the depth of the anger out there in the world,’ Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told Fox News Digital. 

‘And maybe this break will allow them to go home and get yelled at, not just by people who are progressive, but everybody who thinks that this agency is out of control and needs to be reined in.’

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is making an example of former President Barack Obama for encouraging voters and lawmakers to reject adopting national voter ID laws. 

‘You know how badly the Democrats are panicking when they bring out Obama to spread lies about voter ID,’ Leavitt posted to X Thursday. ‘The fact is that nearly 90% of voters support’ voter ID laws, she continued before posting two screenshots showing two polls reflecting Americans support such laws at around 83% support to 84% support. 

Leavitt’s comments follow the House passing a massive election integrity overhaul bill Wednesday, which includes requiring voters to show a photo ID when casting ballots in federal elections. The bill overall aims to prevent noncitizens from voting in U.S. federal elections, with all but one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, voting against it. 

Obama was among prominent Democrats encouraging House lawmakers to vote against the measure, claiming it will disenfranchise voters. 

‘Republicans are still trying to pass the SAVE Act—a bill that would make it harder to vote and disenfranchise millions of Americans,’ he posted to X Wednesday evening. ‘Join @RedistrictAct and tell your member of Congress to vote no.’ 

Democrats have argued that voter ID laws can disenfranchise eligible voters because they often require specific, current government-issued IDs that may be a struggle to obtain due to costs, paperwork hurdles or limited DMV access. Republicans have rejected that argument, calling the requirement a common-sense safeguards that would boost confidence in elections, while simultaneously noting that most Americans already need IDs for everyday tasks.

In another post, Leavitt shared that Obama presented his own driver’s license to vote in the 2012 election. Obama voted early that cycle and was seen on camera pulling his Illinois driver’s license from his wallet to flash to poll workers. 

‘Here is Barack Obama showing his photo ID to vote in a past election,’  Leavitt posted. ‘Why are Democrats in Congress so opposed to making this a requirement across the country? Voter ID laws are common sense.’ 

White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers added that IDs are frequently used by Americans to buy alcohol or get on a plane, which she said shows the hypocrisy of Democrats pushing against the election security overhaul. 

‘Barack Obama and the rest of the Democrats think Americans are stupid, which is why they are blatantly lying about the commonsense election integrity provisions in the popular SAVE Act,’ Rogers told Fox News Digital. 

‘Americans need to show ID to buy alcohol, get on a plane, and even get into the Democratic National Convention — but these hypocrite Democrats don’t want voters to show their ID to cast a ballot. Congressional Democrats’ opposition to the SAVE America Act is indefensible and wildly out of step with the views of the American people.’ 

Fox News Digital reached out to Obama’s office Thursday for comment but did not immediately receive a reply. 

Called the SAVE Act, the legislation would additionally require information-sharing between state election officials and federal authorities in verifying citizenship on current voter rolls, as well as enable the Department of Homeland Security to pursue immigration cases if non-citizens were found to be listed as eligible to vote.

If passed, the new requirements could be implemented for the November midterm elections. It must first pass the Senate before it could land on President Donald Trump’s desk. 

Iran’s election as vice-chair of the United Nations Commission for Social Development is being slammed by human rights advocates and policy analysts, who have condemned the U.N.’s hypocrisy when it comes to its treatment of undemocratic regimes. 

The leadership role was approved without objection during a meeting of the commission, where delegates adopted agenda items and organizational decisions by consensus.

The United Nations has faced continued criticism over its inaction towards the regime’s violent crackdown against protesters in December and January. On Wednesday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres faced criticism for congratulating Iran on the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz criticized the development, writing on X: ‘Yet another reason why we are not a member of, nor do we participate in, this ridiculous ‘Commission for Social Development.’’

Alireza Jafarzadeh, author of The Iran Threat and deputy director of the U.S. office of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, also criticized the decision. ‘Having the Iranian regime in the leadership of a U.N. body tasked with promoting democracy, gender equality, tolerance and non-violence is appalling and like fox guarding the hen house,’ Jafarzadeh said. ‘The vast majority of the Iranian people are calling for regime change because the mullahs are the world’s leading human rights violators, misogynist to the core, and they slaughter the voices of dissent by thousands.’

He argued that Iran should face scrutiny rather than institutional advancement. ‘Instead, the Iranian regime must be a subject of intense investigation and accountability by all U.N. bodies for crimes against humanity and genocide, from the 1980s to January 2026 uprisings,’ Jafarzadeh said. ‘Decades of inaction by Western governments have emboldened the regime. This must stop now.’

‘By electing Iran to help lead a commission devoted to democracy, women’s rights and non-violence, the U.N. makes itself into a mockery,’ said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch. ‘This is a regime that brutalizes women for not covering their hair, and that just massacred tens of thousands of its own civilians in two days.’

Neuer argued that governments had the ability to block the appointment but chose not to act. ‘The EU states know how to stop abusive regimes from winning these seats — they’ve done so in the recent past with Russia — but this time on Iran, they chose silence and complicity,’ he said. ‘By rewarding the Mullahs right after their slaughter of innocents, the U.N. has now sent a very dangerous message to Tehran.’

Lisa Daftari, an Iran analyst, said the optics of Iran holding a leadership role in a commission centered on social development and rights were deeply troubling.

‘For Iranian women who risk prison or worse just for taking off a headscarf, watching Tehran get a vice-chair on a U.N. social-development commission feels like a slap in the face.’

She added that broader patterns in U.N. voting and resolutions contribute to perceptions of bias.

‘When the same U.N. system has spent the last decade passing roughly 170-plus resolutions against Israel and only around 80 on all other countries combined, you don’t need a PhD to see there’s a bias problem,’ Daftari said. ‘When the U.N. has churned out well over a hundred anti-Israel resolutions in recent years while managing a fraction of that number on the world’s worst dictatorships, it looks less like moral leadership and more like political theater.’

Daftari rejected that procedural nature of United Nations committees and committees.

‘Some diplomats will wave this away as a procedural formality, but at the U.N. nothing is ever purely symbolic,’ she said. ‘The bottom line is that handing Iran’s regime a gavel on ‘social development’ confirms yet again that the place is biased and deeply hypocritical.’