Politics
Stephen Miller, Channeling Trump, Has Built More Power Than Ever
When Stephen Miller met with Mark Zuckerberg at Mar-a-Lago late last year, the 39-year-old Trump adviser was in a position of power that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
Back then, Mr. Miller was a mere Senate staffer railing about the evils of immigration. Now he was holding forth on U.S. policy with the billionaire chief executive of Meta, a man he had vilified for years as a globalist bent on destroying the nation.
The scale had flipped.
Mr. Miller told Mr. Zuckerberg that he had an opportunity to help reform America, but it would be on President-elect Donald J. Trump’s terms. He made clear that Mr. Trump would crack down on immigration and go to war against the diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., culture that had been embraced by Meta and much of corporate America in recent years.
Mr. Zuckerberg was amenable. He signaled to Mr. Miller and his colleagues, including other senior Trump advisers, that he would do nothing to obstruct the Trump agenda, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting, who asked for anonymity to discuss a private conversation. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would instead focus solely on building tech products.
Mr. Zuckerberg blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook that encouraged employees’ self-expression in the workplace, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. He said new guidelines and a series of layoffs amounted to a reset and that more changes were coming.
Earlier this month, Mr. Zuckerberg’s political lieutenants previewed the changes to Mr. Miller in a private briefing. And on Jan. 10, Mr. Zuckerberg made them official: Meta would abolish its D.E.I. policy.
The meeting at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 27 represented more than just another tech billionaire bending the knee to Mr. Trump. It vividly demonstrated the power and influence of Mr. Miller, who in less than a decade has risen from an anti-immigrant agitator on Capitol Hill to one of the most powerful unelected people in America.
Officials from Meta declined to comment, as did Mr. Miller. A Trump transition spokeswoman declined to address a majority of the reporting.
Mr. Miller was influential in Mr. Trump’s first term but stands to be exponentially more so this time. He holds the positions of deputy chief of staff, with oversight of domestic policy, and homeland security adviser, which gives him range to coordinate among cabinet agencies. He will be a key legislative strategist and is expected to play an important role in crafting Mr. Trump’s speeches, as he has done since he joined the first Trump campaign in 2016.
Most significantly, Mr. Miller will be in charge of Mr. Trump’s signature issue and the one that Mr. Miller has been fixated on since childhood: immigration. And he has been working, in secrecy, to oversee the team drafting the dozens of executive orders that Mr. Trump will sign after he takes office on Jan. 20.
“I call Stephen ‘Trump’s brain,’” said Kevin McCarthy, the former House speaker who credited Mr. Miller — a private citizen at the time — with helping to rally Republican lawmakers to insert a sweeping border crackdown into a spending bill in 2023.
In the four years since Mr. Trump has been out of office, Mr. Miller has spent more time than any close Trump adviser mapping out a second-term playbook. He expanded on the hard-line first-term immigration policies; he deepened his relationships with House members, senators and influential right-wing media figures; he built a nationwide donor network to fund a nonprofit that he used as an additional tool of influence; and he quietly cultivated a relationship with the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.
Mr. Miller will re-enter government with even more trust and credibility with the president, fewer internal rivals and a more expansive team reporting to him.
Those who dealt with — and often dismissed — Mr. Miller a decade ago when he was a young Senate staffer, emailing reporters late at night on behalf of Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, with lurid stories about immigrants committing crimes, can hardly believe the scope of his power.
Taking Charge
After Mr. Trump won the election in November, Mr. Miller moved his family down to Palm Beach, Fla., and took a major role in the transition.
People briefed on the executive orders that his team is drafting say they include an attempt to end birthright citizenship; a designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations; and a reinstatement of Title 42, which allows the United States to seal the border with Mexico if there is a public health threat. (Mr. Trump’s advisers have spent months trying to identify a disease that will help them build a case for Title 42, since there is no such emergency at the moment.)
It will be up to Mr. Trump to decide which orders to issue, but Mr. Miller is focused on immigration. The homeland security adviser’s other responsibilities include dealing with natural disasters like the one raging in California, his home state. (The fires destroyed Mr. Miller’s parents’ home, people close to him said.) Mr. Miller is expected to shift some of his portfolio to the national security adviser.
As he works out his priorities, Mr. Miller appears to have learned two key lessons from the first Trump term.
