Thread by @ayewolfe

Gov. Phil Bryant screenshotted my tweet below—which touched on my investigation into welfare in the spring of 2019, at the fever pitch of the largest taxpayer theft in state history—and sent it to MDHS Director John Davis. “How is she figuring this?” he asked. #TheBackchannel

My tweet contained a plain observation. In the poorest state, we left tens of millions of welfare funds unspent — something advocates had screamed about for years. I was digging around in the only public data available, limited and outdated, after MDHS had completely shut me out.

After a long, congenial intro call with the new MDHS spox, a former gov staffer and Supertalk exec, in Sept. 2018, where I rattled on about my personal values and intentions as a reporter, specifically in getting to the bottom of TANF, I never got a return call from her.

MDHS began refusing to answer any of my questions. Eventually, they started routing all emails from me through the attorney general’s office. If I sent the head of the TANF program a question, an AAG would respond in legalese.

Public records requests were agonizing. Any meager explanations I did get—like about what NSPARC was doing to track outcomes for the agency—were hazy and never backed up by documents.

So, when the governor forwarded my straightforward tweet based on data, his welfare director spun it into an ideological agenda: “She is advocating that we should use more TANF funds towards cash assistance,” Davis responded.

We were spending 5% of our welfare funds on direct cash assistance. I wasn’t advocating for anything, but I was asking if MDHS thought that was a proper balance and why. And to show me what they were doing with the rest of the money and how they knew the programs worked.

Two months after my tweet, the MDHS employee responsible for creating many of the TANF subgrants and paying vendors “without creating an audit finding”—part of the scheme to misspend $77m—tattled on Davis for sending $48,000 meant for a professional wrestler to his own P.O. Box.

That’s the tip Phil Bryant took to the state auditor, not the overall and very obviously broken welfare system that was letting tens of millions fly out the door unchecked.

During my interview with Phil Bryant on Saturday, his tone was that he wished he’d known sooner so he could have stopped it. But he would have known if he’d listened back in 2017—before much of the known alleged fraud occurred.

He may not read his texts, but Phil Bryant read my tweet. And he was unfazed about the serious issues raised in my reporting because, as he responded, I’m a “raving liberal.”

Now, I think about all the public assistance recipients and advocates who helped me peek into the system over the years and figure out what the right questions were, and the explanation we would make up in our heads in the absence of any answers from state leadership.

The reality was even worse. And still, we were way more right than we ever wanted to be, because we were hoping we were wrong.