How Tim Walz Spent Your Money

I n 2021, Democrats enacted the American Rescue Plan Act without a single Republican vote. Purportedly for pandemic recovery, the $1.9 trillion law included the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF). That was $350 billion for states that were running surpluses and did not need extra money, with very few restrictions on how it could be spent.

Blue states blew through their SLFRF money faster than red states. According to the Government Accountability Office, of the eight states that have spent 75 percent or more of their SLFRF awards, seven voted for Biden in 2020 and currently have Democratic governors.

But no state has spent more of its share of the SLFRF money than Minnesota under Governor Tim Walz.

The SLFRF was really a slush fund for Bidenomics, with state and local-level politicians using the extra federal dollars for things that had nothing to do with pandemic relief, some of which were little more than progressive political projects.

Minnesota, despite having had a large budget surplus like most states, spent 99 percent of its SLFRF money by the end of September 2023, according to the GAO, more than any other state. For perspective, Oklahoma and South Carolina had only spent 5 percent of what they could have.

States could choose to be responsible and not take federal dollars they don’t need. But the ones that are committed to spend them are in a race against the clock to get the money out the door. The law requires funds to be obligated by the end of this year and spent by the end of 2026.

No governor got the money out faster than Walz. Minnesota has spent over $4.2 billion of SLFRF money as of the first quarter of 2024, according to Brittany Madni of the Economic Policy Innovation Center. Madni co-authored a report on the SLFRF in December 2023 that highlighted wasteful spending supported by the fund across the country.

Madni has since uncovered the following SLFRF-funded projects that have taken place in Minnesota under Walz’s watch:

• $11.5 million for the Minnesota Zoo
• $9 million for three separate guaranteed-basic-income pilot programs
• $7 million for child-care subsidies that don’t appear to have any work requirements or citizenship/legal-status requirements
• $3.8 million for the Science Museum of Minnesota
• $3 million for parking costs for state employees
• $1.8 million for several athletic-field projects across the state
• $1.3 million for a Minneapolis homeless shelter that included in its project description that it was “for people who identify as women”
• $1.2 million for “shelter alternatives” without further details provided
• $929,866 to teach minority-owned businesses how to get state-government contracts
• $237,866 for movie theaters and convention centers
• $50,000 for a mural in St. Louis County
• $50,000 for the city of Hopkins to hire a DEI consulting firm

Minnesota also requested, and the Biden-Harris administration approved, $2.2 million in SLFRF money for “civil unrest expenses.” The Minnesota State Patrol asked for the money for “maintaining safety and security for large-scale events and protests in fiscal year 2022.” It said the request was necessary because of “14 events on and off the Capitol complex” in that year that resulted in above-budget expenses.

A database from the National Conference of State Legislatures shows that Walz has used SLFRF money to fund Minnesota’s massive, teachers’-union-backed increase in education spending, with numerous grants to school districts to support or establish programs and pay teachers. Those expenses will be recurring, and funding them with one-time grants is not sustainable.

Minnesota is only the most profligate example of this type of spending; plenty of other states have done similarly over the past few years. That’s why Minnesota and other states will be begging Washington for more federal dollars in 2025 and 2026 as the SLFRF money disappears. And if Walz is in the next administration, he would likely be a strong advocate for sending more money to the states.

It’s not just the SLFRF. Walz has also demonstrated himself to be an expert in scooping up federal green-energy subsidies from the Biden-Harris administration, as Andrew Follett wrote for NR. He has pledged that Minnesota will use only renewable energy by 2040, and Minnesota has more policies and fiscal incentives for green energy than any state besides California.

And Walz hasn’t let little things like verifying that money is spent properly get in the way. As Jim Geraghty has written, Minnesota under Walz’s watch has been home to several fraud scandals, including payments to people who were ineligible for programs or deceased.

Of course, all of this spending is funded by you, dear taxpayer, and your descendants, who will be responsible for the debt the federal government has accumulated. You may not have known you were on the hook for murals, ballfields, DEI programs, and child-care subsidies in Minnesota, but Walz knew, and he was happy to take your money to pay for them.

Walz is a perfect fit to be Kamala Harris’s running mate. Better than any other governor, he has disbursed the federal dollars Democrats gave to the states. He’s a poster child for Bidenomics.