Scott Fitzpatrick: Missouri State Auditor

It's the Elijah Harshow, 93am 560, KWTO. Welcome back to KWTO on a cloudy to Monday afternoon. One of the conversations while the federal government has been shut down. was Doge successful in their job? And as the round two of the mass firings take place, are we going to see savings at the federal level? Joining us now on the show, Missouri State Auditor, Scott Fitzpatrick. Scott, welcome back. Hey, man, get to be here. All right, first things first. Today is Columbus Day. Do you consider Columbus Day a real holiday or not? That's our question of the day. Well, the auditor's office is closed today as is the rest of state government. So I guess in that sense, I would consider it a real holiday. You know, it's the banks are closed, the mail's closed. So it seems like, you know, by definition, I would call it a holiday. Thank God the stock market still open to my Robin Hood account I can watch. To me, Columbus Day feels a little bit like the Pluto of holidays. It used to be a big deal. Now everybody's like, oh, we don't celebrate that anymore. I don't know the answer. All right. Let's take a break from that question today. I want to focus a little bit. We're going to talk a little bit about Missouri, but I want to focus on the national issues. Obviously, federal government's been shut down for a while. Your position, auditor of the state, you go in, you look for places where money's been wasted, embezzled, lost, whatever. You give people reviews. I want your independent review of the Doge Committee, the group that was supposed to shrink our federal government. A. Were they successful? And B, if not, do you think the second round of layoffs will make them successful? Well, I think that they had a really, they set a really eye bar for themselves. I think the initial idea was that they were going to cut $2 trillion of spending, and then it revised down to a trillion. I don't know where the final number ended up, but it was billions of dollars, I think, of things they identified as potential cuts. But the reality was, I mean, I'm not a federal budget expert, but I know enough about the federal budget to know that you're not going to go in and just wipe out $2 trillion without changing eligibility for... various entitlement programs. If you look at the federal budget last fiscal year, fiscal year 2024, the federal government spent $6.9 trillion. And if you take the health insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, defense spending, interest on the debt, and then benefits for veterans and federal retired employees, that's 79% of the budget. Those like five things that I just listed off. If you wiped out the rest of the federal government, if you got rid of the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Homeland Security, all these different, you know, the Department of Health and Human Service, all these different federal agencies, NASA, get rid of all of it, you're cutting $1.4 trillion. Okay, so they never had a chance of cutting $2 trillion.

they really didn't have a chance of cutting a trillion dollars for that significant participation from Congress and changing eligibility for various entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security. So by their own standard, I don't think that they lived up to what they wanted to do. I do think they highlighted a lot of things for people that showed, hey, there is a lot of ways in federal government, but a lot of it was, you know, it's a lot of money. So $50 million of con and going to Africa. uh, you know, was pointed out. Elon Musk was criticized by a reporter because he misspoke on what country it went to. And he's his response. I don't know if we should be spending $50 million of condoms anywhere. Uh, that's an enormous amount of condoms, you know, which he's right. So, uh, but. You know, at the end of the day, they didn't get to a trillion. They didn't get any or close to a trillion dollars. But, you know, look, we got to nibble around the edges, and we got to take the winds where we can get them. Shrinking the size of government is of huge and challenging task. And so I'm just glad that, you know, the White House and at least some people at the federal level are trying to do that. You know, Scott, we've been friends for a very long time. I always think you do probably a better job, a clearer job explaining the budget issues than maybe anybody else. And I think what you said about them setting a bar too high at the beginning. Listen, Elon Musk was never involved in government. He didn't know what he was getting into. I agree with you. I think by and large, they have moved us in the right direction. I think, you know, if we're going to judge them by the bar, they said, of course they weren't successful. But I do think that they are, are moving in the right direction. Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff to Barack Obama, had this famous quote about, you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I don't know if the federal government shut down is a serious crisis. I spent the weekend going into gas stations and restaurants and asking people, do you know the federal government shut down? They're like, oh, yeah, we heard something about nobody seems to know. Is this an opportunity for Doge to really re-engage and to zero out a lot of that extra fat that they may not have gotten on the first run through? Well, I would say that the federal shutdown is something I want to learn more about because, you know, if the state government failed to appropriate money, let's just say the state legislature did not pass a budget by June 30th, the shutdown at the state level would be much different than what we see in these federal shutdowns. And the federal shutdowns, you still have all these functions that are ongoing. that somehow their emergency, you know, they are qualifying as an emergency, and so they're allowed to continue operating. In the absence of the legislature in Missouri passing a budget, nothing is happening at state government. It would be a, it would be a true crisis situation. And so I don't fully understand the mechanics of how the federal government is able to partially continue to operate during a shutdown. I do think that, yeah, I mean, that, you know, there are opportunities.

