Mississippi Today
Attorneys drop hints that feds are eyeing former Gov. Phil Bryant in welfare investigation
Attorneys drop hints that feds are eyeing former Gov. Phil Bryant in welfare investigation
Perpetrators in the Mississippi welfare scandal lawsuit are cooperating with federal prosecutors.
High-profile officials confirm that a federal investigation into the misspending continues. Top defendants in the civil case have implored state prosecutors to pursue their boss, former Gov. Phil Bryant, who they say was responsible for much of the scandal.
But federal prosecutors are keeping quiet about their ongoing probe into the $77 million in welfare funds squandered while Bryant was governor.
And they’re demanding others keep quiet, too, according to a recent court filing.
“John Davis knows of the extent of personal involvement of former Governor Bryant and Governor (Tate) Reeves and the massive waste of taxpayer money,” attorney Jim Waide wrote in a Jan. 12 motion to dismiss the state’s massive parallel criminal case. “John Davis refuses to answer discovery because the FBI has directed him to keep silent.”
Meanwhile, attorneys for people accused of perpetuating the scheme — and even someone who committed fraud in an unrelated case — say they’ve taken all the blame for actions Bryant took, too.
“The landscape is very uneven out here, and if you’re not powerful and you don’t have powerful friends, then you are not protected,” said Lisa Ross, a defense attorney in the unrelated fraud case. “All the people with power get the benefit of the doubt.”
Davis, the former director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, pleaded guilty in September to a combined 20 state and federal counts of fraud, conspiracy, or theft and has agreed to aid the prosecution in the ongoing investigation, delaying his sentencing. He is a key witness.
“John Davis is critical because the ladder continues to move up,” Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens said after Davis pleaded guilty.
Up the ladder from Davis is Bryant, the former governor who appointed him, and potentially Reeves, the current governor who served as lieutenant governor at the time of the known misspending.
Bryant’s spokesperson, Denton Gibbes, told Mississippi Today on Friday that the former governor has not been interviewed or even contacted by federal authorities.
Most of the stolen funds came from the nation’s welfare program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or TANF. Bryant — who has been tied to the now infamous illegal spending on former NFL quarterback Brett Favre’s pet projects but has not faced any civil or criminal charges — oversaw the welfare agency during the heist.
“As policy director of MDHS, former Governor Bryant adopted policies of spending only a minuscule portion of TANF funds for payments to needy families, of foregoing competitive bidding, and of distributing massive amounts of TANF funds through private conduits,” Waide wrote in the recent filing. “These negligent policies foreseeably caused all of the misexpenditures alleged in the First Amended Complaint.”
Waide also pointed to communication in which Davis described the illegal transfer of $1.3 million in welfare funds to a celebrity fitness camp by former athlete Paul Lacoste as “the Lt. Gov’s fitness issue,” referring to then-Lt. Gov. Reeves.
Records show that Reeves and Favre discussed the University of Southern Mississippi volleyball stadium, which was built with $5 million in welfare funds, in early 2020. Those texts, as well as Reeves’ decision to fire the attorney who originally attempted to investigate that purchase, have also raised questions about his involvement. Reeves’ texts prior to becoming governor are not considered public records because the Legislature exempted itself from Mississippi’s Public Records Act, so any communication he had with Favre during the scandal, when he was lieutenant governor, has not been released.
Waide is representing Austin Smith, Davis’ nephew and one of dozens of defendants in the state’s civil litigation that attempts to claw back misspent or ill-gotten public funds. The state has accused Smith of taking more than $426,000 in primarily TANF funds to teach coding skills to needy students and failing to conduct the work — an allegation Smith denies.
Owens and State Auditor Shad White, who initially investigated the case, have recently confirmed to Mississippi Today that the federal investigation is ongoing.
“I would speak more generally on this point and say anytime you see sentencing withheld, the reason you withhold sentencing is to get information from those people,” White said. “So, those folks are going to be talking to prosecutors and are talking to prosecutors.”
Under Bryant, the welfare department essentially privatized the TANF program by pushing tens of millions of the grant funds to two nonprofits, including Mississippi Community Education Center founded by Nancy New, a politically connected educator and friend of Deborah Bryant, the governor’s wife. Virtually all of the misspending occurred under the umbrella of this nonprofit-run program, called Families First for Mississippi.
Gov. Bryant was so involved in Families First that he described the privatized program as “us” in a never-before-published text message to New, one of the primary criminal and civil defendants in the case.