The first is to flood the zone. He believes that those he regards as Mr. Trump’s enemies — Democrats, the media, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and portions of the federal bureaucracy — are depleted and only have so much bandwidth for outrage and opposition. Mr. Miller has told people that the goal is to overwhelm them with a blitz of activity.
The second lesson has been to operate with as much secrecy as possible to prevent anyone from finding ways to obstruct the Trump agenda. As a congressional staffer, Mr. Miller was freewheeling in his digital communications. But since working for Mr. Trump, who doesn’t use email and regards people who take notes with suspicion, he puts almost nothing in writing. Instead, he works through emissaries.
The protectiveness around the executive orders is particularly notable. An incoming administration would usually send the drafts to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, where a career lawyer — walled off from the outgoing administration’s political appointees — reviews them for form and legality and suggests improvements. For the most part, Mr. Trump’s first transition is said to have followed that practice.
But Mr. Miller is using a team of lawyers from outside the Justice Department to vet the orders, a person with knowledge of the situation said — a sign of Trump aides’ general distrust of the Justice Department, which brought three special counsel investigations into Mr. Trump and twice indicted him.
In the meantime, Mr. Miller is trying to eliminate any roadblocks to Mr. Trump’s immigration plans. Mass deportations will require arrangements with other countries to take in the migrants; to that end, Mr. Miller lobbied for his ally, the former ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, to be chosen as deputy secretary of state under Marco Rubio, the Florida senator whom Mr. Trump has chosen to lead the agency.
Knowing the White House will need billions in congressional appropriations for the biggest deportation operation in American history — which he’s previously said will include sweeping raids and use of the U.S. military to build massive camps to detain the migrants — Mr. Miller has spent the past four years building relationships with lawmakers.
It appears to have paid off.
When Mike Johnson addressed the House Republican conference after securing the speakership, he made a point of singling out Mr. Miller for praise. Senator Jim Banks of Indiana, a former House member, said he talked to Mr. Miller nearly every day for the four years that Mr. Trump was out of the White House. And Senator Mike Lee of Utah said there had been many times he pondered a new policy, when “all of a sudden a thought will occur to me: I wonder what Stephen Miller thinks of this one.”
The Long Game
The last time Mr. Miller participated in a Trump transition, after the surprise victory of 2016, he was fairly low in the Washington power structure.
He had become a minor celebrity on the right in 2006 for vocally defending a group of Duke University lacrosse players who had been accused — falsely, it later became clear — of rape. But he was best known to insiders as the scrappy congressional staffer for Mr. Sessions. Much of Washington’s establishment regarded Mr. Miller as a racist, and as an irritant, mocking his over-the-top pronouncements and skinny ties.
He joined the Trump campaign part time in late 2015 and full time in early 2016, one of a handful of original aides on a small team. He worked like a man possessed, staying up all night to write Mr. Trump’s speeches, a task assigned to him by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. He channeled Mr. Trump’s voice better than any other adviser.
But he entered the executive branch knowing little about how it worked, and it showed. The travel ban executive order against mostly Muslim-majority countries, crafted in secret by an ally of Mr. Miller’s amid concern some Trump appointees would try to stop it, was criticized as sloppily drafted and was initially blocked by the courts.
Mr. Miller mostly stayed out of the factional warfare that defined the early years of Mr. Trump’s first term. He was friendly with the more moderate West Wing camp — people like Mr. Kushner and Hope Hicks — and with those on the sharp edge of Mr. Trump’s movement.
People who have worked closely with Mr. Miller say they cannot recall him ever expending his political capital on an ally who fell out of favor with Mr. Trump. When Mr. Sessions, his former boss who was now attorney general, became persona non grata with Mr. Trump over the Russia investigations, Mr. Miller made it clear that his allegiance was to the president.
His strategy paid off. He survived. And his vision for immigration — including deeply restrictive and xenophobic policies — are now at the center of Mr. Trump’s economic and cultural agenda.
Unlike many others, he stuck with Mr. Trump after the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. He remained a paid adviser and a frequent Fox News presence promoting the Trump agenda, and made an early public endorsement of Mr. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign at a time when many Republicans wanted to move on.
Mr. Miller, who comes from a wealthy family, did something else that Mr. Trump appreciated: He did not try to leverage his Trump ties into lucrative consulting contracts. The compensation he drew from his nonprofit, the America First Legal Foundation, in 2023 — $266,000 — was far less than what he could have earned working as a political gun for hire.
