Occupational licensing laws are passed by states, setting minimum standards for workers to enter a profession. These required qualifications include education, training, job experience, exams, and fees. Occupational licensing can be thought of as a permission slip from the government to work, because it is illegal to practice without first meeting the requirements and obtaining a credential.
Occupational licenses are contemplated as a form of consumer protection. The motivation for these requirements is to protect the health and safety of consumers, ensuring that they receive high quality services. To accomplish this, licensing laws require that aspiring professionals demonstrate confidence before practicing. Low skilled professionals or charlatans are prevented from being able to practice and harm consumers.
Typically, market competition effectively rewards skilled professionals and drives low skilled ones from the market. But due to the nature of some services, the risk of harm to consumers is great enough that competition could leave many injured before the market process is able to work. In these cases, low quality services pose such a threat to the health and safety that some form of government regulation is appropriate. For example, nearly all professions within healthcare require a license. Low quality healthcare services pose a serious risk to patients, where one mistake can cause permanent injury or death and it is difficult for patients to know the quality of their healthcare provider. Rather than wait for the healthcare provider to make mistakes, they try to ensure quality through licensure.
Proponents of occupational licensing cite two additional benefits. First, licensing laws improve the human capital, or skill, of workers. These more highly skilled professionals are likely to provide higher quality services. Additionally, licensing reduces information asymmetry, or a difference in knowledge about the transaction, between buyers and sellers. It is more difficult to discern the quality of a service than a product before a purchase, so licensing helps consumers know that a professional is qualified. Because consumers are able to have more confidence in the quality of service providers, they are more likely to participate in the market.
The growth of occupational licensing
Occupational licensing has steadily grown to become the most significant labor market regulation in the US. In the 1950s, roughly 5 percent of workers needed a license to work. Now, more than 20 percent of workers do. The growth in licensing can be seen in the figure above. Though much contentious debate surrounds both minimum wage and unionization laws, licensing effects more workers than both of those areas combined.
Some of the increase is due to a growth in the service sector of the economy. But most of it is licensing requirements being extended to a growing list of professions. From 1993 through 2012, on average, states added licensing requirements for 31 professions that required less than a bachelor’s degree. Not only has the number of licensed professions grown, the entry requirements for professions have increased, becoming more difficult over time. This trend can be seen across professions, but it is most prominent in healthcare.
For example, in the 1990s, Physical Therapists required a bachelor’s degree to obtain a license, which increased to a master’s degree by the 2000s, and a doctorate today. The ratcheting up of licensing requirements increases the time and cost of entering a licensed profession, making it more difficult for aspiring professionals. However, it is important to note that current professionals are typically grandfathered in, so they do not need to meet new requirements.
Impact on consumer prices
Because licensing requirements make it more difficult to enter a profession, it restricts the supply of workers. The upfront investment in education and training is a barrier to entry that increases the cost for aspiring workers. Economists find that this has a significant effect. Estimates of the reduction in supply of professionals caused by licensing range from 11 to 27 percent. Additionally, licensed professions grow more slowly, relative to the rest of the economy. This can harm consumers, who receive less convenient services and longer wait times.
It also increases wages for professionals. The estimates vary, but economists tend to find that the licensing premium is around 17 percent, even after accounting for worker characteristics. For some highly skilled professions with substantial licensing requirements, the wage premium is even higher. When higher wages result from professionals becoming more productive or offering higher quality services, both consumers and professionals are made better off. However, the licensing wage premium is primarily a result of the shortage created by occupational licensing, not better services. In effect, licensed professionals increase their wages by making consumers worse off. According to a study performed by economists Morris Kleiner and Evgeny Vorotnikov, the higher wages are passed on to consumers as higher prices—as much as 15 percent higher. In total, Kleiner and Vorotnikov estimate that licensing costs the economy between $183.9 and $197.3 billion due to the higher prices and misallocated resources.
An illustrative example of the effect of occupational licensing on consumers is the “Cadillac Effect.” In a situation where the government mandated only the highest quality, luxury car can be sold, what would happen? Some consumers who were willing to buy a basic economy car, would now buy the more expensive luxury car. But, other consumers would be unable to purchase a car, because the Cadillac exceeds their budget. The average quality of cars would be higher in this world, but many consumers would be left worse off, either by paying more for cars that do not meet their needs or not being able to purchase one.
Licensing works in much the same way, forcing some potential consumers out of the market, and increasing prices for others.
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The tidal wave of alleged misspending identified by auditors at the Mississippi Department of Human Services was not confined to the headline-grabbing payments for publicity events with famous athletes, inspirational talks from a former pro-wrestler and construction of a new volleyball stadium.
Auditors say some disputed payments also included grants to established programs, such as the T.K. Martin Center at Mississippi State University that helps children with dyslexia learn to read.
The problem is not with the worthiness of the recipients but with how officials awarded the grants in violation of federal regulations, the auditors say.
The examples also show how then-MDHS director John Davis cut corners and skirted guidelines to further his own agenda and to try to satisfy the aims of former Gov. Phil Bryant. Behind his support for valid programs, Bryant’s requests also served to placate a campaign donor and the agriculture school, one of the state’s most powerful lobbies.
New communication obtained by Mississippi Today shows Bryant asking Davis about funding for specific vendors — encouraging Davis to pre-select grant awards — and the director eagerly complying.
“Yes sir we can definitely help,” Davis replied to his boss in one instance. “You can go ahead and tell them I will be reaching out to fund them. I will do today.”
The exchanges shed light on a larger scandal that began after Davis exploited his agency’s nonexistent bid process for federal block grants that came with virtually no federal oversight. Under his leadership, the agency started making upfront, multimillion-dollar payments to two private nonprofits, Mississippi Community Education Center and Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, to run an umbrella program they called Families First for Mississippi.
Davis maintained control over how Families First operated while he treated the private nonprofits and the public agency as one in the same.
But they weren’t the same because the nonprofit spending was shielded from public view, creating a black hole and concealing a raft of legal and ethical issues until state auditors finally caught up with them.
Davis and five others have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges while the state attempts to claw back payments identified as improper. Officials have not accused Bryant of any wrongdoing in the case.
Mississippi Today reviewed communication between Davis, Bryant and other welfare officials in the months leading up to the start of the state auditor’s welfare investigation to understand the closed-door decisions behind the public spending. Some of those text messages are reprinted here exactly as they appear without correction.
In this story, we examine two examples of Bryant asking Davis, his appointee, if he could fund a specific organization without using normal channels.
“Any way we can help?” Bryant worded his request both times.
In one case, Davis responded within minutes, assuring the governor he would reach out that day to fund Willowood Developmental Center, a nonprofit that serves adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Jackson.
Credit: Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
Willowood was already under a separate child care grant with the department when Bryant sent Davis the request for Families First funding. And even though Willowood never ended up receiving additional MDHS funding after the exchange, Davis’ response reveals his agency’s cavalier and preferential grant award process – and Bryant’s involvement in it.
“If it’s wrong to try to help Willowood and those poor children out there, then I will have to say I was wrong, but I don’t think I was,” Bryant told Mississippi Today.
In the other case, Davis initially told the governor it would be against federal regulations for his agency to fund the T.K. Martin Center for Technology and Disability at Mississippi State University. But, then Davis found a way to award the center a grant anyway.
“Perhaps he did,” Bryant said. “And I hope it was proper and legal and ethical and moral because I remember people at Mississippi State, and I don’t remember who, calling and saying, ‘This is a wonderful program for these poor children and we’re going to lose it.’”
Both programs were associated with Families First for Mississippi, the now-defunct program that attached its name to many existing organizations across the state and promised to pump resources directly into the communities of needy residents.
In reality, the initiative was little more than a smokescreen for the widespread misspending of a federal grant called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), intended to help the state’s most vulnerable residents. According to a Mississippi Today analysis of audit reports, independent accountants found that between 70% and 86% of purchases by the two Families First nonprofits violated federal rules – including welfare regulations, which are already some of the laxest guidelines of all federal grants.
For more than two decades, Families First was a catch-all phrase for services Mississippi provided with its TANF dollars.
Dating to the 1990s, after Congress overhauled the welfare system, small organizations across the state received “Families First grants” from the Mississippi Department of Human Services to offer parenting and anger management classes, after-school programs, tutoring, and job-preparation activities. Sometimes these entities received grants directly from the state agency and sometimes they received subcontracts from other MDHS subgrantees, making them what auditors call “third tier recipients.” The contractors were supposed to advance the state’s goal of helping low-income families “achieve self-sufficiency.”
But the state also used its welfare money and the Families First program to supplement the budgets of existing programs and private organizations that don’t seem to directly relate to poverty, such as services for children with disabilities – programs often absent from Mississippi’s notoriously underfunded public school system.
The state has broad flexibility to spend welfare dollars not just to help people out of poverty, but to prevent others from falling into it. Ideally, the money would be distributed as part of a cohesive plan for battling poverty in the state or through a competitive process to boost the most promising programs. But records show that under Davis, the agency often awarded grants at his discretion, sometimes on the suggestion of political leaders.