In the fall of 2018, shortly after the launch of a new judicial initiative called Family First aimed at preventing the need for Child Protection Services to separate families, there was much confusion between the two entities because of the similar name, shared logo and overlapping members.
Bryant texted New on Nov. 1, 2018, a photo that PR specialist Becky Russell, whose daughter worked on the initiative, took with Attorney General Jim Hood, the Democratic candidate for governor who ran against Gov. Tate Reeves. Reeves was lieutenant governor at the time and gearing up to run for governor in 2019.
“Jim Hood is a strong supporter of the Mississippi’s Family First Initiative-Believes in the approach that Mississippi must first fix families in order to fix foster care,” Russell wrote in a tweet containing the photo.
“Not good,” Bryant wrote to New with a screenshot of the tweet. “The LtGov will not like this at all.”
“Omg! That makes me sick,” New responded. “The Family First Initiative is causing so much confusion. Just not good.”
The messages provide some insight into the conflict between various officials working on child welfare in the state, exclusively detailed in a July article by Mississippi Today, and the political nature of the programs.
At the time, Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Dawn Beam, who worked with Deborah Bryant to launch the Family First initiative months earlier, was distancing herself from Families First for Mississippi because “it was obvious they were not what they had held themselves out to be,” Beam recently told Mississippi Today.
Beam said welfare officials promised to build a database, which they estimated to cost $5 million – the same amount that went to the volleyball stadium – that could connect needy families to resources in their communities and collect data that could be used to better meet needs in the future. But by the time of Bryant and New’s text exchange, Beam said she knew the computer system wasn’t going to materialize. “They were lying,” Beam said.
The two factions hid their infighting behind closed doors while advertising to the public that they were making generational change for families in Mississippi.
Bryant asked New if the entity represented in Russell’s tweet was the privatized welfare program known as Families First for Mississippi, before correcting himself. “Oh that’s Dawn Beam..” he said, referring to the separate judicial initiative.
New explained to Bryant that Beam initially wanted the judicial initiative and Families First to “complement each other,” but then decided New’s program would not be as involved.
“Thanks. Just glad that not us..” Bryant texted, referring to Families First.
New also expressed her frustrations to Bryant when the investigation into her nonprofit’s spending began in 2019. New was squabbling with another nonprofit called Family Resource Center of North Mississippi, which ran Families First for Mississippi in the northern part of the state. The nonprofits, which were affiliated with opposite political parties, had to compete for funding from the welfare department, especially after learning their grants would be cut in early 2019. At one point, one of the defendants in the welfare case alleges, Bryant threatened to cut funding to Family Resource Center because of its director’s support for Hood.
“Sorry to have bothered you. I just wanted to share that I have no choice but to stand up for myself,” New texted Bryant in October of 2019, the same month auditor’s investigators raided her nonprofit offices. “I have tried my best to stay about all this mess that north ms and others started over a year ago. I was not only put in the middle but now I am being dragged through the mud. I have run MDHS grants for 24 years to end up being treated like crap by them now. It’s completely wrong.”
“Go get em..” Bryant responded.

Texts in the months following reveal that Bryant spoke with New about her legal troubles, which she described as “my whole life’s work go(ing) down the drain.”
“Will b glad to facilitate a meeting,” Bryant responded.
“Waiting to hear back from Lucien,” New said, likely referring to Mississippi GOP Chair and consultant Lucien Smith.
Smith did not return calls or texts from Mississippi Today.
New and her son Jess New visited Bryant on Friday, Dec. 13, 2019, after which, she said “All of this ‘crazy making’ is just way too much and hoping will end soon. Thank you for listening. I always value your input and guidance.”
“I am always here when you need me to listen. Keep the faith…” he texted.
New would be arrested seven weeks later.

The newly revealed texts were recently entered into discovery, joining hundreds of thousands of pages of communication existing in the criminal and civil cases. Key communication that has not been released include text messages between Davis and Bryant prior to February of 2019.
New also pleaded guilty and has agreed to cooperate with the prosecution. Her attorney in the civil case, Gerry Bufkin, has similarly blasted the state for not including Bryant as a defendant in the case. Bufkin and Waide are both fighting with Bryant over subpoenas for the former governor’s communication, which would include some of the messages between Bryant and Davis.
