Mississippians deserve to know how elected officials are spending taxpayer dollars and who’s spending money to lobby the decision-makers, even when the officials themselves don’t always make that information easy to find.
Journalists at Mississippi Today have been digging into budgets, expense reports, lobbying disclosures, state plane records and other documents to follow the money. That effort has been central to the nonprofit newsroom’s mission during the first 10 years of publication, and the work will continue – all with the goal of letting people of the state know what their government is doing.
An investigation by Mississippi Today’s political team revealed in 2024, for example, that more than $7 million of public money was spent to improve the private country club neighborhood and golf course in Senatobia, where House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Trey Lamar lives. Lawmakers also approved using taxpayer money to repave a Jackson street where Lamar owns a house..
In 2025, Mississippi Today teamed up with The Marshall Project to examine the error-riddled campaign finance report filed by Hinds County District Attorney Jody Owens, a Democrat who is awaiting trial on federal bribery charges. The analysis found tangled finances, thousands in personal loans and a political contribution from a supposed investor group made up of undercover FBI informants.
Since last summer, a series called “The Black Box” by mental health reporter Allen Siegler has examined how Mississippi spent – or in many cases, did not spend – tens of millions of dollars from opioid lawsuit settlements. Instead of seeking ways to help people overcome addiction, some local governments have used settlement money to bolster their own operating budgets or to buy equipment for law enforcement agencies.
Mississippi received $6 billion for COVID-19 pandemic recovery as part of the federal American Rescue Plan Act. A series called “Follow the Money” dug into how state and local governments had spent that cash. Among the findings: The need for water and sewer improvements exceeded the money allotted.
“The Backchannel,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by Anna Wolfe, examined how welfare money that was intended to help some of the neediest people in one of the poorest states in the nation went to projects run by people with political connections.
Gov. Tate Reeves delivers his State of the State Address from the south steps of the State Capitol in Jackson, Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today
An analysis in 2023 showed that during Republican Gov. Tate Reeves’ first term in the state’s top office, he flew on the state airplane to political events that did not appear to directly involve state business. The reporting was based on a review of flight records and the governor’s social media posts. The cost to taxpayers for those flights was at least $31,000.
A separate analysis showed that some of Reeves’ top campaign contributors had received state contracts or grants from agencies that the governor oversees. This was between January 2020, when Reeves became governor, and October 2023, when Mississippi Today published its findings. Of the 88 individual or corporate donors who had given Reeves’ campaigns at least $50,000, Mississippi Today identified 15 donors whose companies received a total of $1.4 billion in state contracts or grants.
In 2018, an analysis showed lawmakers had requested $163 million for dozens of transportation projects in their own districts between 2012 and 2018, even as many of those same officials criticized management of the Mississippi Department of Transportation. Documents obtained through open records requests showed that internal evaluators in the department found many of the projects to be unnecessary.
