This article is a worked example. Earlier this week we published “The Game You Were Never Taught” — the prelude to PMC’s new civic-investigations series mapping the rules that allow the moves we keep getting outraged at. Oklahoma’s child-welfare grant architecture is one of those moves running in the open. Read this as the case study. Then read the Prelude.
Right now, 62 children are missing in Oklahoma. Fifteen of them are from the Tulsa area alone. One of those children — a 13-year-old girl named Makyia Johnson — has been reported missing twice. The first time on June 17, 2025. The second time on November 5, 2025, now listed as age 14.
In the world of child trafficking, a repeat runaway is not a troubled kid who keeps leaving home. It is one of the single strongest indicators that a child is being exploited.
And nobody is connecting the dots.
“Confronting the real issues facing our communities, institutions, and our country at large is up to all Americans,” said Mary Flynn O’Neill. “Our nation’s destiny is in our hands. We urge you to attend this event, stay informed, seek truth, and get in the fight for our precious children — the future of our nation.”
The Oklahoma Crisis — By the Numbers
Here is what the data actually says about what is happening to children in this state:
13,198 children were confirmed victims of abuse or neglect in Oklahoma in 2023. That number has climbed 37% since 2012 and it is still rising.
Tulsa County’s child abuse rate is 16 per 1,000 children — exactly double the national average.
The state’s DHS abuse hotline receives approximately 32,000 allegations per year. Over 13,000 are confirmed.
Oklahoma removes children from their homes at a rate 55% above the national average. Native American children are overrepresented by a factor of 3.9x. Children of two or more races enter foster care at nearly 5x the national rate.
There are currently 5,800+ children in Oklahoma’s foster care system with only about 3,200 approved foster families. The state needs 736 additional foster homes. In Tulsa County alone, there are 47 more children than available placements — and the state’s own goal is to recruit 63 new Tulsa foster homes this fiscal year.
Nearly 70% of all child removals in Oklahoma involve substance abuse. Neglect is the number one driver. These are not hypothetical statistics. These are children.
$169 Million Flows In. Children Keep Disappearing.
This is the part where it stops being a tragedy and starts becoming a question.
Project Milk Carton’s CivicOps database has tracked $169.4 million in grants flowing into Oklahoma’s child welfare ecosystem:
$92.5 million in IRS 990-reported grants to Tulsa-area organizations (932 records)
$72.5 million in federal Office of Refugee Resettlement funds through Oklahoma DHS
$4.4 million in federal Unaccompanied Children subgrants
Where is the money going? Here is what we can document:
Catholic Charities, Diocese of Tulsa received $1,426,805 in federal UAC (Unaccompanied Alien Children) funding. Catholic Charities, Archdiocese of Oklahoma City received $2,328,748. The money flows from HHS to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to local Catholic Charities offices. It is the same pipeline PMC tracks in every state.
Meanwhile, a $3.75 billion Medicaid managed care contract called SoonerSelect handed a Centene Corporation subsidiary — Oklahoma Complete Health — the sole provider contract for the Children’s Specialty Plan covering all 34,000 child members, including the 5,800 in foster care.
Centene has paid over $1 billion in fraud settlements across 20+ states. Texas: $165.6 million. California: $215 million. Ohio: $88.3 million.
Oklahoma? Not a dollar.
And on March 13, 2025 — just 11 months after SoonerSelect launched — a federal judge terminated the consent decree that had been the only independent oversight mechanism for Oklahoma’s child welfare system since 2012.
The consent decree tracked 30 performance measures. Across two separate federal reviews (2017 and 2024), Oklahoma met zero of seven child welfare outcomes. Both times. The oversight ended anyway.
Oklahoma’s own Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, called SoonerSelect an “abject, systemic failure” in a formal letter dated October 2025.
District Attorney Adam Panter of District 23 publicly accused DHS of “systematically and repeatedly failing to follow state laws designed to protect children” — within days of the consent decree being dissolved.
