A government program built to help working families afford childcare now sits at the center of a mounting controversy in Seattle, where more than $5 million in taxpayer funds appears to have flowed toward businesses showing little proof they ever cared for a single child.
The Post Millennial’s Katie Daviscourt spent weeks documenting the pattern, visiting over 20 addresses registered as daycare providers across two South Seattle neighborhoods.
Seattle’s Child Care Assistance Program forms the backbone of the story.
Designed to subsidize childcare costs for low- and middle-income households, the program allows registered providers to draw monthly government payments tied to the number of children they claim to serve.
That structure, investigators found, may have created an opening for abuse.
Take Daisy Family Childcare. From the street, the property looks less like a daycare and more like an upscale private estate.
Financial records tied to the business show nearly $2 million collected in taxpayer money, with monthly draws now running around $70,000.
Yet when Daviscourt arrived in the middle of the day, the hours when a working daycare is normally loudest with activity, the property showed no sign of children present.
A few blocks away, Aboo Family Daycare tells a similar story. Public payment records list the business at roughly $40,000 in monthly government funding.
One neighbor who has watched the property for years said he had already reached his own conclusion about the operation.
He told Daviscourt he has believed for years that the business amounts to a scam.
Further into the neighborhood, Hormuud Home Family Daycare became the site of a tense exchange.
Two women standing outside grew visibly irritated when Daviscourt asked simple questions about enrolling a child.
The property sits inside a stretch of South Seattle that Daviscourt referred to as “Little Mogadishu.”
A map compiled during the investigation revealed more than a dozen registered daycare businesses packed into that single corridor.
Star Family Home Daycare, located in the same area, produced an equally combative response.
A woman connected to the address refused outright to engage with questions about the business.
Pressed on whether the building actually functioned as a daycare, she answered, “I don’t care, I’m not going to answer.”
That property, according to funding records, brings in close to $30,000 a month in public assistance dollars.
Hostility followed Daviscourt to yet another location.
A man exited the building and immediately questioned her political motives, asking whether she and her cameraman were “Trump people.”
He then labeled the two “haters” and ordered them off the property, telling them to “get out of here.”
Not every neighbor was combative.
One resident described the sheer density of daycare businesses in the area, saying there are “so many” of them, while suggesting the people behind them are mainly operating for their “family.”
Adding up the properties Daviscourt visited, the investigation identified more than 20 addresses registered under the program across just two neighborhoods, with combined potential misuse exceeding $5 million.
Three of the businesses named in the reporting, Daisy Family Childcare, Aboo Family Daycare, and Star Family Daycare, together draw close to $140,000 every month in public subsidies.
Projected across a full year, that trio alone would account for close to $1.68 million in government payments, a figure separate from the almost $2 million Daisy Family Childcare has already collected to date.
None of the operators confronted during the investigation produced records, staff, or enrolled children to support their funding claims.
At each stop, a consistent pattern emerged: locked doors, defensive answers, and buildings that appeared empty despite steady month-to-month payments from public coffers.
The investigation does not identify any single government office as having flagged these properties before Daviscourt’s visits.
It remains unclear whether Washington state or the city of Seattle has since opened a formal review of the specific daycare businesses named in the reporting.
What is documented, through property visits, funding records, and on-camera confrontations, is a cluster of taxpayer-backed daycare businesses that struggled, address after address, to demonstrate they were doing the work they were being paid to do.