Davis said when he became director, Bryant instructed him to significantly consolidate the number of TANF grants to a manageable number, resulting in the large contracts with the two nonprofits. This was just one of multiple areas of the agency that Davis said Bryant instructed him to outsource, including child support enforcement.
The T.K. Martin Center, formed in 1997 and named after a former MSU dean and vice president, received a “Families First grant” in 2017 to open a program to help kids learn to read. It was called the IGNITE Dyslexia Clinic.
Willowood, a roughly $6 million-a-year, nearly 50-year-old charity funded primarily by government grants and run by a board of prominent community members, had received Families First funding throughout the 2000s, its director told Mississippi Today.
Both Willowood and T.K. Martin programs overlapped with another federal grant that investigators and auditors have yet to examine as closely as they have TANF: the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF).
From 2015 to 2019, MDHS had stopped giving Families First grants to Willowood but instead funded the center through a CCDF subgrant, which the nonprofit used to operate its day care center.
When the TANF program was in strife during the months leading up to Davis’ forced retirement – after his agency had cut the budgets of several subgrantees and Families First was bleeding funds – the agency also pivoted to CCDF to help T.K. Martin.
The Child Care Development Fund is a federal block grant, similar to TANF, that states can use to provide child care vouchers to low-income working parents or improve the quality of day care centers. In 2018, child care advocates complained that the agency had not approved a new voucher in five years.
A week after Davis told Bryant his agency couldn’t legally fund T.K. Martin, the welfare director visited Mississippi State University to tour the facilities and discuss funding with college president Mark Keenum, emails show. They struck a deal that day, according to text messages.
Nancy New, the nonprofit founder who partly ran Families First, also crossed paths with both programs. She is one of the central figures in the welfare scandal who has pleaded not guilty to several criminal charges and is awaiting trial.
New joined welfare officials when they visited T.K. Martin in April of 2019, according to an emailed itinerary.
NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre participates in a question and answer session at a fundraiser for Willowood Developmental Center, a facility that provides training and assistance for special needs students, Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018 in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
New also attended a luncheon at Willowood with “special Guest Brett Favre,” a calendar entry from October 2018 shows. Willowood’s director told Mississippi Today that Favre’s cousin sat on its board and arranged for the former NFL star to speak at Willowood’s event and fundraiser.
Favre became a high profile figure in the welfare scandal after the auditor revealed that the New’s nonprofit had paid the athlete $1 million in welfare funds to promote Families First and to speak at events that the auditor said he didn’t attend.
“That was not one of the speeches he was quote-unquote supposed to make,” said Willowood’s executive director Curtis Alford, who added that Willowood did not pay Favre for the appearance.
A couple months after the event, Davis signed a $182,275 CCDF subgrant with Willowood “to promote self-sufficiency by promoting the optimal development of children” — language that more closely aligns with the purposes of TANF. A week later, calendar entries show, the News planned to attend a tour of Willowood.
Independent accountants found that Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, one of the Families First subgrantees, had illegally funded the dyslexia program at T.K. Martin Center in 2017 and 2018.
Overall, auditors determined that the nonprofit misused more than $11.5 million in federal grant dollars, including $717,000 it improperly paid to Mississippi State University. That included the grant that went to T.K. Martin. No one from the north Mississippi nonprofit has faced criminal charges.
In the spring of 2019, while the Family Resource Center faced reported budget cuts and its grant to T.K. Martin had expired, Davis received a flurry of messages.
He heard concerns about the reading program from First Lady Deborah Bryant, U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and the head of the Republican Party in Starkville where Mississippi State University is located, texts show.
“Things like this disturb me,” Deborah Bryant said in an email to her husband, referring to the story of a mom whose 6-year-old daughter was at risk of losing the life-changing services she received from the clinic.
Bryant, who struggled with dyslexia as a kid, forwarded his wife’s email to Davis. “Anyway we can help?” he wrote from his personal email account.
Davis said he couldn’t. He told the governor that his agency would be violating federal regulations if it funded the center – even though MDHS had already indirectly funded the center through Families First.
“My attorneys told me that after they reviewed the scope it is all clinical based diagnosis and treatment,” Davis told Bryant in the April 17, 2019 email. “They advised me that they are of the opinion that it cannot be funded with TANF or any other MDHS funds.”
A footnote in the forensic audit referenced this email, but didn’t mention that the recipient was Gov. Bryant. Auditors determined that TANF money could not be used for the services at T.K. Martin because the program did not target needy families. The audit never acknowledges that the center eventually received child care funding.
“Thanks John,” Gov. Bryant responded. “Let me know if I can help find funding. We always want to follow the rules.”
Credit: Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
The same day as the email, the Columbus Dispatch published a story addressing concerns that MSU might be closing T.K. Martin, which included vague quotes from university officials saying that a new plan for funding “is still being formulated.”
Behind closed doors, the university was discussing funding with Davis. A week later, welfare officials visited the campus to discuss the program.
With the help of a deputy director named Jacob Black, who also attended the April 24 tour, Davis found the funding workaround. The day of the visit, Davis texted Bryant, saying he had “FOUND A WAY TO FUND THE T.K. Martin Center you ask me about.”
Credit: Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
Later that day, Black texted Davis, recommending they add T.K. Martin into its application for renewed federal preschool funding, which was set to open in a few months. The federal agency eventually rejected Mississippi’s application and the state never got that funding.
“I think we can bridge the gap until that funding starts next spring. I will make that happen,” Black wrote.
Davis thanked Black for “always thinking ahead.”
“I am just tying to keep up with my teacher,” Black responded. “Thank you for being that teacher.”
Davis relied on Black, who is an attorney, to provide legal advice and ensure the agency was complying with the law. Their communication suggests Black knew how to get creative with funding. Once, when Davis asked Black by text if he could find $2.5 million to shore up New’s nonprofit, he agreed to find a way.
“Let me figure out how to do it without creating an audit finding,” Black wrote.
Davis and Black seemed to get along; the director once told his deputy that the governor “thinks a great deal of you.”
But Black apparently wasn’t as loyal to Davis as he appeared. Black was one of the employees who took information about Davis’ alleged misspending to Phil Bryant’s office in late June of 2019, according to a former agency spokesperson. Bryant alerted State Auditor Shad White, according to the auditor, prompting the investigation that identified rampant misspending and possible theft. Officials have not made public what exactly the tip entailed, calling it an exempt investigatory record. After Davis was ousted, Black remained a top agency official and even became interim director for about a month in early 2020 before current Gov. Tate Reeves replaced him with former prosecutor Bob Anderson. Soon after, Black left MDHS to take a staff attorney job at Medicaid.
Days after the MSU tour, Davis told Gov. Bryant the funding to T.K. Martin was a done deal, even though the agency didn’t yet possess a “scope of work” document from the center and wouldn’t officially ink the grant for almost three months.
“They are being funded,” Davis texted Bryant on April 26. “…They sent a memo out telling the staff at TK Martin everything is good … I told him that’s all I needed to know. So, we are slick.”
Officials never publicized – even in a press release about T.K. Martin published weeks later – that the welfare agency provided the stopgap.
Mississippi State spokesperson Sid Salter did not return several phone calls for this story, but he told Mississippi Today by email, “Your assertions regarding ‘closed doors’ or ‘workarounds’ reflect neither the spirit nor the letter of what transpired at the meeting” with Davis.
That July, days after the investigation into Davis began, Black signed the official MDHS subgrant agreement with T.K. Martin for $149,978. Since MDHS awarded the grant after Davis left office and the money came out of the child care fund and not TANF, the main grant under investigation recently, forensic auditors have not examined this expenditure.
In the subgrant file, there is a non-solicitation grant sheet, on which officials must explain why they are awarding funds outside of a bid process. On the document, there is a box that asks agency officers to “explain in detail the reason(s) that quotes, bids or proposals were not requested to obtain an award of services.”
The box is empty.
“Any assertion that MSU did not appropriately apply for the MDHS grant is simply not factual,” Salter wrote.
Although T.K. Martin is no longer receiving funding from MDHS, the university representative said the program is on solid footing. “MSU is proud of the T.K. Martin Center and openly advocates for funding to keep TKMC programs operating because those programs serve deserving clients,” Salter said by email.
Governor Phil Bryant after delivering the State of the State address in the House of Representatives Chamber of the Mississippi State Capitol Tuesday, January 15, 2019. Credit: Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/Report For America
Bryant made a similar intervention on behalf of Willowood, the Jackson center that provides services to adults and children with special needs and runs a day care center that often takes kids who are in state custody.
From 2000 to 2010, MDHS had given Willowood an annual Families First grant averaging around $130,000, which allowed it to run fatherhood initiatives or programs at Mississippi’s youth detention center. But in recent years, Willowood hadn’t received that funding, so it stopped providing those services.
Alford, the Willowood director, told Mississippi Today that around 2018, he began discussing the changing landscape of the state’s welfare program with other community leaders, asking, “How do you get back into the Families First deal?”
“They said, ‘Well, Nancy New is controlling a lot of that money now,’” Alford said. “I reached out to her to see if we could get back into that loop of money.”
But the help never came.
Willowood board member David Marsh wrote Bryant a letter in March of 2019, just a few months before the auditor’s investigation began and Davis abruptly retired.
