California isn’t being scammed because the fraud is sophisticated. It’s being scammed because it keeps begging to be.

The so-called “ghost daycare” scandal isn’t some shocking revelation that slipped past an otherwise competent system. It’s the natural result of a government that treats oversight as optional and assumes good intentions are a substitute for verification. When you build a multi-billion-dollar funding pipeline and then deliberately look away, fraud doesn’t “happen.” It’s invited.

The state is currently pouring more than $6.7 billion into child care and early education. That number gets tossed around as proof of moral seriousness, as if the size of the check alone guarantees virtue. It doesn’t. It guarantees exposure. And when oversight is weak, exposure turns into hemorrhage.

The allegations raised by Amy Reichert should not surprise anyone who’s been paying attention. Daycares reporting dozens of enrolled children while inspectors show up to empty buildings? That isn’t a loophole. That’s the system working exactly as designed. California pays providers based largely on self-reported enrollment data, backed by paperwork that no one has the time or staffing to meaningfully verify. The state hands out money first and hopes audits will catch up later.

They never do.

This isn’t a staffing problem. It’s a priorities problem. California has no shortage of agencies, departments, task forces, or administrators. What it lacks is the will to say no before money changes hands. Enforcement is treated as an inconvenience — something that slows down the narrative about “historic investments” and “bold commitments.” So it gets deferred, diluted, or quietly ignored.

And when fraud inevitably follows, officials act confused.

Let’s be clear about the scale here. Even a small fraud rate in a program this large means hundreds of millions of dollars vanishing into thin air. That money doesn’t float away. It gets pulled out of a system that real families and legitimate providers rely on. Fake daycares don’t just steal from taxpayers — they crowd out honest operators who actually follow the rules, staff their facilities, and show up every day.

Those providers then get lumped into the same cloud of suspicion, forced to jump through even more hoops to prove they aren’t criminals, while the fraudsters disappear with the cash. This is how you break a system from both ends.

And none of this is new. A 2015 audit already warned about serious oversight gaps in California’s child care programs. The response wasn’t reform. It was expansion. The state decided that the solution to weak enforcement was to dramatically increase the amount of money flowing through the same broken channels.

That’s not optimism. That’s denial.

What makes this worse is how predictable the official response will be. There will be promises of “review.” There will be calls for “process improvements.” There will be press releases assuring the public that the issue is being taken seriously — now, after the damage is done. Maybe a few prosecutions down the line, once the political heat demands it.

But the core problem won’t change unless California admits something it refuses to say out loud: accountability has been treated as optional because it complicates the story lawmakers want to tell.

Child care funding isn’t a branding exercise. It’s infrastructure. When it fails, families suffer, workers lose stability, and trust erodes. And once trust is gone, no amount of new funding will bring it back.

“Zero kids present, millions changing hands” isn’t a slogan. It’s a warning. And if California keeps pretending this is an isolated issue instead of a structural failure, it won’t be the last one.

At some point, the state has to decide whether it wants to fund child care — or just feel good about saying it does.

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