A Mississippi audit has identified millions of dollars in recurring waste in the state’s major agencies.
Mississippi’s “Project Momentum” is the largest such audit in the state in decades.
The audit found up to $335 million in recurring waste over 13 state agencies. It follows several smaller audits over the past five years that also identified opportunities for tens of millions of dollars in savings, according to Mississippi State Auditor Shad White.
White said the project aims to accomplish on a state level what former President Donald Trump said last month he aims to do on a federal level.
“I was encouraged to see President Trump announce recently that if elected, he would appoint Elon Musk to lead a government efficiency commission to help eliminate fraud and waste in the federal government,” White said in a statement on Oct. 28 announcing the audit’s release. “We’re doing the same thing right here in Mississippi with Project Momentum.”
During a speech at the Economic Club of New York, Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, said he would establish a government efficiency commission and would tap SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk to head that agency.
“At the suggestion of Elon Musk, who’s given me his complete and total endorsement ... I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reform,” Trump said.
Project Momentum identified excessive spending targets such as expensive IT contracts, agencies owning too many vehicles, government spending on state property insurance, state buildings with unused space, agencies with too many employees, and unnecessary administrative costs in K–12 schools.
The audit focused on large agencies such as the state’s Division of Medicaid, the Department of Education, and the Department of Public Safety.
White said in his report that the agencies collectively spend more than $5 billion annually.
In his Sept. 5 speech, Trump focused on federal fraud cases and improper payments, which he said cost taxpayers an estimated total of “hundreds of billions of dollars” in 2022.
White told reporters on Oct. 28 that big fraud cases “tend to be the things that get the news,” but his audit focused more on wasteful spending.
Areas for Improvement
According to the report, the audit identified four major areas for improvement.The state government should operate more like a business, the report said, adopting best business practices and striving for a higher return on investment.
Further, as a state that is heavily affected by natural disasters, Mississippi should focus on prevention and readiness because “preventing or avoiding problems is cheaper than fixing them after they occur.” Other areas of concern in the report were the state’s health care and foster care systems.
The report’s third area of focus was availability of data and technology to enable decision-making.
“In too many cases, government leaders did not have access to essential data about their operations,” the report reads, highlighting outdated technology.
Finally, as an organization that spends “billions of taxpayer dollars annually on a wide range of goods and services,” the state should strive to get the best pricing and value from its spending, the report advised.
Spending Cut Proposals
White said that procurement was a major focus of the project. All agencies would save money by sharing purchasing contracts for items such as TVs, toilet paper, and other needed products, he said.Mississippi spends $25 million on travel, vehicles, and fuel per year, he said, which is “far more than Louisiana, Iowa, and Arkansas.”
“Those are states with similar populations and similar rural areas, so their state agency employees are driving similar mileage to do their jobs,” he said.
White said there were “multiple opportunities” for potentially saving “tens of millions of dollars” within the state’s Medicaid division.
Among those opportunities are cutting out people who are making “too much money to be eligible to be on Medicaid” and moving patients who are receiving long-term care out of institutions and into home-based settings.
“If we move patients into those kinds of settings, the state would save money. And it’s actually better, generally, for the patients themselves to be in a home-based setting,” he said.
Within the Department of Public Safety, he discussed “eliminating duplicative inspection teams.”
When it comes to education, the state spends a lower percentage of its budget on K–12 instruction than the national average, White said. However, it spends a higher percentage of its education budget on administration than any other state in the South.
“Those kinds of things have to change,” he said. “We have to get more money into the classroom, and so by having smarter procurement, by putting into place other measures that require those dollars to go into the classroom, Mississippi can get a better handle on this.”
As an example, he cited a Texas proposal that recommended that 50 percent of all K–12 spending directly go to teacher salaries.
“That’s something we could do in Mississippi if we wanted more dollars to go into the classroom as opposed to on administrative spending,” he said.
White pointed to Mississippi’s state-owned golf courses, which the report said “are barely used.” Those could be closed, he said.
“There may be people out there who love the state golf courses, but the truth is that the ROI [return on investment] on those golf courses is very, very small and we have to be smart about what the core functions of state government are, and we have to be honest about what’s providing a good return on investment and what’s not,” he said.
He added that Mississippi would save more than a million dollars a year if it sold the state plane.
“About 18 states do not operate their own aircraft for official travel, and that includes some big states like Florida and California,” he said.
By selling the plane, the state would save on maintenance costs.
Instead, he proposed that state officials rely on commercial or chartered flights.
White called the report “a roadmap for a leaner, more modern state government.”
“We were long overdue to do a look like this at state agencies to make sure that we were getting the biggest bang for our buck, to make sure that the dollars are not going toward things that are simply wasteful but are instead going to roads and bridges, teachers’ salaries, tax cuts, cops, whatever it may be, the stuff that actually matters to Mississippians,” he said.