“You have been a friend to Willowood for numerous years and we can’t thank you enough for your support,” wrote Marsh, owner of a local construction company. “We humbly ask that Families First reinstate the $150,000.00 that Willowood desperately needs.”
Marsh, whose company Benchmark Construction has donated $6,200 to Bryant’s political campaigns over the years, told Mississippi Today that he had known Gov. Bryant for decades. Marsh said Bryant helped Willowood fundraise when he was state auditor.
“I thought that would be beneficial if he knew that Willowood needed help,” Marsh said. “… So I just reached out to him because I know him personally and wanted to see if there was any opportunity to get that (Families First grant) back.”
Gov. Bryant sent a picture of the letter to his welfare director, Davis, with the message, “Anyway we can help these guys?”
Davis said yes. “You can go ahead and tell them I will be reaching out to fund them,” he responded. “I will do today.”
Though the Families First program collapsed before Willowood received another grant, the exchange shines light on Bryant’s role in the channeling of funds not just at the state agency level, but through the privatized Families First program run by Nancy New.
Auditors have accused Davis of having inappropriate involvement in New’s funding decisions, demonstrating his favoritism and undue influence over the nonprofit. But in the case of Willowood, Bryant appeared to wield the power.
After Marsh sent the letter, Alford said he received a call.
“In just a couple days,” Alford said, “Nancy New called me and said, ‘I understand that the governor says that y’all are supposed to be getting money from us and we’re not giving it to you.’”
“She said she was going to try to fund me something and then she got arrested, I’m assuming, shortly after that because I’ve never heard another word from her,” he said.
This is Part 3 in Mississippi Today’s series “The Backchannel,” which examines former Gov. Phil Bryant’s role in the running of his welfare department during what officials have called the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history.
OXFORD – Haley Morgan lost her job at a liquor store when she came out as transgender last year.
The 23-year-old cycled through job interviews where she shared her new, chosen name. She didn’t get calls back.
That May, her college town’s Starbucks became a lifeline. The Seattle-based coffee chain had policies that supported trans workers and provided health insurance that could cover hormone replacement therapy.
But store managers never stayed for long, creating a chaotic workplace. And the one manager who did stick around made Morgan’s work life a nightmare.
“He was explicitly transphobic,” Morgan said. “He’d say things like my appearance gives away the fact I’m trans. He’d refer to me as a man as a way to belittle me.”
Workers at the Starbucks just outside University of Mississippi’s campus were already frustrated that the new manager was given the position at all. He hadn’t worked at a Starbucks before. The situation got Morgan thinking about a strategy she was seeing at Starbucks stores across the country: unionizing.
The reasons to do so kept piling up in her mind: inconsistent scheduling, pay that has yet to hit $15 an hour, confusing performance metrics.
As a lifelong Mississippian, where federal data shows just 5.5% of workers are in unions, Morgan’s understanding was theoretical — what she learned through bits of American history in grade school and as a public policy major at UM. But as she saw the number of unionized Starbucks stores grow, she felt more confident trying.
Since a Buffalo Starbucks voted to form a union in December 2021, seven others have won union elections. More than 100 others have started petitioning to hold their own.
Their efforts come amid a growing movement nationwide led by younger members in consumer-oriented jobs known for high turnover, not the stereotypical blue collar trade work usually associated with union representation.
Amazon workers in Staten Island won their election last week. The workers who wrap Amy’s burritos in California and the people who box Hershey’s chocolate in Virginia are organizing, too, demanding better conditions and pay.
“The kind of grass roots efforts we are seeing are real and part of a broader pattern,” said Jarod Roll, a labor historian at the University of Mississippi. “Whether (young people) are leaving high school or leaving college, living-wage jobs or jobs that allow them to buy a house or pay off debt are hard to find. And that, in part, is the result of intense anti-union efforts over the last 50 years.”
Brenda Scott of MASE/CWA speaking to union members ahead of vote at the Nissan Canton plant. Credit: Alex Rozier, Mississippi Today
Brenda Scott has been a voice for workers over three decades and is the president of Mississippi Alliance of State Employees. At one point, her group represented6,000 workers in 1989. Now that number is fewer than 2,000, as workers have left and lost interest. It’s a challenge, she said, to keep people engaged rather than “on the bench.”
Mississippi’s so-called right-to-work laws make it so workers can opt out of joining and paying dues to recognized unions, just like the rest of the South.
“The Mississippi labor movement has a lot of work to do,” Scott said. “Our numbers are low.”
In 2020, Mississippi’s number of union workers was at about 7,400. In 2021, that number was down to 5,900, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the last decade, the number of unionized Mississippians has rarely reached 7% of the workforce.
“We older leaders, we need to engage with the younger leaders,” Scott said. “They’re not only leaders of tomorrow, they’re the leaders of today.”
Call center workers employed at Maximus, the largest federal call center contractor in the nation, went on strike today in Hattiesburg, Wednesday, Mar. 23, 2022. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
The last major Mississippi union campaign at the Canton Nissan plant in 2017 failed. But less than a month after Morgan’s announcement at the Oxford Starbucks, workers in Hattiesburg held the first ever strike at a call center contracted by the federal government. They, too, are working to unionize.
In Mississippi, the unions that do exist include educators and teachers, the Teamster brotherhood, boilermakers, electrical workers, steel workers, and communications workers from AT&T. Some of those unions are more in name than action. Their numbers are still small considering the workforce at large.
Morgan is now experiencing what those who have dedicated decades to mobilizing workers in Mississippi have long seen: workers aren’t often familiar with the concepts and abilities of unions and they’re terrified of losing their jobs or health insurance.
“It’s really hard to explain what a union is when there is no real concept of bottom-up organizing in Mississippi,” Morgan said. “The Nissan plant was a huge thing in the news, so a lot of the times that is brought up: It didn’t work there so why would it work here?”
The Nissan campaign targeted thousands of workers in a single plant. It had over a decade of work built up behind it. But come election day, workers voted 2,244-1,307 against the United Auto Workers.
Sanchioni Butler, a UAW organizer, spent a decade building support from clergy members to community leaders in addition to educating plant workers on unions.
“I learned that fear is real,” Butler said. “I’ve seen some of the strongest people fold because of the fear of losing what they have.”
In this Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2017, photo, UAW members use their signs to block Nissan company signs at one of the entrances to the vehicle assembly plant in Canton, Miss. In voting that begins early Thursday, Aug. 3, some 3,700 direct employees at the Nissan plant will decide whether they want a union. The polls close at 7 p.m., local time on Friday. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)
Then-Gov. Phil Bryant and business leaders came out hard against union efforts at Nissan. It would hurt the company’s competitiveness, they said, in turn hurting its workers. A National Labor Relations Board complaint accused a plant supervisor of threatening workers with lost wages and a plant closure if a union came in — something Nissan denied.
Similar back-and-forth has played out between workers and management at the Maximus Federal office in Hattiesburg, where workers answer calls about Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.
“In order for workers in the South to win, they have to stand together and have courage,” Butler said. “Somebody has to take a stand. The organizer can’t do that. The workers are the ones who have the power to vote in their best interest.”
In its annual report on unions, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the national median weekly earnings of nonunion workers was about 83% of the wages of their union counterparts — $975 versus $1,169.
A recent study by Oxfam, a nonprofit that works to end poverty, found that 45% of Mississippians are earning under $15 an hour.
While the Maximus workers aren’t in a recognized union, they’ve still put pressure on the company with some results alongside other Maximus call center workers in Louisiana and members of Communications Workers of America. Maximus bumped wages up to $15 per hour before a presidential federal contractor order required it; the company lowered health insurance costs; and shareholders voted to have a third-party racial equity audit to examine the company’s impact on communities of color.
The workers — largely single mothers and women of color — are still pushing for higher wages that compare to the $55,000 salaries federal call center workers make at the Internal Revenue Service. Maximus also doesn’t offer every worker paid sick days.
While Starbucks touts investing in baristas’ pay, Morgan has yet to see an increase to $15 an hour in her paycheck. She said she and her coworkers are still around $12 with the promise it will eventually reach $15. Morgan says it’s unclear when that will happen.
A Starbucks spokesperson told Mississippi Today that $15 an hour for baristas will become the baseline starting wage this summer. The average wage, at that point, will be $17 nationwide, according to the chain.
Morgan would work at Starbucks full-time, but the store isn’t offering it. To ensure she brings home at least $600 every two weeks — just barely enough to cover her rent and other expenses — she works on a food delivery app.
“Different managers said different things,” Morgan said, referring to the hourly pay increases. “And it’s hard to hold any of them accountable.”
A union, she thinks, could mitigate issues like that.
Workers can either sign enough union cards to spur an election hosted by the National Labor Board or they can have a large enough number of cards signed that the election isn’t needed.
Neither the local Starbucks or Maximus workers are at that point yet — getting there has long been a challenge in Mississippi, especially.
“There was a conscious effort to erase unions, demonize unions, that goes back to the 40s and 50s,” said Roll, the UM professor. “And it all goes back to maintaining Mississippi’s cheap labor economy.”
That economic structure originated from Mississippi’s reliance on the free work of enslaved Black people and then their cheap work through tenant farming and sharecropping.
