This site doesn’t usually delve into college stadium and arena spending because there’s plenty to keep busy with in pro sports and university funding is a whole other can of worms, but it’s really tough to pass up a story about Brett Favre being involved with fraudulently spending federal welfare money on a college volleyball arena:
Text messages entered Monday into the state’s ongoing civil lawsuit over the welfare scandal reveal that former Gov. Phil Bryant pushed to make NFL legend Brett Favre’s volleyball idea a reality…
The newly released texts, filed Monday by an attorney representing Nancy New’s nonprofit, show that Bryant, Favre, New, [then-Mississippi Department of Human Services director John] Davis and others worked together to channel at least $5 million of the state’s welfare funds to build a new volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi, where Favre’s daughter played the sport. Favre received most of the credit for raising funds to construct the facility.
This report, by Mississippi Today, follows months of revelations about how Davis, the state welfare director, and New, who headed the Mississippi Community Education Center, took at least $77 million in federal money that was supposed to be used for helping poor Mississippians, and instead spent it on things like first-class airline tickets for Davis and drug rehab for a former pro wrestler who was working for Davis’s agency in the nebulous job title of “deputy director for transformational change.” The volleyball arena, according to Mississippi Today, was a project that Bryant personally directed New to fund, texting her, “Just left Brett Favre. Can we help him with his project.” (New pled guilty in April to 13 counts of felonies and faces up to 100 years in prison; Davis is still awaiting trial; Bryant and Favre have so far not been charged.)
If you’re wondering why a local nonprofit is being used to launder stolen federal welfare dollars, this is a very special feature of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the “welfare reform” law designed by Congressional Republicans and signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. Part of TANF was eliminating welfare as an entitlement like Medicaid, which anyone can get just by meeting certain income limits, and instead replacing it with “block grants” that states would be responsible for spending in any way they saw fit, so long as it qualified under TANF’s four main goals: aiding families with children; promoting job preparation, work, and marriage; preventing pregnancies among unmarried persons; and encouraging two-parent families.
Those are a lot of loopholes, and states soon realized that they could use TANF block grant money to pay for things having nothing to do with aid to the poor, including drug courts, foster care services, and college scholarships for middle-class students. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities calculated that in 2020, states spent only about 20% of TANF block grant money on actual cash assistance, with 15 states spending 10% or less.
Under Bryant and Davis, Mississippi took this to extremes, using New’s organizations to funnel tens of millions of dollars in federal TANF funds to everything from expenses for state employees and their family members to hiring lobbyists and funding religious concerts. The state auditor found that New “made many unallowable sports-related expenditures,” some of which was for “services that were not actually performed.”
The USM volleyball arena, which was built to help the school’s volleyball team avoid “scheduling difficulties” with the school’s basketball teams, opened in 2019. It’s still possible that Bryant, who was term-limited out as Mississippi governor that year, could face state or federal charges; as could Favre, who retired from the NFL in 2011 as the result of the long-term effects of multiple concussions.
The upshot: If you give people — whether elected officials, nonprofits, or regular old billionaires — carte blanche to take public money and don’t pay close attention to what they spend it on, they’re going to spend it on things like Teslas and no-show jobs for their relatives, duh. The remarkable thing is that the argument for welfare reform was sold in large part on stories like Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” speech that perpetuated the stereotype that poor people who received welfare just blew it on things like steaks and Cadillacs; in reality, the vast majority of welfare fraud isn’t committed by people receiving welfare checks, but rather by the people who handle the money along the way. In that sense, the Bryant-Favre debacle is extremely typical of TANF fraud — if Clinton and Newt Gingrich’s goal was to ensure that poor people couldn’t access government funds without trying to find jobs by instead giving the funds to state officials to spend on volleyball stadiums for their friends, then mission accomplished.