Text messages uncovered by Mississippi Today in April of 2022, which covered February to June of 2019, reveal how Bryant steered Davis to award welfare grants to his favored vendors.
The texts show Bryant was in talks about two of Favre’s pet projects – a pharmaceutical startup and a new volleyball stadium at University of Southern Mississippi – that illegally received a total of more than $8 million in welfare funds. Even Favre is facing civil charges for his role in the scandal while Bryant is not. Favre told Bryant when his pharmaceutical venture, Prevacus, began receiving funds from the state and the governor even agreed by text to accept stock in the company after leaving office.
In mid-2019, Bryant relayed a small tip of suspected fraud brought forward by an employee of Mississippi Department of Human Services to Auditor White, whom Bryant initially appointed to the office. White was also Bryant’s former campaign manager.
Bryant was discussing a future working relationship with Prevacus and setting up meetings just one day before White arrested the nonprofit officials who funneled the money to the company.
In a recent unsuccessful appeal attempt, defense attorney Ross criticized White for failing to equitably pursue fraud suspects, namely former Gov. Bryant and current Gov. Reeves. She echoes the sentiments from some Mississippians who believe White has unfairly targeted lower-level offenses, leading to record-making demands for repayment, for political gain – an assertion White rejects.
Ross represented Toni Johnson, a Democratic Hinds County Election Commissioner who recently pleaded guilty to embezzlement and was sentenced to 20 years for using private grant funds to purchase two personal televisions.
“White bragged in the email that his office ‘has pursued aggressive consequences for embezzlers regardless of whether they were Republicans or Democrats.’ Text messages published by Mississippi Today belie White’s claim that he pursues public corruption ‘regardless of whether they were Republicans or Democrats,’” Ross wrote in a Jan. 6 petition for interlocutory appeal. “The text messages show former governor Phil Bryant and Governor Tate Reeves directed public employees to unlawfully divert $94 million of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families funds to Brett Favre and other friends of Phil Bryant and Governor Reeves. At the behest of White, Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens has doggedly pursued Johnson about the misuse of private funding but has buried his head in the sand when it comes to the alleged involvement of Bryant and Governor Reeves and others in a $94 million heist of public funds.”
(The state auditor’s 2020 report questioned $94 million worth of welfare agency spending while forensic auditors found $77 million in unallowable purchases. The state has relied on the forensic audit to determine which funds to claw back.)
Favre also alleged in his motion to dismiss the civil case that the state has neglected the roles of Bryant, and even White, in the welfare scandal.
White recently explained to Mississippi Today that his office conducts investigations, but it does not decide who to prosecute.
“We have a system with multiple players who look at the facts of a situation, and then the system itself comes to a conclusion about who is held accountable, not just the state auditor,” White said. “And some people believe that out there that I am investigator, judge, jury, executioner. Democracy is not set up that way. It’s not supposed to be set up that way.”
Asked if he thinks Bryant’s role in welfare spending warrants further investigation, White said, “I think everybody top to bottom is going to be thoroughly investigated, period, all the way down to the janitor at DHS.”
Owens called Ross’ claims of selective prosecution “baseless.”
“An allegation of other wrong doings doesn’t exonerate her client and the prosecution of the News and Davis or evidence that we prosecute all cases,” Owens said in a text to Mississippi Today.
Overseeing prosecution on the federal side is the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the southern district of Mississippi, which is without a permanent U.S. attorney. President Joe Biden selected Todd Gee, current deputy chief of the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, for the position, but he failed to secure the blessing of Mississippi Sens. Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith. The new Congress is now waiting for Biden to re-nominate the position.
The criminal case is running parallel to the civil case Mississippi Department of Human Services has filed against 46 people or organizations.
Several defendants have filed motions to dismiss or requests to stay the case while the criminal investigation continues. In his recent motion to dismiss, Waide argues that Davis has evidence crucial to Smith’s defense, but that he won’t share it due to the ongoing investigation. Davis’ plea deal keeps him out of Mississippi’s notoriously harsh state prisons.
MDHS filed its initial complaint in May and an amended complaint, adding several new defendants, in December.
Other recent filings in the civil suit include memorandums in support of motions to dismiss from retired WWE wrestler Ted DiBiase Sr. and Lacoste, the former football player and fitness coach. DiBiase argued that his ministry, Heart of David, conducted the TANF activities it was hired to perform and that the contract was no secret to the agency. Lacoste argues that he didn’t know the money he received came from TANF and therefore can’t be held liable. Attorney Garrig Shields, a former deputy director at MDHS who was added to the suit in December, filed a 94-page answer denying the allegations against him. Another defendant Nick Coughlin, one of the welfare contractors and former reality TV contestant who also worked for the Attorney General’s Office, also filed a lengthy answer denying the state’s claims.
