Most of you are probably aware of the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi where, for six weeks, the 180,000 residents of the state capital, 83% of whom are Black, were under an advisory to boil all water before drinking it or brushing their teeth. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves lifted that advisory on Thursday. But other reports, as well as state officials, caution that, because of the decaying infrastructure of Jackson’s water system and high lead levels, many people there still don’t have reliable access to safe drinking water.
I noted in my last post that Mississippi has the lowest life expectancy of any state in the country. It also has the highest poverty and child poverty rates. A particularly cruel reality is that it has the highest percentage of Black residents, trapped in a state dominated by the Republican Party. Its Republican elites, including Reeves, spend a lot of time exhorting Mississippians to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, to put their trust in Jesus and to stop asking for handouts. Reeves and his predecessors have long made good on their contempt for government assistance to the poor. Just last month, according to the Daily Beast’s Brianna Sacks, Reeves “[ended] the state’s participation in a federal pandemic rental assistance program—which he called a ‘cruel’ “socialist experiment”—and sending back about $130 million in aid funds.” Until an increase last year, Mississippi provided the lowest allocation of any state from the federally funded Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program to its poor residents. According to one estimate, in 2017 Mississippi approved less than two percent of applications for its miserly TANF benefits. And of the $135 million it received in TANF funds in 2018, only seven million was spent on basic assistance to poor families.
While Black Mississippians make up about 37% of the state’s population, three quarters of the state’s children on TANF benefits are Black. The large proportion of Black poor in Mississippi is directly relevant to how minuscule are state TANF allotments. That’s because states receive TANF in block grants with wide discretion over how they use those funds. And it’s long been a feature of our substantially decentralized welfare system that southern states with high Black populations have been especially uninterested in helping their impoverished residents.
So, where did the rest of the TANF money in Mississippi go, since so little of it went to helping the people it was supposed to help? That’s where we come to the most nauseating part of this story.
According to Mississippi Today’s Anna Wolfe, in 2018, the same year that Mississippi gave out five percent of TANF benefits to poor families:
[it] gave six times that amount, almost $44 million, to Mississippi Community Education Center (MCEC) and another nonprofit, Family Resource Center of Northeast Mississippi, which together called their statewide outreach services “Families First for Mississippi.”
As a subgrantee of the state and its Department of Human Services, MCEC was bound by federal rules governing how TANF funds could be spent. But until 2019, it benefitted from extremely lax oversight, which required little in the way of verifiable documentation to ensure that it was not improperly using those funds. This was helpful to Nancy New, MCEC’s founder, since she had other ideas for how to spend the money. New had a longtime business relationship with the Hall of Fame quarterback, Brett Favre. Favre, a Mississippi native who went to the University of Southern Mississippi, where he first became a star, has a daughter who played volleyball and enrolled at USM in 2017. Late that year, USM’s Athletic Foundation received $5 million from the MCEC, in a complicated leasing arrangement, to build a state-of-the-art volleyball facility.
In case you’re shaking your head in disbelief, let me repeat - the state of Mississippi, through the MCEC, handed five million dollars in TANF funds to Southern Miss to build a volleyball facility, almost as much as it would give to all TANF-eligible families in 2018. The deal was greased by former governor Phil Bryant, and signed off on by the state’s attorney general at the time, as well as other relevant government agencies. A shakeup at Mississippi’s Department of Human Services (MDHS) in 2019 began to unravel the scheme and the state auditor Shad White launched an investigation into improper use of funds. That investigation resulted in indictments against New, former MDHS head John Davis and others in 2020.
But a new court filing this past Monday, which includes text messages between Favre and New exposes further just how sordid this whole arrangement was (Ashton Pittman, a reporter for the Mississippi Free Press, co-reported this excellent piece yesterday and also has a lengthy and gripping Twitter thread about the scandal). Favre had begun asking New for funds for the facility in 2017. Since the indictments against New and others were handed down in 2020, Favre has denied that he knew where the money for the facility was coming from. He’d already been in hot water because MCEC had gifted him $1.1 million to give a series of speeches he never gave, money that he was forced to pay back to the state after White began his investigation (Favre still owes over $200,000 in interest from those sham payments). But the text messages show unequivocally that Favre knew (sorry for all these “knew” “news” "and “New” words!) exactly where the money was coming from and, in fact, asked New whether there was any way this scheme could be exposed. New assured him that she’d never really been asked to account for how she spent her money as long as John Davis was in charge of the Department of Human Services so - not to worry. She also assured Favre that then Governor Bryant himself was fully on board.
About those payments for speeches he never made, New had originally asked Favre to make them so she could justify funneling the $1.1 million to him. Favre whined to her that his busy schedule made him wary of making any commitments in exchange for receiving defrauded taxpayer dollars. New promised Favre his commitment would be minimal, about which she was true to her word, since Favre never did have to make a speech. The text messages also show that, as the project was delayed and more money would be needed, New told Favre that while she thought she could come up with most of what he requested, a new director at the Department of Human Services was asking for more documentation. Favre, naturally, complained about this imposition.
The volleyball facility is only part of a now much larger state case, involving some $77 million in misappropriated monies. Nancy New and her son, Zach, have pled guilty to federal fraud charges in a separate case and Favre himself now faces serious legal jeopardy. But in spite of the accountability that Favre, New and others now face, this story embodies so many of the worst pathologies of American conservatism. A cruel and punitive ideology that believes the poor mostly deserve what they get and get what they deserve. Utter contempt for the basic principle that the rules that bind everyone else ought to apply to them. Delusional and hypocritical sanctimony about how it is that they “earned” their good fortune. And a lack of conscience about the consequences of degrading the basic functions of government, without which people of lesser means will struggle to meet their most fundamental needs. But while Mississippi’s poor suffer, in the face of a state apparatus determined to make life as difficult as possible for them, a favored son got millions in handouts, without doing a lick of work, and with no apparent sense of shame, or conscience.
Praise Jesus!
To spur interesting discussion on an overnight road trip, we leveraged a few of your articles to read out loud and discuss. Starting with the painful situation in Mississippi (and explaining to us why the poverty their gets so little relief) -- running through Title IX, then life expectancy and ending with a Tribute to your father. Always a writer, historian and scholar who brings interesting topics to the table -- and to the journey (in this case, our road trip home around midnight). Thank you Jonathan and well done. While I may always envision you as 7 years old talking about baseball...my family and i look forward to more good reads.
That seven year old talking baseball is very much still in there. But I've branched out. Thank you for reading.