Zohran Mamdani has been mayor of New York City for a few months and has already established a pattern so predictable you could set your watch to it. Step one: announce a massive new government spending program. Step two: make sure illegal aliens qualify. Step three: dare anyone to question it. Step four: act confused when the math doesn’t work and the fraud rolls in.
Wednesday’s installment: a $425 million universal child care program for 2-year-olds. Open to every family in the city regardless of “immigration status.” At a cost of $36,000 per child.
He announced it at a children’s museum. Because of course he did.
The Numbers
Let’s start with the price tag, because it’s the part Mamdani is hoping you’ll skip past.
The pilot program costs roughly $36,000 per toddler. That’s not a typo. Thirty-six thousand dollars per 2-year-old for one year of child care. City officials acknowledged Tuesday that this is approximately $13,000 more than the average cost of private child care in New York City.
Read that again. The government program costs more per child than private care. Not a little more. Thirteen thousand dollars more. Per kid. Per year.
Governor Hochul committed $73 million to fund the initial seats and the program is expected to balloon to $425 million by next year. By 2027, it’s supposed to serve roughly 12,000 children across all five boroughs, with the eventual goal of covering every 2-year-old in the city.
Twelve thousand children at $36,000 each is $432 million. For two-year-olds. In a city that’s simultaneously freezing rents, hiking taxes, cutting 5,000 police officers, and calling snowball attacks on cops a fun winter activity.
The Immigration Status Clause
The press release from Mamdani’s office confirmed what everyone expected: the program is open to families “regardless of immigration status.” That’s city hall code for illegal aliens qualify, no questions asked.
In a city already struggling with a migrant crisis that’s overwhelmed shelters, schools, and social services, the mayor just created a new $425 million magnet. Free child care for your 2-year-old, no documentation required, funded entirely by taxpayers who are watching their property taxes climb and their police force shrink.
This isn’t compassion. This is a policy designed to attract more demand than the system can handle, funded by people who didn’t vote for it, administered by a government that has demonstrated zero ability to prevent fraud in any program it’s ever run.
The Fraud Alarm
The timing of this announcement is almost comically bad. The entire country just spent weeks watching Minnesota’s Medicaid fraud scandal unfold — billions in taxpayer money stolen through programs designed to serve vulnerable populations, funneled through sham businesses and fake clients, with money allegedly ending up in the hands of Al-Shabaab terrorists.
On the same day Mamdani announced his child care program, news broke that a founder of a Minneapolis autism center admitted to paying kickbacks to Somali families in a $6 million scam. Tim Walz just sat through a congressional hearing where he couldn’t answer a single question about how spending on his state’s autism programs exploded 34,200 percent under his watch.
And Mamdani looked at all of that — the fraud, the hearings, the federal investigations, the halted Medicaid funding — and launched a program with the same fundamental design flaw: massive government spending with minimal verification requirements, open to a population that’s difficult to track and impossible to audit.
Nick Sortor’s reaction racked up over a million views: “This is going to be freaking LOADED with fraud.”
He’s not wrong. When you build a program that writes $36,000 checks per child with no immigration status verification, you’ve constructed the perfect fraud vehicle. Fake enrollments. Ghost children. Shell daycare operations collecting per-child payments for kids who don’t exist or don’t attend. It’s the Minnesota playbook applied to New York’s budget at ten times the scale.
The Museum Rollout
Mamdani announced the program at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling in Harlem. The press conference opened with a mother describing her desire to raise kids “in a city that looks like us, that has the values that we share” and declaring “diversity as the greatest strength of New York City.”
None of that has anything to do with child care policy. It has everything to do with framing the program as a cultural identity project rather than a fiscal one — because the fiscal argument falls apart the moment you look at the numbers.
$36,000 per child is more than many families earn in a year. It’s more than private daycare costs. It’s more than tuition at some private schools. And the city is planning to scale it to every 2-year-old in New York within a few years, on top of existing Pre-K and 3-K programs that already strain the budget.
The Mamdani Pattern
Rent freeze. Tax hikes. Police cuts. Diversity offices. Snowball-attack tolerance. And now, a $425 million child care program that costs more per child than private alternatives and is open to anyone who shows up, legal or not.
Every week brings a new spending announcement. Every announcement comes with a press conference full of emotional framing and zero fiscal analysis. And every program is designed with the kind of loose eligibility standards that make fraud not just possible but inevitable.
Mamdani’s New York isn’t being governed. It’s being run like a nonprofit with an unlimited credit card and no board of directors. The spending has no ceiling. The accountability has no floor. And the taxpayers funding all of it are watching their city become a laboratory for every progressive policy experiment that’s failed everywhere it’s been tried.
The Bottom Line
Somewhere in Minnesota, JD Vance just halted $259 million in Medicaid payments because the state couldn’t stop fraudsters from stealing money meant for autistic kids. The federal government is actively at war with the kind of loose, unverifiable spending programs that turn into ATMs for criminals.
And Mamdani just built another one. Bigger. More expensive. With fewer guardrails. In the biggest city in America.
“This is just the beginning,” the mayor said. “Universal child care is within reach — and we’re making it happen.”
He’s right about one thing. It is just the beginning. The fraud hasn’t even started yet.