By the 1940s, white male Mississippians in grain processing, timber and other trade jobs did create influential unions. Hall said those gains were stomped out by politicians and business leaders with accusations of communism during the McCarthy era.
“There’s a history that they were here and they were successful that often gets overlooked,” Roll said. “And the suppression of those unions shows how much a threat they were seen as by employers and politicians.”
Morgan has been inspired by the work of former UM classmate, Jaz Brisack, who led the Buffalo Starbuck unionizing efforts. She isn’t sure she’d have found the confidence to begin organizing without Brisack.
Morgan’s manager, who workers say also made racist and sexist comments, was put on leave to be investigated. But Morgan said Starbucks ethics and compliance investigators didn’t call her to discuss what happened until after workers shared their letter about unionizing publicly.
Haley Morgan, 23 of Oxford, near the Starbucks where she is employed. Morgan is spearheading a movement in the state for baristas at Starbucks stores to unionize. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
Recently, Morgan was told the manager was fired. In a statement to Mississippi Today, Starbucks said it “separated” from the manager for “policy violations.”
Starbucks has consistently said it supports its workers’ right to unionize but thinks a union would come between them and their workers, which it prefers to call “partners.” It says it’s continuing to “listen and learn” from its stores.
Morgan said hours are still inconsistent for her and her coworkers. She has to stay at about 20 hours each week to hold onto her health insurance. Most weeks she’s lucky to hit 25.
“Not many jobs are going to support being trans in Mississippi,” Morgan said.
It’s not as simple as just quitting and finding something better — an option critics often jump to.
“We like working at Starbucks,” Morgan said. “That’s why we want to unionize. We care.”
The failure of the Legislature to restore the initiative process that allows citizens to place issues on the ballot for voters to decide could be seen as a case study on how a handful of people or even one lawmaker can determine whether a proposal lives or dies.
In this case, the legislator was Senate Accountability, Efficiency and Transparency Chair John Polk, R-Hattiesburg, who near the end of the just-completed 2022 session demanded a key change be placed in the final agreement restoring the initiative.
That demand resulted in the demise of efforts to restore the initiative.
The change Polk proposed was to more than double the number of signatures needed to place an issue on the ballot.
Whether rank-and-file members of the Legislature would have agreed with Polk’s proposed change will never be known. Polk never proposed the change for legislators to publicly debate. Instead, he tried to make the change at the end of the session in closed door negotiations.
Polk is far from the first and will not be the last member of the Legislature to exert such influence. But there is a certain degree of irony that Polk exerted that influence on a proposal designed to give citizens the right to bypass the Legislature and place issues on the ballot.
Just about all legislators went into the 2022 session saying they supported restoring the initiative that was ruled invalid in a controversial May 2021 ruling by the Mississippi Supreme Court. The language that offended the Supreme Court justices said the signatures had to be gathered equally from the five U.S. House districts as they existed in 1990. The state lost a congressional district as a result of the 2000 U.S. Census.
Multiple bills were filed at the start of the 2022 session to fix and to restore the process. Speaker Philip Gunn assigned most of the House bills to the Constitution Committee since the initiative is created in the Mississippi Constitution. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann assigned most of the Senate bills to Polk’s committee.
All of the Senate bills died when they were not taken up in committee, leaving the only vehicle to restore the initiative as House Concurrent Resolution 39. That proposal passed the House Constitution Committee and was approved by the full chamber.
The proposal mandated that the number of signatures of registered voters needed to place an issue on the ballot be equal to 12% of the vote in the last gubernatorial election — or roughly 90,000 signatures. That was the threshold in the original initiative process that was struck down by the Supreme Court.
On a deadline day — the final day for Polk to pass the bill out of his committee — he finally took up the House proposal to restore the initiative. He added a so-called reverse repealer to the bill — meaning it would be repealed automatically should it pass. Reverse repealers are common in the legislative process as a means to keep a bill alive while preventing it from passing without additional discussions.
The Senate voted on and overwhelmingly approved the original language requiring signatures be gathered equal to 12% of the vote in the last gubernatorial election. Polk or no one else tried to change that language.
But what Polk did by placing the reverse repealer in the bill was ensure that it would go to conference. In conference, three House members and three members of the Senate — but in reality Polk and House Constitution Chair Fred Shanks — would work out the final details of the bill.
In those closed-door discussions, Polk advocated the number of signatures needed to place an issue on the ballot should be equal to 12% of the registered voters (those eligible to vote) — or about 238,000 compared to about 90,000 signatures in the original proposal.
Polk was advocating for that position in a conference report that legislators could not change. They either had to accept, reject or send the proposal back for further negotiations during the final days of the session.
Shanks would not agree. Gunn, who supported Shanks’ position, said Polk was asking for “an enormously high threshold that we felt the citizens would never be able to achieve.”
Polk maintained the high threshold “makes sure more Mississippians care about the issue being presented.”
Hosemann said he supported Polk’s position.
“There was concern that … it is so easy to get people to sign,” Hosemann said. “… I think that was a concern of both the House and the Senate.”
Perhaps it is a legitimate concern. And indeed any legislator could have tried to amend the bill and had public debate about the number of signatures that should be required to place an issue on the ballot. None did until Polk at the very end of the session.
While 50,000 Mississippians face the prospect of going without affordable medical care thanks to a contract dispute between the state’s largest hospital and insurer over reimbursement rates, the salaries for executives at both entities are shielded from the public.
Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi sued the state over a decade ago to make sure its executives’ compensation could not be disclosed, and the University of Mississippi Medical Center — despite being under the purview of the Institutions of Higher Learning and receiving state and federal funding — cites a broad exemption in state law when withholding its top administrators’ salary information.
Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi is required to file information about its executives’ compensation as part of its annual report to the Mississippi Insurance Department. But in 2009, the insurer sued the department to stop it from releasing that information to the public.
Several current executives at the company — Carol Pigott, the CEO; Thomas Fenter, the chief medical officer; and Bryan Lagg, senior vice president of consumer marketing and sales — are listed as plaintiffs in court filings.
Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Patricia D. Wise sided with Blue Cross, ordering the department “to withhold from public disclosure all information concerning the compensation of BCBSM executives.” Wise determined that the Insurance Department didn’t use the information to carry out its duties, so it isn’t a public record, and that disclosing the salary information would violate “the privacy rights of the individual plaintiffs/executives.”
Top executives make seven figures, a longtime former employee of the insurance company told Mississippi Today.
The median household income in Mississippi is around $46,000.
“Salaries and employee compensation of all employees at BCBSMS is not pertinent to the contract dispute with UMMC, and simply distracts from what is really important — high-quality, cost-effective care for our Members,” Cayla Mangrum, manager of corporate communications for the company, said in a statement to Mississippi Today.
But Mississippians faced with exorbitant health care costs or the added burden — financial and otherwise — of driving elsewhere for care might see it differently.
Carmen Balber, executive director of the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, said that health insurance is essentially a public good, even when delivered through private companies.
“At the end of the day, we’re paying for those salaries,” she said, speaking about health insurance companies generally because she doesn’t have specific knowledge of BCBS Mississippi. “I’m certain that any consumer who’s had issues with their health insurance, paying for what they need, would be very interested to know that the CEO of the company was making $1 or $2 or $6 million a year.”
In many other states, that information is public record. In California, for example, an executive compensation report published annually on the company’s website shows their top executive made $6.4 million in 2020. In Michigan, the company’s CEO made $15.6 million in 2021. A spokesperson for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, the umbrella group for 34 different BCBS companies, said they did not have information about the number of states in which BCBS executive compensation is withheld from the public.
A 2016 survey by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners of its members around the country found that insurance company compensation figures were kept confidential in at least 12 states, including Mississippi.
The company awards yearly bonuses to employees — as much as six figures for executives — around March each year, said the former BCBS employee, and the amounts of the bonuses also increased in recent years.
The company told Mississippi Today the bonuses are “an important part” of incentive-based compensation.
“Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi (BCBSMS) is proud of our employee incentive program because it rewards (and thanks) our employees for their individual performance and contribution to the achievement of the Company’s health and wellness goals for our Members,” Mangrum said.
Though the University of Mississippi Medical Center receives about 9% of its funding from the state, the hospital shields its executives’ compensation, too. When Mississippi Today requested hospital salary information last year, UMMC invoked the broad hospital exemption in the state’s public records law to withhold the information. When reporters asked the Institutes of Higher Learning for the salary information this week, a spokesperson cited the law and said UMMC employees’ salaries are exempt from disclosure.
The salary for Dr. LouAnn Woodward, vice chancellor of health affairs and dean of the school of medicine, was $700,400 a year in 2016, according to a news article.
On March 31, Blue Cross and UMMC missed their deadline to sign a new contract, forcing tens of thousands of patients to pay higher costs for out-of-network care at the hospital, or go elsewhere. UMMC maintains it has been underpaid relative to other academic medical centers in the region and is asking for a 30% overall increase in reimbursement rates from Blue Cross in the first year of a new contract. Blue Cross argues that’s too much.
Contract disputes between the two have been tense in the past, but this is the first time UMMC has gone out of network with Blue Cross, hospital officials said.