“Some people in Trump’s world have been there for career advantage or transactional reasons,” said Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who is close to both Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller. “But Stephen believes in the president’s agenda deeply.”
He plays the long game on relationships, scouting people who may be influential several years in the future. He built a relationship with JD Vance ahead of his successful Ohio Senate primary, years before he would become Mr. Trump’s running mate.
He also can be a political shape-shifter when it’s expedient for him.
His long-term demonization of “radical Islam” went relatively quiet at moments during the 2024 presidential race, as he encouraged the Trump campaign to issue inviting statements to Muslims in Michigan — part of a strategy to exploit Muslims’ anger over the Biden administration’s support for Israel, according to three people with direct knowledge.
Mr. Miller is generally well-liked on the Trump staff, though he is regarded as unusually intense and has been known to berate government officials he deemed obstructive. He has strongly held opinions about even minor matters, like men’s fashion. Specifically: fabrics, patterns, colors and collars.
He never argues with Mr. Trump, certainly never in front of others. Once it’s clear to him that Mr. Trump is headed in a certain direction, he sets aside his reservations.
In recent weeks, according to multiple people with direct knowledge, Mr. Miller has done little, if anything, to try to talk Mr. Trump out of his support for H-1B visas to import high-skilled foreign workers — despite the fact that Mr. Miller has spent much of his career condemning such visas.
Another recent example: Mr. Miller was initially surprised that Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor, was chosen by Mr. Trump for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Mr. Miller had wanted Thomas D. Homan, whom Mr. Trump had picked as his border czar, for the D.H.S. role, according to two people who spoke to him at the time. But when it was clear Mr. Trump was set on the idea, he did not try to dissuade him.
“He has the president’s complete trust,” said Mr. McCarthy. “Trump’s complained about everyone. Never him.”
Mr. Trump may not complain about Mr. Miller, but he does occasionally poke at his obsession with immigrants — a hostility that goes far beyond Mr. Trump’s. In one meeting during the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump said that if it was up to Mr. Miller there would be only 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like Mr. Miller, according to a person with knowledge of the comment. Karoline Leavitt, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, denied the account.
The Outside-In Strategy
Since he was a high schooler in Santa Monica, Calif., obsessed with Rush Limbaugh, Mr. Miller has cultivated right-wing media personalities. He is close to Tucker Carlson and Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, but he also follows the new wave of podcasters and comedians.
Mr. Miller has told friends how pleased he is that the Trump movement has shifted the cultural dial on his favored policies. Prominent Democrats have scrambled to rebrand themselves as tough on immigration, and officials such as New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, have welcomed tighter restrictions after an influx of migrants in their cities.
Mr. Miller has spent much of the past four years figuring out how to build pressure from outside of government to help enact Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Less than a month after Mr. Trump left office, he founded the America First Legal Foundation, a nonprofit “public interest law firm.” Mr. Miller, who is not a lawyer himself, cast the group as a conservative answer to the American Civil Liberties Union, helping the little guy fight big government or big tech.
His group quickly became a fund-raising powerhouse, raising $44 million in 2022.
Mr. Miller’s group used some of that money on legal work. It filed more than 100 lawsuits, legal briefs and other actions, and helped block a Biden administration plan to offer debt relief to Black farmers, which Mr. Miller’s group said was discriminatory.
But it spent far more on advertising: $32 million, which was nearly 70 percent of its total spending. Some of those ads seemed designed to damage Democrats in the run-up to elections. In 2022, for instance, the group paid for ads in swing states that accused the Biden administration of “anti-white bigotry.”
Now, as Mr. Trump returns to the White House, the America First Legal Foundation wants to serve as an attack dog for the Trump administration. In December, the group sent letters to 249 city and state officials in “sanctuary” jurisdictions that have said they will not cooperate with federal immigration authorities to help them arrest immigrants. If these officials do not participate in Mr. Trump’s crackdown, Mr. Miller’s group said, the local officials could be considered to be illegally “harboring” undocumented immigrants.
Experts said it would be difficult for the group to actually sue local officials, but, as before, Mr. Miller’s group is contemplating a campaign outside the courtroom. It filed public-records requests with 17 states and cities, seeking evidence that they were preparing to defy Mr. Trump’s crackdown. And it set up a website called “Sanctuary Strongholds,” designed to direct public pressure against state and local officials.