Four revenue streams activate every time a child is removed from their home: Medicaid capitation payments, foster care daily maintenance, Title IV-E federal reimbursement, and behavioral health billing. Every single one of those streams terminates upon reunification.
No entity in the revenue chain has a financial incentive to send a child home.
This is not a conspiracy. It is not a loophole. It is the rulebook working as written — federal Medicaid statute, Title IV-E reimbursement code, state managed-care procurement law, IRS 501(c)(3) framework. Every party in the chain is in compliance. Citizens were never taught how to read the chain. We are about to teach you.
Tulsa Sits at the Crossroads
This is not a metaphor. Oklahoma sits at the physical intersection of three major interstate trafficking corridors:
I-35 — the north-south pipeline from the Texas border through OKC to Kansas
I-40 — the east-west corridor from Arkansas through OKC to Amarillo
I-44 — the diagonal connector linking Tulsa to OKC, Wichita, and St. Louis
Tulsa is where I-44 meets the Turner Turnpike. It is a trafficking interchange point by geography alone.
The numbers confirm it:
3,997 trafficking hotline signals reported in Oklahoma (lifetime)
1,166 identified trafficking cases
2,562 identified victims
73+ Tulsa PD trafficking investigations
60+ Tulsa County DA trafficking prosecutions
And Oklahoma has 39 tribal nations — more than any other state — with 86 missing Indigenous persons and a murder rate on some reservations that runs 10x the national average.
What We Bring To The Fight
ARIA — Autonomous Research Intelligence Agent. Our AI-powered investigation system. ARIA can read every IRS 990 filed by every nonprofit in your county in under two minutes. She cross-references grant flows from HHS through VOLAGs to local organizations against missing-children registries, court filings, NCMEC alerts, foster-care exit data, and trafficking-route indicators. She speaks plain English. She cites her sources. She does not hallucinate — every number she reports is traceable to a public record.
CivicOps — the database ARIA runs on. 340 million records. Every federal dollar from HHS through VOLAGs to local organizations, sourced from IRS 990s, USASpending, TAGGS, SAM.gov, FEC, NIBRS, NCMEC, and 200+ public datasets.
The State Profiles — 40-page automated investigations ARIA generates for any state on demand: legal authority hierarchies, decision chains, crime statistics, missing children registries, nonprofit financials, pending legislation, and case law. Oklahoma’s profile is what produced the numbers in this article.
ECHO — our training platform with 68 skill courses covering OSINT investigation, child welfare law, financial tracking, and community organizing. Free. Self-paced. Designed for citizens who have never investigated anything in their lives and want to learn.
The Wall — our secure social platform where verified investigators share intelligence, coordinate efforts, and hold each other accountable.
These are not products. They are not behind a paywall. They are tools built by investigators, for citizens, because the agencies that were supposed to protect these children have had $1.18 billion in federal funding and 13 years of court oversight and still could not meet a single federal outcome measure.
This is what AI in the hands of a citizen looks like. This is what we are training people to use. This is the fight we are in.
What You Can Do Right Now
Report
If you see something, say something. These lines are staffed 24/7: - National Trafficking Hotline: 1-888-373-7888 - Oklahoma DHS Abuse Hotline: 1-800-522-3511 - Text “HELP” to 233733 (BEFREE)
Watch
Learn the repeat runaway pattern. A child reported missing more than once is not a “problem kid.” Makyia Johnson was reported missing twice in five months. There are 15 active missing children in the Tulsa area right now at the time of this writing, including a 5-year-old girl, Sarahi Flores Rosales, missing since May 2025.
Follow the Money
Every grant we track is from a public source. IRS 990s are public records. USASpending.gov is a public database. The information exists. The question is whether anyone is looking at it. PMC built the tools to make that possible. Use them.
Advocate
Oklahoma needs 736 more foster families. Tulsa needs 63. Tulsa’s child abuse rate is double the national average. These are facts your state legislators need to hear — repeatedly, loudly, and with the data attached.