In 2009, reporters from WLBT requested information on Blue Cross Blue Shield executive compensation from the Insurance Department, on behalf of several policyholders who wanted to know where their money was going.
Blue Cross then sued the Insurance Department, triggering the court order in their favor.
Last week, Mississippi Today filed a records request with the Mississippi Insurance Department for the executive compensation information Blue Cross Blue Shield is required to file with the state annually. The department responded that the 2009 court order prohibits it from fulfilling the request.
“In accordance with the Court’s directive, MID is prohibited from releasing the aforementioned information which is the subject of your request,” wrote deputy commissioner Mark Haire.
Historically, public hospital records were exempt from public disclosure. But after Singing River Health System in Pascagoula secretly stopped paying into its pension system from 2009 to 2014 as it faced a hidden financial crisis, legislators moved to require greater transparency. Public hospitals are now required to share board meeting minutes and financial records. But employee salaries and personnel records are still exempt.
In a statement to Mississippi Today, Blue Cross said they make money not from customer premiums but from “administrative efficiency and investments.” They also said they outperform federal requirements for the percentage of customer premiums they spend on claims, a figure called the medical loss ratio. For large employer groups, the requirement is 85%; Blue Cross says it hit 94%. For individuals, the requirement is 80%, and Blue Cross reached 99%.
“Our medical loss ratio performance clearly illustrates Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi’s ability to ensure the vast majority of the Member’s premium is for health care costs,” the statement said.
In other states, legislatures have passed laws preventing disclosure of insurers’ executive compensation. Alabama, for example, used to release the information publicly. In 2015, following lobbying from the insurance industry, the law changed to make salaries confidential.
Alabama health care attorney Jim McFerrin told AL.com that making salary information public gave customers more information about where their money was going and could allow them to take legal action in certain situations – like, for example if they believed a rate increase was unreasonable.
“A decrease in transparency means a decrease in accountability,” he told the news site.
Legislators approved $20 million in federal pandemic relief funds to private K-12 schools and private colleges for infrastructure improvements this week, despite concerns from some that public dollars should stay with public schools.
The money comes from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which gave the Mississippi Legislature $1.8 billion to spend on pandemic response, government services, and infrastructure improvements to water, sewer, and broadband.
After several rounds of deliberation, the Legislature approved grants of $10 million each to private K-12 schools and private colleges and universities.
Private schools must be members of the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools or accredited by another regional or national accrediting organization to be eligible for the grant. No school can receive more than $100,000 for infrastructure improvement projects related to water, sewer, broadband, or other allowable infrastructure projects under ARPA.
Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven, said she voted against the measure because she felt that the state shouldn’t be giving tax dollars to private schools.
“It’s a choice to go to a private school, and they have other methods of funding that our public schools don’t have,” she said.
Nancy Loome of The Parents’ Campaign shared that sentiment, calling the passage of the bill a “tremendous disappointment.”
“We believe that the public’s funds should be used for the public’s schools, not for the private schools that pick and choose which children they want to educate,” Loome said. “Right now, public schools are severely underfunded in Mississippi, and that harms all of us. Every public dollar that gets spent on a private school could be spent on a public school.”
For the private colleges and universities, funds will be allocated based on a school’s enrollment and schools can apply for grants to spend on water, sewer, broadband, or other allowable infrastructure projects under ARPA. The seven private colleges and universities named in the legislation are Belhaven University, Blue Mountain College, Millsaps College, Mississippi College, Rust College, Tougaloo College, and William Carey University.
Jason Dean, director of the Mississippi Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, was grateful to see the needs of these schools acknowledged, which he said serve 13,000 students across the state.
“There are private colleges that have served students in this state for decades, and some of their buildings are literally falling in,” he said. “While the money can’t go to build new buildings, it can go to water, sewer, and HVAC systems, which is a big one.”
Dean explained that by updating HVAC systems, costs can be defrayed on energy bills, giving colleges more money to allocate to other things.
The money for both grants must be allocated to schools by December 2024 and spent by December 2026.
Starting school is often an exciting, anticipated right of passage for a child, but for some parents – parents like Josh and Elizabeth Saucier – it’s an upcoming milestone for their son that comes with a deep sense of anxiety.
“Nolan stopped talking at 18 months,” said Elizabeth. “Before that, he was saying four to five words and hitting all of his milestones.”
Elizabeth took Nolan to his pediatrician.
“We started thinking that he had hearing problems, but the more questions she asked the more we realized that there was something else there.”
Nolan was referred to a developmental pediatrician in Mobile. By age 2 he was diagnosed with autism.
“I immediately started crying because I didn’t know what to expect,” Elizabeth said. “I knew that I didn’t want a tough life for my son. As a parent, you want the best for your child.”
They enrolled Nolan in speech and occupational therapies and identified a small school that would work for him.
“He’s progressing well,” Elizabeth said. “He’s been verbal since he was 3.”
Today, Nolan is 5 and will graduate from The Children’s Center for Communication at Development at the University of Southern Mississippi in Long Beach. While Elizabeth and Josh are proud of their son and his accomplishments so early in his life, there is a sense of anxiety for what the future holds.
“Nolan has a hard time with transitions,” Elizabeth said, “and I worry about that for him with any school. My fear is how he will adjust to the changes. I’m looking for a smaller class for Nolan to help keep him from getting overwhelmed and to give him more one on one time with the teacher.”
The idea of placing Nolan is a traditional classroom was nearly frightening for Elizabeth.
“I just don’t think he is ready to go to a regular school and be in a classroom with 25-30 kids. Right now, he is in a class of four and I just can’t see him in that large class setting.”
Elizabeth’s fears of understanding teachers, understanding parents, and accommodating Nolan’s special needs began to creep in.
“I have the fear that people won’t understand what Nolan goes through and that other parents in the class will get mad if he is struggling and disrupts the class. I just hope that no matter where he goes, people are understanding.”
Elizabeth has scoured the Mississippi Gulf Coast looking for options for Nolan.
“There is a private school in Gulfport called the Child Development Center for children with autism, but Nolan doesn’t qualify because he is high-functioning,” she said.
Elizabeth is determined that her son will not slip through the cracks. She has made it her mission to find a setting which works for Nolan.
“Not all kids are the same,” she said. “They each have their own struggles. Nolan has more struggles than the average child, but we are going to find the best place for him.”
Elizabeth has identified several options on the coast that would work. One of those options is Coast Episcopal School in Long Beach where she found a transitional kindergarten class.
“The class size is small with seven or eight kids,” she said, “and it’s perfect because I really wanted to hold Nolan back a year because I thought he wasn’t ready.”
The transitional kindergarten is exactly what Elizabeth was hoping for because it is for students who are not yet ready for kindergarten.
Elizabeth visited the class and saw a teacher who made accommodations for the different needs of her students.
“There was one child in the class who had a special seat that helped him with what must have been his need to fidget,” she said. “I watched the teacher get his seat out and help him with it and for the first time I could picture Nolan in a classroom,” Elizabeth said of the Coast Episcopal option.
She has continued to tour several other private school options along the coast.
“We want to give Nolan the best opportunity to succeed, and we feel like that is in a private school setting,” Elizabeth said.
Elizabeth has applied for the state’s Education Scholarship Account program which is designed to direct a portion of parents’ tax dollars to the education setting that best suits their child.
“The ESA would be a blessing because private school is expensive,” Elizabeth said. “There are so many expenses that go along with a child who has been diagnosed with autism that parents of typical children don’t have. We have therapy bills and other expenses.”
While there are plenty of excellent public schools available on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Elizabeth and Josh agree that they are not the best fit for Nolan.
“My brother and I were blessed to be typical children and attend school in the Long Beach School District,” Elizabeth said, “but not all kids learn the same and it wouldn’t be an option for Nolan. Parents know what’s best for their children. We know Nolan’s struggles and his strengths. We know what works for him when he is having a meltdown. We are more aware of what works for him than anyone else.”
Elizabeth’s mother Deborah Holt agrees.
“By offering the ESA, it levels the field for all children to have access to more education opportunities,” Deborah said.
Deborah is a staunch supporter of the Long Beach School District where she taught for over 26 years but recognizes the need for options for every child.
“Some children need a smaller class size that may be found at a private school,” she said, “and the ESA opens up more choices for families. We have excellent schools on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and parents should be able to choose the one that works best for their child.”
Elizabeth’s hope for Nolan is that he is happy and healthy.
“I want him to lead a happy life with the least amount of struggles.”
Whether the governor wanted grant funds directed to his favored vendors, a partner to proselytize for his faith-based initiatives, or for someone to keep track of his wayward distant relative, Bryant’s welfare director John Davis was eager to deliver for his boss.
It often took no more than a brief text message — sent privately — to get things done.
“Yes sir,” Davis would respond.
“Your the best,” Bryant would say.
Credit: Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
The former Mississippi governor appointed Davis to oversee the state’s roughly $1 billion public safety net for the poor in 2016.
Text exchanges recently obtained by Mississippi Today expose the governor’s backchannel influence on that agency, which is in the middle of a massive scandal auditors say cost Mississippi taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
Officials are accusing Davis of turning the federal block grant program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, most commonly known for providing the meager monthly “welfare check” to very poor families, into a slush fund.