Key to some of those outside efforts will be one of the relationships Mr. Miller has established in the last few years — an alliance almost as valuable as his one with Mr. Trump. Mr. Miller found common cause with Mr. Musk, who had begun describing undocumented immigrants as a threat to Western civilization. Mr. Miller’s wife, Katie, is also working with Mr. Musk, at his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Mr. Miller began advising Mr. Musk on his political donations, which were at the time a closely held secret, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. A nonprofit called Citizens for Sanity, which tax filings show is closely tied to Mr. Miller’s group, raised $94 million in 2022 and paid for ads that attacked Democrats’ policies on transgender youth. The Wall Street Journal reported that $50 million of the donations to Citizens for Sanity that year came from an outside group that Mr. Musk had been donating to. The America First Legal Foundation and Citizens for Sanity did not respond to questions sent by The New York Times.
Mr. Miller is also secretive about his relationship with Mr. Musk. But one person willing to discuss it on condition of anonymity said Mr. Musk had once told him: “I want doers. And most of these people in government, that’s not how they are.”
The person recalled that Mr. Musk allowed for one exception: “But Stephen Miller — I love Stephen Miller. He’s a doer.”
Annie Karni contributed reporting from Washington.
Former vice presidential contender and current aw-shucks Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz announced this week that he won’t run for a third term, dogged by a scandal over child care funds that may or may not be going to fraudsters.
It’s a politically driven mess that not coincidentally focuses on a Black immigrant community, tying the real problem of scammers stealing government funds to the growing MAGA frenzy around an imaginary version of America that thrives on whiteness and Christianity.
Despite the ugliness of current racial politics in America, the fraud remains real, and not just in Minnesota. California has lost billions to cheats in the last few years, leaving our own governor, who also harbors D.C. dreams, vulnerable to the same sort of attack that has taken down Walz.
As we edge closer to the 2028 presidential election, Republicans and Democrats alike will probably come at Gavin Newsom with critiques of the state’s handling of COVID-19 funds, unemployment insurance and community college financial aid to name a few of the honeypots that have been successfully swiped by thieves during his tenure.
In fact, President Trump said as much on his social media barf-fest this week.
“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun,” he wrote.
Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson also said he’s conducting his own “investigation.” And Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton is claiming his fraud tip line has turned up “(c)orruption, fraud and abuse on an epic scale.”
Just to bring home that this vulnerability is serious and bipartisan, Rep. Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley congressman rumored to have his own interest in the Oval Office, is also circling the fraud feast like a vulture eyeing his next meal.
“I want to hear from residents in my district and across the state about waste, mismanagement, inefficiencies, or fraud that we must tackle,” Khanna wrote on social media.
Newsom’s spokesman Izzy Gardon questioned the validity of many fraud claims.
“In the actual world where adults govern,” Gardon said, “Gavin Newsom has been cleaning house. Since taking office, he’s blocked over $125 BILLION in fraud, arrested criminal parasites leaching off of taxpayers, and protected taxpayers from the exact kind of scam artists Trump celebrates, excuses, and pardons.”
What exactly are we talking about here? Well, it’s a pick-your-scandal type of thing. Even before the federal government dumped billions in aid into the states during the pandemic, California’s unemployment system was plagued by inefficiencies and yes, scammers. But when the world shut down and folks needed that government cash to survive, malfeasance skyrocketed.
Every thief with a half-baked plan — including CEOs, prisoners behind bars and overseas organized crime rackets — came for California’s cash, and seemingly got it. The sad part is these weren’t criminal geniuses. More often than not, they were low-level swindlers looking at a system full of holes because it was trying to do too much too fast.
In a matter of months, billions had been siphoned away. A state audit in 2021 found that at least $10 billion had been paid out on suspicious unemployment claims — never mind small business loans or other types of aid. An investigation by CalMatters in 2023 suggested the final figure may be up to triple that amount for unemployment. In truth, no one knows exactly how much was stolen — in California, or across the country.
It hasn’t entirely stopped. California is still paying out fraudulent unemployment claims at too high a rate, totaling up to $1.5 billion over the last few years — more than $500 million in 2024 alone, according to the state auditor.
