Anna Wolfe Profile picture
Apr 5, 2022 13 tweets 4 min read Read on X
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 I was digging around in the only public data available, limited and outdated, after MDHS had completely shut me out.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. ImageImageImageImage
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.” Image
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.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Anna Wolfe

Anna Wolfe Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @ayewolfe

May 12, 2023
For my talk at Milwaukee Press Club's Gridiron Dinner tonight, I pulled some data about Wisconsin's TANF program over a decade showing that its unspent pot grew from $0 to $214 million from 2011 to 2021, plus other findings. Here is the interactive chart: datawrapper.de/_/UaGOp/
Over half a million people in Wisconsin live in poverty and just one-in-five of those families get monthly aid. With $214m, WI could:

-Provide a year of child care to 39,000 kids

-Issue 60,000 transportation stipends for working adults

-Pay 1.5 million past-due electric bills
Considering just 15% of its annual TANF budget goes towards cash assistance and federal reporting is sparse, it would likely take boots-on-the-ground reporting to learn exactly how WI is spending the rest of the money and what it's achieving.
Read 8 tweets
Feb 10, 2023
In the post-Roe era, Republican leaders have promised an “aggressive new pro-life agenda” to “support the whole life and the whole woman.” I compiled and analyzed more than 60 pieces of legislation filed this year that satisfy this stated goal.

Here’s what I found.
Lawmakers advanced bills to increase tax breaks to corps who give to religious CPCs and to create a “Maternal Assistance Program,” which sounds like it would provide resources to women but actually just creates an info campaign about where to find the existing (scarce) services.
Meanwhile, bills to actually pump out resources — making free contraception available at county health clinics, funding child advocacy centers and providing free menstrual hygiene products in schools, for example — all died.
Read 23 tweets
Oct 19, 2022
ICYMI: MS's TANF graft primarily occurred through what are called "Subgrants" -- $ to private orgs to provide services like workforce dev, mentoring. But even at the height of the scandal, this only accounted for half of the spending. Where did the rest go?mississippitoday.org/2022/10/17/mis…
We looked at every expenditure labeled under "TANF Work Program" from 2015-2022. Our findings here: mississippitoday.org/wp-content/upl…

From 2015 to 2016, program spending on "contractual services" rose from $162,000 to $6.4 million. There has been no comprehensive audit of this spending.
From 2016-2020, MDHS spent $36 million on contractual services. This is completely separate from the scandalous "Families First" spending. (That was $95 million to MCEC and FRC). Here are the top 20 vendors who were paid for contractual services:
Read 10 tweets
Oct 18, 2022
🧵of testimony from Pastor Reginald Buckley, today at the TANF hearing: “In 2014, the state of Mississippi took the somewhat extreme position of tying TANF support to the administration of a drug-questionnaire. 1/
"In doing so, the subversive suggestion was made that if you are poor, then you are likely to be on drugs. And if you are on drugs, then the state was making a case to deny support through TANF. 2/ jacksonfreepress.com/news/2014/jul/…
"This was bad policy from the beginning because it required people to prove their innocence merely because they were in need. It stigmatized people because they were poor. It humiliated people and subjugated them to an invasion of their privacy because they lived in poverty. 3/
Read 10 tweets
Oct 18, 2022
I’m at the Democratic Caucus hearing to address the TANF scandal, where current MDHS director Bob Anderson is currently speaking.

Yesterday, I published a report containing every MDHS expenditure labeled under the TANF Work Program 2015-2022. mississippitoday.org/wp-content/upl… ImageImage
Rep. Johnson just asked Anderson if he recommends repealing the 2017 HOPE Act, which created some of the strictest eligibility requirements in the nation. Anderson said yes, and that he’s already asked the agency to repeal the redetermination clause. More: mississippitoday.org/2021/01/29/mis…
Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative’s Carol Burnett: “A family of three only receives $260/month. If this were a wage it would be $1.50/hour.

At this rate, it would take 352 years for a family to receive as much TANF money as Brett Favre received in one subgrant.”
Read 4 tweets
Oct 5, 2022
Years before MS’s welfare scandal broke, one statistic provided a foreshadowing: We were approving just 1.5% of cash welfare applications.

Today, we approve about 8%. But we’re not the only state like this, per federal data @MSTODAYnews analyzed:

mississippitoday.org/2022/10/05/mis…
Texas, for example, has approved just 5% this year. In most states, approval rates in 2022 (green) have dropped since 2016 (red). Nationally, under 30% of applications are approved. Out of $16B in TANF annually, 80% is spent on other things—workforce child care, fatherhood, etc.
But there’s no telling where that money is actually going. There’s no federal repository of data showing which orgs actually receive the money to perform these functions, what specific programs they offer, how they spend the money, who they help and what outcomes they achieve.
Read 9 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(