But the aversion to providing direct cash assistance to the needy – causing welfare rolls to drop 75% and opening the door for Davis to use the bulk of the money in nonsensical ways – was the governor’s.
Over time, the agency’s alternative goal of helping people “find self-sufficiency,” became distorted by bloated, misleading campaigns posing as workforce training, parenting and youth development programs for poor families.
The changes in policy, Bryant’s influence, Davis’ eagerness to please, a cult-like atmosphere and lax oversight from state and federal authorities all contributed to the welfare agency’s failures.
From January 2016 to June 2019, when Davis served as director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services and reported directly to Bryant, auditors say at least $77 million in that agency’s taxpayer funding was misspent, millions of which have yet to be found. The governor has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the scandal.
The state could have used that money to provide a low-income family with a year’s worth of rent, electricity, child care, diapers, monthly transportation stipends, and nine meals a day – and have done the same for 2,600 more families. The number of people who could have benefitted from this is enough to fill every seat in the new volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi – which was purchased with welfare funds – eight times.
Davis, who has pleaded not guilty, is facing state embezzlement and fraud charges, a $96 million demand for repayment from the state auditor, a potential federal indictment, likely civil litigation, the risk of serious prison time and public scorn.
On the other hand, Bryant, who eventually forced Davis out of his job, has emerged unscathed.
Text messages, however, shed new light on Bryant’s involvement in the way Davis ran his department, spent welfare dollars and circumvented agency controls that should have prevented favoritism in grant awards.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is a federal block grant Congress authorized during the 1996 welfare overhaul. States have broad discretion to spend this annual pot, $86.5 million in Mississippi, on programs satisfying four purposes:
Provide direct assistance to needy families
Promote job preparation and work
Prevent out-of-wedlock pregnancies
Encourage two-parent families
Investigators from the office of State Auditor Shad White, a Bryant appointee, obtained these texts more than two years ago through cellphone data dumps – but the story they tell had been concealed until now. Mississippi Today has reviewed hundreds of pages of written communication, which are reprinted here exactly as they appear without correction.
But the governor’s name does not appear in White’s 104-page report describing in meticulous detail the misdeeds of welfare officials and contractors, save for a line about him alerting the auditor to potential fraud. Instead, White credited Bryant as the whistleblower in the welfare scandal.
White, who has stopped publicly discussing the audit due to a gag order in the criminal case, told Mississippi Today last October that he believed it was the welfare director’s duty to reject any improper requests from the governor, not the governor’s responsibility to know agency spending regulations.
John Davis, 54, spent his whole career in the Mississippi Department of Human Services, starting as a low-level social worker at the county DHS office in Brookhaven, where he grew up. By 2005, he was promoted to the state office, where he served directly over the very program he’s now accused of defrauding.
In a typical year, MDHS manages around $1 billion in federal safety net funds, about $150 million of which it contracts to other organizations, including private nonprofits. Before Davis took over, the TANF program was catching flak not for making large purchases, but for severe underspending. When he became director, the agency had accumulated roughly $40 million in extra TANF dollars from past years, creating the opportunity for what happened next.
Much of the misspending identified by auditors in the welfare scandal occurred on the nonprofit level as Davis’ department enforced few controls. The alleged scam primarily involved TANF funds the state funneled through a program Bryant touted called Families First for Mississippi.
In this Sept. 7, 2016 file photo John Davis, then executive director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, answers lawmakers questions at a hearing at the Capitol in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)
In audit reports, Davis is painted as a tyrant, as a leader who intimidated people with his unilateral control over funding and his ability to fire employees at will – a legislative change to the department that began his first year as director. But Davis wasn’t the only agency employee controlling MDHS’s finances and accounting, which was in disarray. For legal opinions and help issuing subgrants, he relied on savvy attorneys who could write grants to fit funding purposes and make expenditures without triggering a red flag in an audit.
His texts also indicate that the burden of holding the purse strings, and the barrage of requests and wheedling he received because of it, wore on Davis.
“I try to avoid him as much as possible cause he is always asking for money,” he once texted, referring to subgrantee and former football player Paul Lacoste, who ran a welfare-funded boot camp-style fitness class often attended by lawmakers and political staffers free of charge.
Davis didn’t have the luxury of ignoring the governor, so he leaned into his role as a good ole boy.
Gov. Bryant and his wife, Deborah Bryant, sometimes flattered Davis using language that seemed more familial than professional.
Just eight months into Davis’ term as director, Bryant’s wife assured him of the governor’s affection and support: “He LOVES you,” she wrote.
The lifelong government bureaucrat – a never-married, self-proclaimed “simple country boy” in his late 40s, doughy and balding – appeared to feed off the praise.
And Davis was not shy about showing his devotion to Bryant – a popular, charismatic politician who dressed in expensive suits and customized cowboy boots.
Credit: Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
Once in 2018, when the federal human services office rejected Mississippi’s proposal for a food stamps-funded workforce project that benefitted a prominent local trucking company, Davis sent an email to a national association requesting “URGENT ASSISTANCE” to save it. “My Governor, Phil Bryant has promoted this program,” he wrote.
He ended his message with, “My Governor is counting on me.”
Davis and Phil Bryant shared an evangelical energy, invoking God and Christianity in their public messaging or turning government-related speeches into what sounded like sermons.
The governor and the agency bureaucrat were the front-line defenders of a 2016 law to protect the “sincerely held” religious beliefs that marriage is between one man and one woman; that people should not have sex outside such unions; and that a person’s gender is set at birth.
Bryant and Davis also enjoyed sharing the company of celebrities. The governor flaunted his proximity to country musicians, reality TV personalities or star athletes like Favre, a high-profile player in the welfare audit. He snapped selfies with actress Jennifer Garner, who represents an international humanitarian nonprofit that received millions in TANF funds from the welfare agency Bryant oversaw.
Met w/ Jennifer Garner today in D.C. to discuss early childhood education in Mississippi and her initiative “Early Steps to School Success.” pic.twitter.com/1SvjL7zgTP
Davis, meanwhile, had become close to the family of famous retired WWE wrestler Ted DiBiase Sr., known as the “Million Dollar Man” – who was eager to promote the agency’s self-help principles through evangelism.
It was the perks Davis provided to the wrestler’s son, Brett DiBiase – including a fraudulent $48,000 contract and allegedly sending him to rehab on the welfare program’s dime – that prompted the initial investigation, blowing the larger welfare scandal wide open. Brett DiBiase pleaded guilty to a felony within the welfare scheme in 2020.
The other son, Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr., is the subject of a sealed federal civil investigation related to his work with the department.
Bryant had some prior connection to the wrestlers, but inside a government office that blended workplace and family, Davis developed particularly close relationships with the sons.
Since 1987, Ted DiBiase Sr. has played a classic WWE villain known for using his wealth to manipulate his opponents. In scripted, performance wrestling, they call this person a “heel.” He started a Christian ministry, through which he gets paid to speak at churches, in 2001. While he retired from wrestling in the 1990s, he still plays the character in skits on the program today.
The WWE is characterized by its portrayal of staged events and over-the-top storylines as real. These actors stay in character out of the ring, sometimes even off camera in an attempt to blur the line between reality and fiction.
Davis and Teddy DiBiase swapped Christian devotionals, traveled out of state and exercised at the gym together. Davis frequently texted the older brother, “I love you.” The welfare director flew across the country to visit Brett DiBiase while he was in drug rehab, discussed his treatment options with a specialist and called him the “son I never had.” When not together, they shared long, late-night phone calls, phone records show.
The welfare department hired the DiBiases, and their ministry, called Heart of David, for various “soft services,” such as to create a phone app to reach troubled teens and send them Bible verses. The plan was to incentivize kids to use the app by promising personalized videos from Ted DiBiase Sr. or the governor, proposals show. The app never happened. Their programs, according to audits, generally delivered few results and they didn’t report any outcomes to the state, according to Mississippi Today’s records requests.
Former Gov. Phil Bryant and Ted DiBiase Jr. in 2015.
The DiBiases invited Bryant and his wife to the premier of a documentary that Teddy DiBiase made about his father. On the red carpet, the photo op backdrop contained both Heart of David and Families First for Mississippi’s logos. Teddy DiBiase also sat on the advisory council for an initiative Deborah Bryant chaired and gave motivational speeches at the governor’s Healthy Teens Rallies.
In 2015, then-Gov. Phil Bryant visited the Canton, Mississippi set of the film Teddy DiBiase Jr. was attempting to produce and find investors for, according to a lawsuit DiBiase filed against the film producers for breach of contract. DiBiase’s partner on the film, Nicholas Coughlin, also received welfare money that the state auditor demanded he return.
While Davis’ closeness with the younger DiBiases, 39 and 34, has drawn scrutiny from investigators, Ted DiBiase Sr. believed Bryant was the one who elevated the wrestlers inside the state’s welfare program.
In an interview at a 2018 comic convention in Michigan, DiBiase Sr., 68, said that his ministry was “selected by our governor to be the face of his faith-based initiative for the state of Mississippi.”
Bryant denied this assertion, saying that people and organizations surrounding his administration often exaggerated his involvement with them for clout.
