Anna Wolfe Profile picture
Sep 24, 2022 13 tweets 5 min read Read on X
The latest texts released by Nancy New and now today by former Gov. Bryant come within a court battle about whether Bryant should have to produce all texts related to the USM-Favre volleyball project. Bryant wants to keep them private #TheBackchannel mississippitoday.org/2022/09/24/phi…
Bryant has released select text messages in an attempt to show that he had no idea Favre was using welfare money for the volleyball project in 2017. He suggests his appointed welfare director immediately committed $4m to the project without his knowledge.
Some of the most brow-raising new texts:

Bryant in 2019 after meeting with the new welfare director, Favre and New about volleyball funding:

“We are going to get there. This was a great meeting. But we have to follow the law. I am to old for Federal Prison. 😄😎”
Bryant and his attorney a few days after the meeting:

Attorney: “She’s relentless.”
Bryant: “Nancy is worrying. She know[s] what they were doing was wrong.”
Brett Favre when asking Bryant in 2018 for help finding funding to construct lockers at the facility:

“[It would be helpful] [i]f someone would build them on [their] spare time. Poncho mentioned the prison industry possibly as a builder.”
(According to Bryant’s court filing, HGTV star and woodworker Ben Napier assisted with constructing the lockers on Bryant’s request).
Favre in July of 2019, after the volleyball project had received $5m in welfare funds and Favre received $1.1m himself:
USM president when Bryant approached him in early 2020 about Favre’s persistent badgering:
Also, Bryant’s claim that he instructed Christopher Freeze, the MDHS director he hired to replace John Davis, to cut welfare funding to Nancy New is significant, considering what State Auditor Shad White said after Davis’ guilty plea hearing Thursday:
This proposal is also incredible. They proposed naming the USM volleyball center “The Dewey Phillip Bryant Center for Excellence.” It was supposed to be a “surprise” for the governor, but in an appeal to get the funds before he left office, they told him the plan #TheBackchannel
Question: why would a TANF subgrant proposal go to the governor’s office in the first place? What does this show about their role in dismantling the official RFP/bid process? The accountability measure hadn’t been followed since 2012, Bryant’s first year in office.
CLARIFICATION: The public court filing says Ben Napier “assisted with locker construction … at Gov. Bryant’s request” which, of course, there’s nothing wrong with. In a now deleted Tweet, his wife Erin Napier says Ben simply gave the gov a recommendation for a cabinet maker

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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

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