OLYMPIA… Senate Republican Leader John Braun, R-Centralia, issued the following response today to a state audit that uncovered widespread non-compliance and staggering overpayment rates within the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF). The audit, which examined the use of federal funds during the 2025 fiscal year, was made public yesterday.
“This audit confirms what many of us have feared. While those in the majority party in Olympia continue to grow the size of the state bureaucracy at record rates, they have completely abandoned their duty to provide basic oversight and protect taxpayer dollars.
“The findings regarding DCYF and payments to childcare providers reveal nothing short of a systemic failure. The agency’s own data shows that in a single year, 67% of audited provider payments were overpaid. Even more alarming, 22% of the total dollars audited—over $2 million out of a small $10 million sample—were found to be improper. When you consider that DCYF makes nearly 400,000 payments a month, the potential for waste, fraud, and abuse is enormous.
“Perhaps most damning is the agency’s excuse that it lacks the staff to fix this. Over the past five years, DCYF’s administrative and support divisions have ballooned by over 500 people. Their ‘government affairs’ team has doubled to 22 people, yet they claim they can only afford six people to audit hundreds of millions in provider payments.
“It is a question of priorities. The department has plenty of people to lobby the Legislature for more money and plenty of people to handle ‘communications,’ but almost no one to ensure that childcare providers are being paid accurately or that federal funds are reaching the children who actually need them.
“Taxpayers are struggling with an affordability crisis made worse by Olympia’s tax-and-spend playbook. They deserve to know that the money already being taken from their paychecks is being managed with integrity. Instead, they are seeing an agency that is quick to grow its own footprint but slow to account for its failures.
“We don’t need more funding for a broken system; we need a complete overhaul of agency priorities and real accountability from the leadership at DCYF. It is time to stop the excuses and start protecting the public’s trust.”