A draft proposal attached to agency emails obtained by Mississippi Today describes a plan to incorporate elements of faith within Families First for Mississippi as Bryant’s vision.
“Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant has identified the need to build capacity locally of many faith groups in Mississippi and has developed a faith-based initiative with a leader chosen to work with local communities,” the document dated May 2018 reads. “(Families First for Mississippi) will align its efforts with the Governor’s plan and will work closely with the Governor’s faith based leadership team.”
While welfare money may be spent on programs run by faith-based institutions, the federal government prohibits the state from using the money for inherently religious exercises, like worship.
A review of videos and social media posts shows that one of the only visible programs the DiBiases conducted, a four-day sports summer camp called “Ignite Sports Camp,” had the explicit goal “to reach young men for Jesus Christ.” The camp existed for years before the DiBiase ministry put its name on it. Videos from past summers show participants in the camp singing worship music.
In its report, the State Auditor’s Office also said that an MDHS subgrantee running Families First violated federal regulations when it paid to stage concerts starring Christian rock musician Jason Crabb and bought 4,000 copies of Crabb’s children’s book about the Ten Commandments in 2018. Independent auditors confirmed the book purchase was indicative of abuse and waste.
Emails show Deborah Bryant requested a lunch meeting for the governor to meet with Crabb and welfare officials in February of 2019.
The next month, Gerald Crabb, Jason Crabb’s father and also a Christian musician and ministry founder, texted Davis to thank him for what he had done for him and his son.
The welfare director told Gerald Crabb of his plan to incorporate “inner city kids” into their project. “You should hear them sing,” Davis wrote.
Davis said he envisioned them putting on a concert series with the children as the “opening act” and said that the governor and his wife were supportive of the effort.
“We had lunch with the Governor and First Lady,” Davis texted Gerald Crabb in March of 2019. “They are on board.”
Ted DiBiase Jr. speaks at the Healthy Teens Rally hosted by Families First for Mississippi and Gov. Phil Bryant’s office in 2018.
TANF, a federal block grant, is notorious in public program and policy circles for lax guidelines that give states broad flexibility to spend the money however they wish. It has the reputation of being a legal slush fund, a program in which officials can defend seemingly ludicrous purchases as satisfying vague purposes in federal law and get away with it.
But, according to the state and independent auditors who examined Mississippi’s spending, that perception is not entirely true. The accountants determined that most of the misspending violated federal law either because the purchases did not serve the needy, an apparently overlooked requirement of TANF guidelines, or they did not comply with other federal grant regulations governing conflicts of interest and unfair grant-awarding practices.
Because of the way Congress wrote the law creating TANF, though, “there’s very, very little ability to regulate,” said Nisha Patel, former director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Family Assistance, which oversees the TANF program.
States must gather and report many details about the lives of poor cash recipients in the welfare program so that the federal government can measure their household resources and track how many of them are working. But when it comes to how states spend the rest of the money or which private organizations it chooses to award the funds, the federal agency barely gathers any information. States only have to report their expenses to the federal government in vague categories and are not required to provide any supporting documentation, like subgrants or invoices.
“The data is only as good as what the state’s report,” Patel said, and if states aren’t accurately recording their spending, “There’s no way to check that.”
There is one entity that’s supposed to hold the Mississippi welfare agency accountable.
Each year on behalf of the federal government, the Office of the State Auditor audits state agencies that receive federal funds. It’s the federal government’s primary way of holding states accountable for their spending. Bryant served as state auditor from 1996, the year Congress passed the overhaul of welfare and created the TANF program, until 2007.
In 2005, a new state law required Bryant to begin auditing the TANF program’s performance – the actual outcomes of the people who were supposed to benefit from it – and the expenditures of its subgrantees. But the new requirement was conditional on the agency having the specific funds to do so, and the Legislature allowed the law to expire shortly thereafter. The office never conducted the audit of TANF under Bryant or since.
“It was too easy to put the hand in the copper kettle,” said former chair of the health and human services committee Rep. Steve Holland, D-Plantersville, who authored the 2005 law.
Holland, a longtime champion of public programs for the poor and sick, had realized for years that the state was relying on “quote unquote political faith” that the welfare agency would spend these funds wisely. He even voted back in the ‘90s against moving the department under the governor’s office, which he said only decreased accountability and yielded too much power to one politician. His colleagues ignored his concerns.
Near the end of Bryant’s administration, Holland said he raised suspicions about MDHS spending and “even bombarded in on the director at one point after having been told probably 10 times I could not see him.”
“I told him, I said, ‘Director, this thing is fixing to be like walking from hell to Texas. It’s gonna bust wide open. There’s too much hanky panky going on with this money and too little accountability,’” Holland said. “And he just simply said, ‘I’ve got it under control, Mr. Chairman.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think you do but I damn sure hope you do.’”
The lawmaker added, “This was the most enormous top-down scandal I think I’ve experienced in my 36 years in government.”
Auditor White has laid most of the blame in the welfare scandal at the feet of Davis and his nonprofit subgrantees, even though Davis’ department follows plans approved by the governor. Some state agencies have boards overseeing their operations, but others, like MDHS, answer directly to the state’s top official.
In the case of the misspending by nonprofit founder Nancy New, a central figure in the scandal, White sent letters demanding repayment to all of her nonprofit Mississippi Community Education Center’s board members – who could be held responsible in civil court. But in the case of the governor’s office, which oversees MDHS, no such demands were made.
The auditor explained to Mississippi Today in October that it is not the governor’s role to know how TANF funds may or may not be spent.
White posed a hypothetical: A governor meets with his human services director and asks for the department to use welfare funds to build, let’s say, a community garden – an unallowable purchase under TANF regulations.
White said it is the director’s responsibility to reject the request and explain that the money may not be used for that purpose.
On the flip side, White asked, “Is it the governor’s responsibility in that hypothetical that I just set up to know all the TANF regs? The answer is no.”
“If that is the governor’s responsibility,” he continued, “then it is impossible to be the governor of the state of Mississippi or any state, because you would have to be an expert in TANF regs, MEMA regs, DPS regs, and every federal grant that is drawn down by any of those entities. It would be impossible.”
Near the end of Davis’ administration in 2019 – around the same time he was asking New by text message to wire money to the Malibu, Calif., facility where Brett DiBiase was in rehab – there is an example of Davis telling the governor “no,” at least for a time.
Bryant was seeking funding for a children’s development clinic. Davis told the governor by email that his attorneys determined it would be against federal rules to put TANF or any other MDHS funds toward the program.
“Thanks John. Let me know if I can help find funding. We always want to follow the rules,” Bryant responded.
But even then, Davis eventually “found a way to fund” the organization anyway, he told the governor in a text a week later.
Credit: Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
“Perhaps he did,” Bryant said when Mississippi Today reminded him of this exchange. “And I hope it was proper and legal and ethical and moral.”
The director hadn’t even seen an application from the organization before making the decision, according to emails Mississippi Today obtained.
The conversation about whether a program fits the purposes of a particular pot of funding, and whose responsibility it is to know these rules, ignores another glaring problem with this scenario: A governor and agency director cannot simply decide up front, on their own, which organizations to give grant money, according to a lead auditor in White’s office.
“A director cannot unilaterally direct money to a subgrantee due to the required pre-award conditions and steps required in Uniform Grant Guidance,” director of the auditor’s finance and compliance division Stephanie Palmertree told Mississippi Today in an email. “Also, all federal monies are guided and audited on the concept of adequate internal control, which would require an application process at a minimum.”
White told Mississippi Today in October that he had not seen evidence of Bryant directing Davis to fund specific vendors.
And yet, the notion that Bryant could “find” ways for MDHS to fund specific organizations — and all he had to do was ask Davis to do so – is clear in their written communications possessed by the auditor’s office for more than two years.
Bryant deflected when asked about whether his requests put pressure on Davis to grant his wishes.
“I wouldn’t pick organizations and say ‘fund this one,’ ‘fund this one,’ ‘fund this one,’” Bryant said. “I think a question from me saying, ‘Can we fund these folks?’ is just that, a question.”
Policy advocates don’t see it that way.
“I’ve been saying all along that all of those TANF subgrants that are suspect – Nancy New, all of them – it was the governor who was the wizard behind the curtain,” said Carol Burnett, founder of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Institute. “That’s my opinion.”
Burnett’s opinion is an educated one; she was a division director in the Mississippi Department of Human Services in the early 2000s and has direct knowledge about how the agency operates.
“The thing about TANF and the governor in Mississippi is: it’s a huge pot of money and the governor has total control over it,” Burnett said. “The governor just had to have been involved in those decisions.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the federal funds to Mississippi, has denied several Mississippi Today requests for an interview, even to discuss general policies and controls within the program. It has said through written statements that the agency is waiting until its Office of the Inspector General has completed its investigation before it levies penalties against the state for the misspending. The agency did tell Mississippi Today in 2020 that Mississippi will have to pay back the misspent funds with its own state dollars, not future TANF funds.
Officials from the local FBI office declined to answer whether its investigation is ongoing.
On June 19, 2019, Davis informed Bryant he would be testifying in Washington about the state’s food assistance and public safety net programs. The welfare director told Bryant that members of the House Agriculture Committee “like what Mississippi is doing” and wanted to hear about “what we have done to be so successful.”
