The Mississippi welfare fraud involving Brett Favre, explained

We live in an age of brazen, ham-handed grift. Have you heard the one involving the retired NFL star, a WWE wrestler, corrupt Southern officials, and the millions in welfare money that they benefited from?

If you’ve heard about this scandal, it’s likely because of the involvement of former Green Bay Packer Brett Favre, specifically the $1 million in federal welfare money he received for talks he apparently did not give and the $5 million he was involved in directing toward construction of a volleyball stadium at the college his daughter attended. Favre’s name is what pushed this from dry newspaper stories in 2020 announcing arrests of local bureaucrats to Stephen A. Smith yelling on ESPN about poverty in Mississippi.

But while Favre’s involvement has brought more attention to the story, it’s unfortunately narrowed the focus to a single ex-athlete, instead of taking in the extraordinarily sprawling web of corruption enveloping the state. This scandal takes different shapes depending on the vantage from which one looks at it. Close up, it’s a sleazy, almost comically corrupt scheme by a few bureaucrats and nonprofit officials; zoom out and it looks more like an entire state government has become something closer to organized crime; pull back even further and the whole country’s welfare system is implicated, its very structure encouraging heinous misuse and waste even as poor people receive a fraction of what they need.

To understand how the fraud was perpetrated, it’s helpful to have some basic knowledge of how the United States’ alphabet soup of welfare programs works.

Read more: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/9/24/23368759/mississippi-welfare-fraud-scandal-brett-favre-reform


Can we officially disown him?