Hinds County Circuit Court Judge Faye Peterson has not scheduled hearings to address several pending motions in the case, including Bryant’s motions to quash subpoenas against him.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.
House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.
Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.
“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”
Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.
“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”
The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.
People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.
The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.
“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”
If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.
Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.
The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.
During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.
As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.
“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget
The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.
Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.
House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.
“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”
But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.
The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.
The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.
Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.
“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.
The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.
But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.
The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.
The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.
But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.
On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.
If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.
“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.
If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Amount of federal cuts to health agencies doubles
Cuts to public health and mental health funding in Mississippi have doubled – reaching approximately $238 million – since initial estimates last week, when cancellations to federal grants allocated for COVID-19 pandemic relief were first announced.
Slashed funding to the state’s health department will impact community health workers, planned improvements to the public health laboratory, the agency’s ability to provide COVID-19 vaccinations and preparedness efforts for emerging pathogens, like H5 bird flu.
The grant cancellations, which total $230 million, will not be catastrophic for the agency, State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney told members of the Mississippi House Democratic Caucus at the Capitol April 1.
But they will set back the agency, which is still working to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic decimated its workforce and exposed “serious deficiencies” in the agency’s data collection and management systems.
The cuts will have a more significant impact on the state’s economy and agency subgrantees, who carry out public health work on the ground with health department grants, he said.
“The agency is okay. But I’m very worried about all of our partners all over the state,” Edney told lawmakers.
The health department was forced to lay off 17 contract workers as a result of the grant cancellations, though Edney said he aims to rehire them under new contracts.
Other positions funded by health department grants are in jeopardy. Two community health workers at Back Bay Mission, a nonprofit that supports people living in poverty in Biloxi, were laid off as a result of the cuts, according to WLOX. It’s unclear how many more community health workers, who educate and help people access health care, have been impacted statewide.
The department was in the process of purchasing a comprehensive data management system before the cuts and has lost the ability to invest in the Mississippi Public Health Laboratory, he said. The laboratory performs environmental and clinical testing services that aid in the prevention and control of disease.
The agency has worked to reduce its dependence on federal funds, Edney said, which will help it weather the storm. Sixty-six percent of the department’s budget is federally funded.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pulled back $11.4 billion in funding to state health departments nationwide last week. The funding was originally allocated by Congress for testing and vaccination against the coronavirus as part of COVID-19 relief legislation, and to address health disparities in high-risk and underserved populations. An additional $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration was also terminated.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the Department of Health and Human Services Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement.
HHS did not respond to questions from Mississippi Today about the cuts in Mississippi.
Democratic attorneys general and governors in 23 states filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tuesday, arguing that the sudden cancellation of the funding was unlawful and seeking injunctive relief to halt the cuts. Mississippi did not join the suit.
Mental health cuts
The Department of Mental Health received about $7.5 million in cuts to federal grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Over half of the cuts were to community mental health centers, and supported alcohol and drug treatment services for people who can not afford treatment, housing services for parenting and pregnant women and their children, and prevention services.
The cuts could result in reduced beds at community mental health centers, Phaedre Cole, the director of Life Help and President of Mississippi Association of Community Mental Health Centers, told lawmakers April 1.
Community mental health centers in Mississippi are already struggling to keep their doors open. Four centers in the state have closed since 2012, and a third have an imminent to high risk of closure, Cole told legislators at a hearing last December.
“We are facing a financial crisis that threatens our ability to maintain our mission,” she said Dec. 5.
Cuts to the department will also impact diversion coordinators, who are charged with reducing recidivism of people with serious mental illness to the state’s mental health hospital, a program for first-episode psychosis, youth mental health court funding, school-aged mental health programs and suicide response programs.
The Department of Mental Health hopes to reallocate existing funding from alcohol tax revenue and federal block grant funding to discontinued programs.
The agency posted a list of all the services that have received funding cuts. The State Department of Health plans to post such a list, said spokesperson Greg Flynn.
Health leaders have expressed fear that there could be more funding cuts coming.
“My concern is that this is the beginning and not the end,” said Edney.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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