“Proud of the job you are doing,” Bryant responded by text.
The next day, Davis represented a starkly conservative voice on a panel before Congress, while Nancy New and Teddy DiBiase sat behind him on the first row. Mississippi had just eliminated a policy that expanded eligibility for food benefits, which had the effect of kicking people off the program.
To justify the policy change, Davis said the state was helping raise people out of poverty in other ways. He named one example: “Law of 16,” the self help courses Teddy DiBiase Jr. taught to employees at MDHS and other public agencies. The wrestler was paid millions in welfare funds to deliver these motivational lectures.
Nancy New and Ted “Teddy” DiBiase Jr. listen as Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes testifies before Congress on June 20, 2019 about why eligibility for food assistance should remain expanded to serve more low-income people. Then-Mississippi Department of Human Services Director John Davis was also testifying that day about why his state had eliminated that policy and how DiBiase’s self-help courses were meeting the needs of poor Mississippians. Credit: Courtesy of House Ag Democrats YouTube page
Using little more than buzzwords in his testimony, Davis inflated Mississippi’s “family-centered, multigenerational approach” of “helping the family holistically” and assisting individuals in “finding true self sufficiency.” Congress members praised his concept. Davis was positioning Mississippi’s safety net department as a national leader.
When he returned to Mississippi on June 21, he received a text from the governor. Bryant pressed Davis on whether he and agency employees had stayed at Trump Plaza during their trip and who paid for the rooms. Families First often used welfare funds to pay for these kinds of travel expenses, meaning they weren’t reflected in MDHS spending reports. Davis’ secretary actually held onto the New nonprofit’s credit card, texts show, so she could use it to book flights and hotel rooms.
Credit: Graphic by Bethany Atkinson
A text Davis received later from his colleague says MDHS paid for the rooms this time. Yet, Davis told Bryant he paid for the rooms out of his own pocket.
“Wow that’s an expensive place..” Bryant wrote.
“Yes sir. I’m single and no children. Was on my bucket list,” Davis said.
Bryant then told Davis to come to his office. The conversation happened on the same day Bryant reportedly relayed the initial tip of misspending to State Auditor White. A few days later, investigators from the auditor’s office gave Davis a polygraph test where they asked if he’d received any kickbacks from the DiBiases, according to an examination report. Within about two weeks, Davis announced under pressure his abrupt retirement from MDHS.
In August, after Davis left office and the auditor’s investigation was well underway, Davis sent the governor another text.
“I have been ask by the regional office in Atlanta to assist some states with modeling their programs after Mississippi,” Davis wrote.
The disgraced former bureaucrat wanted the governor’s blessing. “That’s sounds great,” Bryant responded.
This is Part 2 in Mississippi Today’s series “The Backchannel,” which examines former Gov. Phil Bryant’s role in the running of his welfare department during what officials have called the largest public embezzlement scheme in state history.
Mississippi legislators ended the 2022 session on a two-day spending spree where they spent funds at a pace never before seen in the state.
During a two-day period ending late Tuesday evening, legislators appropriated $7.32 billion on a state-support budget – 9.2% or $617 million more than was spent for the current year budget that ends on June 30.
In addition, the Legislature spent:
$1.51 billion in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds on a litany of items ranging from helping to repair or improve local water and sewer systems to tourism enhancement to propping up state agencies facing lawsuits because of substandard conditions.
More than $900 million in surplus funds on hundreds of projects, including small projects such as courthouse repairs across the state, construction (on public buildings, including schools, state office buildings and community college and universities and more) and road and bridge repairs.
At the end of the 48-hour spending spree, House Speaker Philip Gunn, R-Clinton, congratulated members, saying it was “a hard session, but one that has been very rewarding, one that has done amazing things for the people of the state and transformed our state.”
Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, began talking about the need to make transformative change with the funds from the American Rescue Plan soon after the U.S. Congress passed it in 2021.
During the 2022 session, the Legislature appropriated all but about $300 million of the $1.8 billion in American Rescue Plan funds it received. The Legislature can spend the remaining amount in the 2023 session.
“We are not likely to see this magnitude of additional federal dollars come to our state again in our lifetime,” Hosemann said. “This is why it was critical for the Legislature to create a plan which would result in the money going in the ground for generational change. So many of our communities across Mississippi have multi-million dollar water and sewer challenges which have health, safety, economic and other consequences.
“These funds will help these communities begin the process of addressing these concerns resulting in a better quality of life for our citizens,” Hosemann continued.
The Legislature enjoyed almost the perfect storm in terms of available money. Because of an estimated $35 billion in federal funds being funneled into Mississippi to deal with the pandemic, state revenue collections have soared to unprecedented heights, resulting in a surplus of about $1.1 billion in addition to the ARPA funds.
The Legislature spent about $900 million of those surplus funds on building projects and eschewed the traditional bond bill that is passed most sessions to incur long-term debt in addressing the state’s building needs. Legislators said they should be able to do the same next year as state revenue collections remain high. The end result should be a reduction in what the state spends on debt service. The debt service payment was $439 million for the current year.
One of the last of the scores of appropriations bills passed was to spend $222.3 million of the surplus funds on hundreds of projects in communities throughout the state. A summary of the projects was passed out to the members by the leadership, but not to members of the media.
After the summary in the House was passed out, the spending bill was passed in less than two minutes.
At times, the number of appropriations bills being taken up seemed overwhelming, Legislators got off to a late start on taking up the bills. Senate leaders say that occurred because House leadership refused to work on them until a $525 million tax cut was agreed to and passed on March 28.
“I am really concerned with the way the process is rushed,” said Rep. Zakiya Summers, D-Jackson, adding she was concerned about the possibility of mistakes. “…You really don’t have time to debate or ask questions. The conference reports (final agreements) come so fast.”
Summers said she would like to have seen American Rescue Plan funds earmarked to the city of Jackson because of its unique position as the state’s largest city to deal with its antiquated and subpar water and sewer system. But instead, Jackson, like all the cities in the state, will have an opportunity to apply for grants to get help with the system.
She said she was afraid to vote against the bill offered by the leadership to provide grants.
“If you don’t vote for that, you don’t get to vote for anything,” she said.
House leadership said they understand Jackson plans to put up $25 million of the almost $50 million in ARPA funds it received to hopefully pull down $25 million in state ARPA funds for water and sewer infrastructure needs. The program approved by the Legislature requires a dollar-for-dollar match from bigger cities to access the state ARPA funds.
One area where there was debate during the final days was on providing about $20 million in federal ARPA funds to private schools — both private universities and kindergarten through 12th grade schools. Opponents said public funds should not be spent on private schools.
The private school bill was at first defeated in the Senate, but ultimately the Senate leadership garnered the votes to pass the bill.
Significant additional funds also were spent to enhance efforts to improve the state highway system, including spending $40 million from the surplus funds to match federal funds available through the watershed infrastructure bill approved last year by the U.S. Congress.
“Our cities, counties and constituents have asked us to dedicate our resources to better maintain and add to our infrastructure,” Hosemann said. “This package is a direct response to their request, with projects ranging from critical safety needs to routine maintenance to new infrastructure across our state.”
The Legislature also appropriated about $40 million to improve conditions at state parks. Hosemann said a study indicated it would take about $160 million to address all the needs in the state park system. He said he hopes additional funds are appropriated in the 2023 session for the effort.
Jeremy Nichols, center, has his mouth examined by a University of Mississippi Medical Center doctor during a free oral, head and neck cancer screening at Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Dr. Eswarakumar Mundra, left, gives Shayla Allison paperwork after completing her free oral, head and neck cancer screening at Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Jeremy Nichols, center, has his mouth examined by a University of Mississippi Medical Center doctor during a free oral, head and neck cancer screening at Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Glendora Singleton, left, has her mouth examined during a free oral, head and neck cancer screening at Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Dr. Anne Kane, right, examines Rogelio Solis’ mouth during a free oral, head and neck cancer screening at Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Dr. Trace T. Palmer, left, and medical student Alex Hammett Rose, right, checks Betty Rowan’s mouth during a free oral, head and neck cancer screening at Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Literature about vaping and smoking and how it affects health is available during a free oral, head and neck cancer screening at Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Eric Durham gets his neck examined during a free oral, head and neck cancer screening at Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
Dr. Anne Kane, right, examines Eric Durham’s mouth during a free oral, head and neck cancer screening at Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Miss., Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today
More than 90 people attended a free oral, head and neck cancer screening hosted by the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center on Wednesday.
The free event was part of Oral, Head and Neck Cancer Awareness Week.
About 65,000 new oral, head and neck cancer diagnoses will be made this year in the United States, with nearly 14,600 deaths, according to the Head and Neck Cancer Alliance. In Mississippi, 560 new cases of oral cavity and pharynx cancer have been estimated for this year, with 130 deaths. Tobacco and alcohol use are strong risk factors for these cancers.
Researchers have also correlated to rising incidence of head and neck cancer in young adults to the human papillomavirus (HPV), a potentially cancer-causing virus that can be transmitted through oral sex. Early detection of and diagnosis is vital for successful cancer treatment.
