Government So Poorly Administered It Can’t Even Spend Money

Dome of the West Virginia State Capitol, Charleston, WV. Photo by Judson McCranie, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

For folks who haven’t had the pleasure of working/dealing with the federal government on budgetary matters, there is a term for certain kinds of funding commonly referred to as “use or lose” money. Funding that for various reasons, from statutory to the government practice of making sure you spend your entire budget to justify said budget for the next fiscal term, has to be spent by a certain date. The CARES Act money to the states had such language built in, and the clock is ticking.

Over at the excellent Mountain State Spotlight, the national attention West Virginia’s Governor Jim Justice has garnered of late is running up against just such a deadline.

West Virginia, which has one of the highest poverty rates and least healthy population in the nation, was particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. The pandemic hit hard, leaving West Virginians begging for CARES Act aid that has been slow to leave the governor’s coffers.

“The CARES Act is really meant for our communities and people to get through the worst of the pandemic,” said Seth DiStefano, the public outreach director for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. “And I really don’t know that the governor did the best job of that.”

More than a third of the total $1.25 billion pot went into the state’s unemployment trust fund — way more than the state needed. Also controversially, the governor spent $50 million on road repairs. And Justice is currently holding the third round of a lottery meant to encourage West Virginians to get vaccinations. The lottery, dubbed “Do It For Babydog” after his English bulldog, has let Justice travel around the state, awarding prizes to winners. But it has cost more than $11 million in CARES Act dollars so far and the results from earlier rounds and other states showed the approach was unsuccessful.

“Quit trying to take the money and act like it’s a party,” Garrison said. “This is serious. People have died.”

Despite more time to spend CARES Act money, Justice keeps controversial spending priorities
Where the CARES Act money has been used for urgent needs and small business support, it hasn’t reached as far as it could have. When Justice allocated $25 million for utility relief — an amount advocates said wasn’t nearly enough — only around $16.5 million was spent for the purpose. The utility program only covered bills from a limited time frame, from March through July 2020.

When Justice began offering small businesses grants up to $5,000 to get through the pandemic, he put aside $150 million for the purpose, though he later lowered that amount to $40 million. In total, though, only $26 million was used. Some business owners said the money helped, even though they said more was needed. But others reported not hearing about the opportunity until the deadline had passed.

“Moving forward though, I think there is an opportunity for the governor to do some good things with what money is left,” DiStefano said.

With only about a month left to spend the remaining $127 million, time is of the essence.

It is tempting to us the phrase “more money than they know what to do with” here but that is exactly what happened in many cases with the trillions of dollars in outlays passed by Congress during the course of the pandemic. It isn’t just West Virginia that is staring at the end of the year deadline for using these funds. Nor is it just states, as money also allocated to specific cities, municipalities, and tribal governments also sits untapped. Some of that discrepancy comes from a complicated reporting requirement, but with one estimate dated 21 September 2021 showing only 75% of allocated Covid-19 relief funds being spent, the questions remain.

The rhetoric of governmental policy and the optics of “do something” governance are once again not holding up to the actual administrative execution a people should expect from effective government. Money not only doesn’t solve everything, the eye-popping amount of federal funding flooding into state and local government is exposing just how ineptly many of those entities are run. Crisis exposes and reveals, and the federal government’s fiscal response to the Covid-19 pandemic has once again shown bad habits such as “pass it to find out what is in it” massive bills and a nationalized discourse do not understand or well serve the uniqueness of the state and local governments, nor the people they should be representing. The demands for “do something” actions were once again met with politically expedient policymaking resulting in the federal government money machine going BRRRRR with poor planning and even poorer execution and accountability. The long-term crisis that will last long after Covid-19 will be the dependency and hollowed out ability to govern at any level in any manner other than going to the federal spigot going forward. Our government should control our fiscal situation, not the other way around. The pressing need for optics and narrative are inversing that in an America under pressure and crisis both externally and internally from our own poorly administered government.

“Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant,” quipped P.T. Barnum, the master of both making money and presenting optics and narratives to keep the people happy. Seems it would apply to government as well.