Follow the Money: WATCH BUDGET HEARINGS! 🤑

Fifty-five hours into watching, I've decided legislative hearings deserve to have more views, especially when said hearings are spending our money. All sorts of juicy facts come to light.

Take the 2023 Appropriations Subcommittee MDHHS Budget Hearings. I encourage everyone to follow them, for reasons that will become obvious.

Hearings can be entertaining.

For instance, on April 11 it seemed common sense had left the building. The gap was so great between the administration’s goal of 100 new foster care homes and Michigan’s estimated 20,000 homeless youth, a shocked committee member broke ranks.

Abandoning her party’s support-the-governor narrative, she schooled the MDHHS Senior Deputy Director of Child Services about silo mentality, and admonished the department to take a larger view. (Full video)

(Think the department culture will change? I'm not holding my breath.)

Hearings can also be horrifying, like March 22 testimony after juvenile inmates molested a 12 year old.

You may recall the event. According to CBS News, Wayne County declared a state of emergency for juvenile detention facility overcrowding, and blamed the state for lack of secure housing. The emergency was lifted June 5 according to The Free Press, but only a month later the Detroit News reported that overcrowding and in-person MDHHS monitoring had resumed.

Shocking facts came out in the hastily-called Appropriations hearing.

• Most of the 130 "children" in detention were violent offenders, many with gang history. Some had been through court, some had not.
• The backlogged local court had just resumed trials after being remote for COVID.
• MDHHS is working on secure juvenile residential treatment homes.
• MDHHS Directer Hertel responded to questions about Michigan losing 400 secure juvenile beds by saying that because of COVID shut-downs, some facilities went under. Others were shut down by the state "because they were not able to maintain our expectations for the care of children." 
• The state also shut down a Reformatory last term, according to a Department of Corrections budget hearing in May.

MDHHS's primary solution: "... requiring the county to share the case files of all the children that are in the juvenile detention facility so that we can help make determinations and facilitate movement of kids out of the facility."

And MDHHS really, really wants to have integrated data from all sources in law enforcement, courts, and corrections.

Are we feeling safe yet?

SEE A LEGISLATOR WHO DEFENDS HEALTHCARE FREEDOM? Nominate them for the MHF Medal HERE!