Support Ida’s Law and the Kasey Alert System for Oklahoma’s 39 tribal nations. Indigenous children are disappearing at rates that should be a national emergency.
Join Us
Go to projectmilkcarton.org and register on The Wall. Access the ECHO training platform. Run your own state’s profile. Pull the 990s for organizations in your county. Look at the numbers. Decide for yourself whether the system is working.
Project Milk Carton is a 501(c)(3) public charity. We are not aligned with any party, candidate, faction, ideology, or political tribe. We have shared data with congressional offices on both sides of the aisle, with state attorneys general red and blue, with journalists across the political spectrum, with law enforcement, with tribal authorities, with churches, with civic clubs, and with citizens who do not vote at all. We do not endorse any speaker, host organization, or co-presenter at the events we attend. We show up where the children’s data leads us.
The data led us to look into Oklahoma. We will seek to accept invitations from any organization, of any political stripe, anywhere in the country, that wants to put these tools into citizens’ hands.
The system’s allowed moves are bipartisan. We name them wherever we find them. That is the work.
Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas — This Is Your Fight
62 children are missing in Oklahoma as of this writing. Over 13,000 were confirmed abuse victims last year (2025). $169 million in grants flowed into the system. A $3.75 billion contract went to a company with a billion dollars in fraud settlements. And the only federal oversight mechanism was shut down after failing every single measure it was designed to track.
The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed — for everyone except the children.
We have the data. We have the tools. We need the people.
Get in the fight.
Project Milk Carton is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) public charity (EIN 33-1323547) dedicated to protecting children through transparency, data, citizen accountability, and AI-powered investigation tools built for ordinary Americans. All data referenced in this article is sourced from federal databases (NCMEC, HHS AFCARS, FBI NIBRS, USASpending, IRS BMF/990), state records, and court filings. Every figure is independently verifiable from the public sources listed below. This article passes the same SKEPTIC verification, THEMIS legal review, and MINERVA OPSEC review every PMC investigation publishes under, and ships with a hashed evidence vault — see the pinned comment for the SHA-256 hash and source-document index.
Visit projectmilkcarton.org | Follow on Substack at 17sog.substack.com | Read the series prelude:
“The Game You Were Never Taught”
Data Sources
PMC CivicOps Database (NCMEC, IRS 990, USASpending, TAGGS, SAM.gov)
PMC Unified State Profile: Oklahoma (December 24, 2025)
PMC CPS Analysis: Oklahoma (February 10, 2026)
17SOG Substack: “Oklahoma: Under Federal Court Supervision” (March 2, 2026)
HHS Child Maltreatment Reports 2012-2023
FBI National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)
National Human Trafficking Hotline
Oklahoma Watch, KTUL, KJRH
Oklahoma Voice (MMIW reporting)
America’s Future Inc. — “Get In The Fight” Campaign
CourtListener / Justia (194 Oklahoma child welfare cases, 2020-2025)
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Project Milk Carton | 501(c)(3) | EIN: 33-1323547
"Four revenue streams activate every time a child is removed from their home: Medicaid capitation payments, foster care daily maintenance, Title IV-E federal reimbursement, and behavioral health billing. Every single one of those streams terminates upon reunification.
No entity in the revenue chain has a financial incentive to send a child home."
This is really great work putting this all together. Considering that children in foster care are something like 7 times more likely to be sexually abused and six times more likely to die than if they stayed with their family, there should be incentives towards family reunification or not taking them to begin with. Instead the incentive structure rewards turning the children into commodities to milk government money. I also noted the high number of awards for refugee (migrant) children, most likely put into a human trafficking pipeline.
I'd attend the workshop in Tulsa if I was in the area at the time. Instead I've been listening to chatter regarding human sex trafficking from the other side of the world in Isaan. Thai is truly a global enterprise but yet it really takes acting locally to counter it...
Is it 40$ per day?