But that’s not all. Enterprising thieves looked elsewhere when COVID-19 money largely dried up. Recently, that has been our community colleges, where millions in federal student aid has been lost to grifters who use bots to sign up for classes, receive government money to help with school, then disappear. Another CalMatters investigation using data obtained from a public records request found that up to 34% of community college applications in 2024 may have been false — though that number represents fraudulent admissions that were flagged and blocked, Gardon points out.
Still, community college fraud will probably be a bigger issue for Newsom because it’s fresher, and can be tied (albeit disingenuously) to immigrants and progressive policies.
California allows undocumented residents to enroll in community colleges, and it made those classes free — two terrific policies that have been exploited by the unscrupulous. For a while, community colleges didn’t do enough to ensure that students were real people, because they didn’t require enough proof of identity. This was in part to accommodate vulnerable students such as foster kids, homeless people and undocumented folks who lacked papers.
With no up-front costs for attempting to enroll, phonies threw thousands of identities at the system’s 116 schools, which were technologically unprepared for the assaults. These “ghost” students were often accepted and given grants and loans.
My former colleague Kaitlyn Huamani reported that in 2024, scammers stole roughly $8.4 million in federal financial aid and more than $2.7 million in state aid from our community colleges. That‘s a pittance compared with the tens of billions that was handed out in state and federal financial aid, but more than enough for a political fiasco.
As Walz would probably explain if nuanced policy conversations were still a thing, it’s both a fair and unfair criticism to blame these robberies on a governor alone — state government should be careful of its cash and aggressive in protecting it, and the buck stops with the governor, but crises and technology have collided to create opportunities for swindlers that frankly few governmental leaders, from the feds on down, have handled with any skill or luck.
The crooks have simply been smarter and faster than the rest of us to capitalize first on the pandemic, then on evolving technology including AI that makes scamming easier and scalable to levels our institutions were unprepared to handle.
Since being so roundly fleeced during the pandemic, multiple state and federal agencies have taken steps in combating fraud — including community colleges using their own AI tools to stop fake students before they get in.
And the state is holding thieves accountable. Newsom hired a former Trump-appointed federal prosecutor, McGregor Scott, to go after scam artists on unemployment. And other county, state and federal prosecutors have also dedicated resources to clawing back some of the lost money.
With the slow pace of our courts (burdened by their own aging technology), many of those cases are still ongoing or just winding up. For example, 24 L.A. County employees were charged in recent months with allegedly stealing more than $740,000 in unemployment benefits, which really is chump change in this whole mess.
Another California man recently pleaded guilty to allegedly cheating his way into $15.9 million in federal loans through the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs.
And in one of the most colorful schemes, four Californians with nicknames including “Red boy” and “Scooby” allegedly ran a scam that boosted nearly $250 million in federal tax refunds before three of them attempted to murder the fourth to keep him from ratting them out to the feds.
There are literally hundreds of cases across the country of pandemic fraud. And these schemes are just the tip of the cash-berg. Fraudsters are also targeting fire relief funds, food benefits — really, any pot of public money is fair game to them. And the truth is, the majority of that stolen money is gone for good.
So it’s hard to hear the numbers and not be shocked and angry, especially as the Golden State is faced with a budget shortfall that may be as much as $18 billion.
Whether you blame Newsom personally or not for all this fraud, it’s hard to be forgiving of so much public money being handed to scoundrels when our schools are in need, our healthcare in jeopardy and our bills on an upward trajectory.
The failure is going to stick to somebody, and it doesn’t take a criminal mastermind to figure out who it’s going to be.
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The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a pair of laws restricting abortion access violate the state constitution, including the country’s first explicit ban on abortion pills.
The court, in a 4-1 ruling, sided with the state’s only abortion clinic and others who had sued over the abortion bans passed since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, which returned the power to make laws on abortion back to the states.
Despite Wyoming being one of the most conservative states, the ruling handed down by justices who were all appointed by Republican governors upheld every previous lower court ruling that the abortion bans violated the state constitution.
Wellspring Health Access in Casper, the abortion access advocacy group Chelsea’s Fund and four women, including two obstetricians, argued that the laws violated a state constitutional amendment affirming that competent adults have the right to make their own health care decisions.
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The Wyoming Supreme Court ruled that a pair of laws restricting abortion access violate the state constitution. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Voters approved the constitutional amendment in 2012 in response to the federal Affordable Care Act, which is also known as Obamacare.
