States say paperwork tied to $10B funding freeze is an intentionally ‘impossible task’

(Capitol News Illinois) – When the Illinois attorney general on Jan. 9 sued the Trump administration for freezing $1 billion in child care funding for Illinois, he said the freeze came with no real accusations or proof of fraud and accused the administration of making unreasonable requests for documents targeting Democratic-led states.

The Trump administration says it’s aiming to combat fraud in social services. But the five blue states targeted in the freeze say it’s a political move, that they already protect against  fraud, and the administration intentionally gave them “an impossible task on an impossible timeline.”

Attorney General Kwame Raoul joined the four other states — California, Colorado, Minnesota and New York — to secure a temporary restraining order against Health and Human Services and its Administration for Children and Families division last week.

A restraining order, granted by Judge Arun Subramanian in the Southern District of New York, expires on Jan. 23. The parties now seek to prove in court that the administration’s freezing of funds was unlawful and its request for years of documentation to have funds released is an unreasonable one with political motivations.

“Congress has created statutory schemes that constrain the executive branch in how it can identify and sanction noncompliance or fraud by recipients of the ACF Funds. The statutes are clear, and do not permit the ‘shoot first ask questions later’ approach Defendants have taken; Defendants have performed none of the elements of these statutory processes,” the lawsuit states.

“Let’s also be clear that the president’s actions have nothing to do with fraud,” Raoul said in a Jan. 9 news conference. “My office regularly works to investigate and prosecute individuals who defraud Illinois taxpayers.”

Fraud investigations

Online, there are multiple ways to report fraud to the Illinois Department of Human Services, which is the agency that administers federal child care program money. There’s also a way to report fraud to the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services.

Both also have fraud hotlines.

“IDHS is engaged in ongoing, regular reviews and auditing of organizations that receive state and federal funding as standard protocol,” the department said in an email.

There are also ways to report fraud to the federal government online, and through a hotline.

The Administration for Children and Families initially said the child care funds would be frozen until the agency received and reviewed documents from the five states.

The freeze came in the wake of a wide-ranging fraud scandal in Minnesota that’s led to dozens of people being convicted in schemes involving over $1 billion in funds. The states contend the Trump administration seized on that scandal and exaggerated characterizations of it in right-wing media reports as justification for the five-state freeze.

The documents the feds requested

Illinois received three letters on Jan. 6 laying out which documents were required for three separate programs targeted in the freeze. Each letter cited concerns that Illinois was providing benefits to immigrants lacking permanent legal status, but none provided proof.

“These concerns have been heightened by recent federal prosecutions and additional allegations that substantial portions of federal resources were fraudulently diverted away from the American families they were intended to assist,” the letters say.

Read more: Illinois Child Care and Development Fund letter | Social Services Block Grant letter | Temporary Assistance for Needy Families letter

The five states rejected that assertion in their lawsuit.

“As Defendants know, that is an impossible task on an impossible timeline, offered only as pretext to maintain the freeze against Plaintiff States,” the lawsuit states.

For the Child Care Development fund, the Administration for Children and Families is asking for the documented attendance for subsidized child care services, which include the days and hours when care is provided as well as payment information. The administration said it will use the data to decide whether the money the state gets is “‘reasonable, allowable, and allocable.’”

The requirements for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, and the Social Services Block Grant, or SSBG, programs targeted in the freeze are more detailed and ask for the same types of documentation for three areas.

First, the TANF and SSBG letters require Illinois to provide the “complete universe” of administrative data that exist for every program recipient from at least 2022-2025. Raoul estimates that hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans receive aid from these programs.

The letters ask for a recipient’s name, address, date of birth, Social Security number (if collected), the recipient’s Alien Registration Number (if applicable) and any other state ID the person uses for the program.

Second, the letters ask for documentation that shows Illinois has verified the eligibility of applicants and recipients. Only U.S. citizens and “qualified aliens” are eligible for the programs. The letter asks Illinois to include the “policies, procedures, system controls, and verification records” the state uses to confirm a person’s status.

Third, the letters request a full list of “all organizations, subcontractors, service providers, local agencies, community groups, and any other entities” that received program funds from Illinois from 2019-2025. The administration requested information for each organization about the amount of funding provided, the purpose of the award that was provided and documentation about how Illinois oversees the use of the money.

The administration gave the states until Jan. 20 to submit the information for the TANF and SSBG funds.

“In short, Defendants have publicly stoked allegations of fraud, including Plaintiff States purportedly providing unlawful benefits to undocumented immigrants, regardless of whether they have been substantiated, and used those speculative allegations as a pretextual justification to punish perceived political enemies of the Trump Administration by unlawfully withholding critical funding pending purported fraud detection measures unauthorized by any statute,” the lawsuit states.

In a news release announcing the freeze, the administration said the action against Illinois and the other four states is part of a nationwide system, even though only five states were targeted.

(Reporting by Nikoel Hytrek, Capitol News Illinois)

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation

This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.