The federal government helps low-income parents pay for child care through a program called the Child Care and Development Block Grant. In Wisconsin, it covers more than 18,500 children age five and under — about 18% of the kids who qualify, according to the First Five Years Fund. The average cost of care in the state is $17,963 a year.
Glenn Grothman wrote a bill that can shut a state out of that program entirely.
Not for stealing. For having an error rate.
What the CRACKDOWN Act does
The bill is H.R. 7721, and Grothman gave it a name he clearly enjoyed: Combating Regulatory Abuse, Closing Known Deficiencies, and Overseeing Waste Nationwide. CRACKDOWN.
He introduced it on February 26, 2026. A week later the Education and Workforce Committee approved it. Everything below comes from the committee's own report, House Report 119-587, which is the official record of what the bill does and how it moved.
Two changes:
- It cuts the improper-payment threshold from 10% to 5%. Under current rules, a state that goes over 10% has to file a corrective action plan. Grothman's bill drops that trigger to 5% and writes it into permanent law.
- It adds a death penalty. If a state's improper payment rate tops 5% in two consecutive fiscal years, the bill says that state "shall be ineligible to receive funds under this subchapter" — unless it satisfies the Secretary of Health and Human Services that it will fix things.
Read that again. A state goes over 5% twice, and every low-income family in that state can lose its child care assistance — unless one Cabinet secretary decides otherwise.
Grothman then made it broader. In the March 5 markup he offered an amendment "to clarify that the bill applies to all improper payments, not just overpayments." That passed by voice vote. So a state that underpays providers is now racking up the same score that can get it thrown out of the program.
"Improper payment" does not mean fraud
This is the whole thing, and it is not a matter of opinion. The Government Accountability Office has said it plainly, and the committee report quotes it: "While all fraudulent payments are considered improper, not all improper payments are due to fraud."
An improper payment is any payment made in the wrong amount, to an ineligible recipient, or for an ineligible service. That includes:
- A payment that was too small.
- A payment that was probably fine but the file was missing a document.
- A payment to a family whose eligibility paperwork was late.
None of that is theft. It is administration. And Grothman's bill treats a state that runs a 5.1% error rate for two years the same way you would treat a criminal enterprise.
The tools he says don't exist already exist
The pitch for this bill is that nobody is watching. The committee report's minority views walk through what is actually already on the books:
- States above 10% already must file corrective action plans, and HHS's Office of Child Care already oversees that process.
- HHS conducts on-site monitoring reviews of every state on a three-year cycle, and has started publishing the resulting oversight reports.
- Federal law already requires states to arrange independent audits, and requires them to repay the federal government for misspent funds — or HHS can simply deduct the money from future payments.
- HHS can already "disallow improperly spent funds, deduct improperly spent funds from subsequent allotments, take some combination of the actions, or impose other sanctions."
- The GAO issued nine recommendations in 2020 for tightening oversight of the fund. HHS has addressed all nine.
Grothman's committee held a markup on eight fraud bills at once. Per the minority views, the majority "did not produce any evidence of widespread fraud in the program, presenting only vague and unfounded allegations."
What "unlimited power for the Secretary" looks like in practice
The bill hands the HHS Secretary sole discretion over whether a cut-off state can get back in. The minority views call that "unlimited power," and warn it "could open states up to invasive, excessive, and inequitable oversight."
That is not hypothetical. The same report documents what this administration did in early 2026, before the bill even moved:
After an independent journalist posted a video claiming Minnesota child care centers were drawing federal money without serving children — a claim the state agency reviewed and found the centers "were operating as expected at the time of the video" — the administration froze all child care funds to Minnesota and rolled out a nationwide documentation regime. HHS then suspended five states' access to nearly $10 million across child care, TANF and social services block grants.
The five states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. The minority views note that HHS "provided no evidence of fraud in these five states beyond the fact they are led by Democratic Governors." A court blocked the freeze.
Grothman's bill would give that same Secretary a statutory switch to do it again, permanently, and call it the law.
The vote
The committee approved H.R. 7721 on March 5, 2026, by a recorded vote of 19–15 — a straight party split. Democrats' one amendment, which would have required HHS to turn over its communications to states about the funding freeze, failed 15–19.
The CRACKDOWN Act then got folded into a bigger package. Announcing its passage, Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg's office listed the eight reforms inside H.R. 7726, the Stop Child Care Scams Act — Grothman's CRACKDOWN Act among them, described this way: "States that allow improper payments to spiral out of control will be held accountable."
That bill passed the House on June 3, 2026, 217 to 207. Grothman voted yes. Two hundred and seven Democrats voted no.
Who actually pays
Here is the part nobody on that committee had to answer for.
CCDBG reaches roughly 15% of federally eligible children nationwide. It is already far too small. In Wisconsin, families who can't get help pay that $17,963 a year themselves, or one parent leaves the workforce. The First Five Years Fund estimates the state's child care shortage costs Wisconsin's economy $2.6 billion a year in lost earnings and productivity.
Grothman's answer to a program that serves too few children is a rule that can make it serve none — in an entire state — because a state agency's paperwork error rate sat a point too high for two years running.
He knows how to legislate the other direction when he wants to. This is the same member who wrote a bill to make it easier to pay disabled workers below the minimum wage by stripping out counseling requirements he called burdensome. Paperwork protecting a disabled worker: an unnecessary obstacle. Paperwork used to disqualify a state from helping poor families afford day care: essential accountability.
It is the same instinct running in both directions. The people at the bottom are the problem, and the rules should be arranged accordingly.
Source
- House Report 119-587, Combating Regulatory Abuse, Closing Known Deficiencies, and Overseeing Waste Nationwide Act of 2026 — U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce, April 6, 2026