The justices in Wyoming found that the amendment was not written to apply to abortion but noted that it is not their job to “add words” to the state constitution.
“But lawmakers could ask Wyoming voters to consider a constitutional amendment that would more clearly address this issue,” the justices wrote.
Wellspring Health Access President Julie Burkhart said in a statement that the ruling upholds abortion as “essential health care” that should not be met with government interference.
“Our clinic will remain open and ready to provide compassionate reproductive health care, including abortions, and our patients in Wyoming will be able to obtain this care without having to travel out of state,” Burkhart said.
Wellspring Health Access opened as the only clinic in the state to offer surgical abortions in 2023, a year after a firebombing stopped construction and delayed its opening. A woman is serving a five-year prison sentence after she admitted to breaking in and lighting gasoline that she poured over the clinic floors.
Wellspring Health Access opened as the only clinic in the state to offer surgical abortions in 2023, a year after a firebombing stopped construction. (AP)
Attorneys representing the state had argued that abortion cannot violate the Wyoming constitution because it is not a form of health care.
Republican Gov. Mark Gordon expressed disappointment in the ruling and called on state lawmakers meeting later this winter to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion that residents could vote on this fall.
An amendment like that would require a two-thirds vote to be introduced as a nonbudget matter in the monthlong legislative session that will primarily address the state budget, although it would have significant support in the Republican-dominated legislature.
“This ruling may settle, for now, a legal question, but it does not settle the moral one, nor does it reflect where many Wyoming citizens stand, including myself. It is time for this issue to go before the people for a vote,” Gordon said in a statement.
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Gov. Mark Gordon expressed disappointment in the ruling. (Getty Images)
One of the laws overturned by the state’s high court attempted to ban abortion, but with exceptions in cases where it is needed to protect a pregnant woman’s life or in cases of rape or incest. The other law would have made Wyoming the only state to explicitly ban abortion pills, although other states have implemented de facto bans on abortion medication by broadly restricting abortion.
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Abortion has remained legal in the state since Teton County District Judge Melissa Owens blocked the bans while the lawsuit challenging the restrictions moved forward. Owens struck down the laws as unconstitutional in 2024.
Last year, Wyoming passed additional laws requiring abortion clinics to be licensed surgical centers and women to receive ultrasounds before having medication abortions. A judge in a separate lawsuit blocked those laws from taking effect while that case moves forward.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state Democratic leaders accused President Trump of unleashing a political vendetta after he announced plans to freeze roughly $10 billion in federal funding for child care and social services programs in California and four other Democrat-controlled states.
Trump justified the action in comments posted on his social media platform Truth Social, where he accused Newsom of widespread fraud. The governor’s office dismissed the accusation as “deranged.”
Trump’s announcement came amid a broader administration push to target Democratic-led states over alleged fraud in taxpayer-funded programs, following sweeping prosecutions in Minnesota. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the planned funding freeze, which was first reported by the New York Post.
California officials said they have received no formal notice and argued the president is using unsubstantiated claims to justify a move that could jeopardize child care and social services for low-income families.
How we got here
Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social on Tuesday that under Newsom, California is “more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible???” In the post, Trump used a derogatory nickname for Newsom that has become popular with the governor’s critics, referring to him as “Newscum.”
“The Fraud Investigation of California has begun,” Trump wrote.
The president also retweeted a story by the New York Post that said his Department of Health and Human Services will freeze taxpayer funding from the Child Care Development Fund, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which is known as CalWORKS in California, and the Social Services Block Grant program. Health and Human Services said the affected states are California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York.
“For too long, Democrat-led states and Governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” said Andrew Nixon, a department spokesperson. “Under the Trump Administration, we are ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars are being used for legitimate purposes. We will ensure these states are following the law and protecting hard-earned taxpayer money.”
The department announced last month that all 50 states will have to provide additional levels of verification and administrative data before they receive more funding from the Child Care and Development Fund after a series of fraud schemes at Minnesota day-care centers run by Somali residents.
“The Trump Administration is using the moral guise of eliminating ‘fraud and abuse’ to undermine essential programs and punish families and children who depend on these services to survive, many of whom have no other options if this funding disappears,” Kristin McGuire, president of Young Invincibles, a young-adult nonprofit economic advocacy group, said in a statement. “This is yet another ideologically motivated attack on states that treats millions of families as pawns in a political game.”
California pushes back
Newsom’s office brushed off Trump’s post about fraud allegations, calling the president “a deranged, habitual liar whose relationship with reality ended years ago.” Newsom himself said he welcomes federal fraud investigations in the state, adding in an interview on MS NOW that aired Monday night: “Bring it on. … If he has some unique insight and information, I look forward to partnering with him. I can’t stand fraud.”
However, Newsom said cutting off funding hurts hardworking families who rely on the assistance.
“You want to support families? You believe in families? Then you believe in supporting child care and child-care workers in the workforce,” Newsom told MS NOW.
California has not been notified of any changes to federal child-care or social services funding. H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the Department of Finance, said the only indication from Washington that California’s child-care funding could be in jeopardy was the vague 5 a.m. post Tuesday by the president on Truth Social.
“The president tosses these social media missives in the same way Mardi Gras revelers throw beads on Bourbon Street — with zero regard for accuracy or precision,” Palmer said.
In the current state budget, Palmer said, California’s child-care spending is $7.3 billion, of which $2.2 billion is federal dollars. Newsom is set to unveil his budget proposal Friday for the fiscal year that begins July 1, which will mark the governor’s final spending plan before he terms out. Newsom has acknowledged that he is considering a 2028 bid for president, but has repeatedly brushed aside reporters’ questions about it, saying his focus remains on governing California.
Palmer said while details about the potential threat to federal child-care dollars remain unclear, what is known is that federal dollars are not like “a spigot that will be turned off by the end of the week.”
“There is no immediate cutoff that will happen,” Palmer said.
Since Trump took office, California has filed dozens of legal actions to block the president’s policy changes and funding cuts, and the state has prevailed in many of them.
What happened in Minnesota
Federal prosecutors say Minnesota has been hit by some of the largest fraud schemes involving state-run, federally funded programs in the country. Federal prosecutors estimate that as much as half of roughly $18 billion paid to 14 Minnesota programs since 2018 may be fraudulent, with providers accused of billing for services never delivered and diverting money for personal use.
The scale of the fraud has drawn national attention and fueled the Trump administration’s decision to freeze child-care funds while demanding additional safeguards before doling out money, moves that critics say risk harming families who rely on the programs. Gov. Tim Walz has ordered a third-party audit and appointed a director of program integrity. Amid the fallout, Walz announced he will not seek a third term.
Outrage over the fraud reached a fever pitch in the White House after a video posted online by an influencer purported to expose extensive fraud at Somali-run child-care centers in Minnesota. On Monday, that influencer, Nick Shirley, posted on the social media site X, “I ENDED TIM WALZ,” a claim that prompted calls from conservative activists to shift scrutiny to Newsom and California next.
Right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson posted on X that his team will be traveling to California next week to show “how criminal California fraud is robbing our nation blind.”
California officials have acknowledged fraud failures in the past, most notably at the Employment Development Department during the COVID-19 pandemic, when weakened safeguards led to billions of dollars in unemployment payments later deemed potentially fraudulent.
An independent state audit released last month found administrative vulnerabilities in some of California’s social services programs but stopped short of alleging widespread fraud or corruption. The California state auditor added the Department of Social Services to its high-risk list because of persistent errors in calculating CalFresh benefits, which provides food assistance to those in need — a measure of payment accuracy rather than criminal activity — warning that federal law changes could eventually force the state to absorb billions of dollars in additional costs if those errors are not reduced.
What’s at stake in California
The Trump administration’s plans to freeze federal child-care, welfare and social services funding would affect $7.3 billion in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funding, $2.4 billion for child-care subsidies and more than $800 million for social services programs in the five states.
The move was quickly criticized as politically motivated because the targeted states were all Democrat-led.
“Trump is now illegally freezing childcare and other funding for working families, but only in blue states,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said in a statement. “He says it’s because of ‘fraud,’ but it has nothing to do with fraud and everything to do with politics. Florida had the largest Medicaid fraud in U.S. history yet isn’t on this list.”
Added California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister): “It is unconscionable for Trump and Republicans to rip away billions of dollars that support child care and families in need, and this has nothing to do with fraud. California taxpayers pay for these programs — period — and Trump has no right to steal from our hard-working residents. We will continue to fight back.”
Times staff writer Daniel Miller contributed to this report.
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