And it thought, you know, there's all these court challenges and trying to get a temporary injunction place to prevent people from being laid off. But it seems like the administration is trying to use the opportunity that's been created by the shutdown to continue to their mission to downsize various parts of the federal government. And, you know, time will tell how successful they are in doing that. Because as with everything else, it seems like the federal court system gets involved in it and gums it up. And then you have typically, I mean, A lot of times you have a single judge in a single federal district that has done this nationwide injunction thing. And that's being addressed and has gotten a lot of attention in Congress recently. So it's going to be interesting. I mean, the time will tell, but I do think that they're going to try to use the opportunity to deliver on more of the Doge goals that they had that haven't been delivered on yet. Being the state auditor, sometimes I think people, they don't want to, you're kind of like the referee. The only time you're doing something that's unpopular is when people are listening to you. But you recently were in the news, a little Joplin audit going on. You're kind of in the news down here in South of Missouri. Talk just about what you found there. Well, that audit started as a result of a petition by the citizens of Joplin. They gathered signatures in a sufficient amount to have an audit be initiated by law. That's kind of a fun fact for those who don't know that people in any political subdivision in the state can go and gather signatures if they want an audit done. And whether or not there's anything to see there or not, an audit will take place if they get enough signatures. So in the case of Joplin, they got the signatures. We conducted the audit. And what we found was we gave them a fair rating. You know, we have the rating system just to make it simpler for people that don't have time to go read a 40-page audit. We have excellent, good, fair, and poor. And they got a fair, which is an improvement from their last audit 10 years ago where they got a poor. But we had a lot of findings in this audit. And, you know, one of the big ones was transparency-related. They have an emergency ordinance, ordinance process. So when they adopt basically city ordinances, they have a process that they can use when it's an emergency to allow them to introduce an ordinance and pass it on the same day. And they used that in the period that we looked at, there were 100, I want to say, 63 ordinances that they passed. And 130 of those are 80% were passed as emergencies. And there's no way that. that 80% of the things that the city council did were emergencies. And the problem with doing it that way is that it very much limits the opportunity for the public to have input on the activities of the city council. When you don't have a requirement, so I guess I should say in the non-emergency process, the city council has to allow a full week to elapse at a minimum between the introduction of a proposed ordinance and its adoption. That gives citizens the opportunity to be informed about it, to weigh in with the city council to show up to the meeting, to have their voice heard when it's being considered before it is adopted. And I think that that...

finding, although it's one of about 10 different findings we had in the audit, really encapsulates the reason the people in the city of Joplin felt they needed to go gather the signatures because a lot of times when you have mistrust in a local government, it's because there's a lack of transparency. And when you operate in that kind of way, that is the kind of behavior at a city council level that feeds mistrust. from the public because they feel like things are being done in a way where ordinances are being rammed through, where they're not operating transparently, and because of that, you end up in a situation where people want to see an audit done. So there were many other findings, like I said, there were about 10. And part of the thing that goes into the rating is how receptive the entity is to the findings. So when we issue a finding, we also provide a recommendation on correcting it. And then the city or whoever the auditee is has the opportunity to respond to that. And typically what we are looking for is an agreement that, yeah, this is a problem and we agree with the recommendation and we're going to implement it. In the case of the city, they did agree with some of the findings. They did agree with the recommendations in some cases. But there were other cases in which they did not agree. They basically defended their practices and said, well, we think we're doing it the right way and we're not planning to change anything. And so when we see an entity that acts that way, that also impacts the rating. So in addition to having a lot of findings, they didn't unanimously agree to fix all the issues that we identified. uh you're obviously you're you're going to be up for re-election next year you're the only state statewide that's going to be up for reelection next year again like i mentioned being the auditor you're kind of like the you're like the fun police you get to come in and you have to say hey guys you're you're messing up here nobody actually loves when they get a call from scott fitzpatrick saying hey we're going to spend some time going through your books give us a little bit of how do you translate that to re-election next year Well, I view the, although I am a Republican and I'm very conservative, the auditor's job is much less partisan than most of the other positions in state government. It's certainly less partisan than the roles of the legislature or the governor. Because our job is to audit whoever needs to be audited, and we're in a very Republican state. And so a lot of the times that means that I'm auditing Republican office holders. And I have to be willing. to hold everybody accountable regardless of their political affiliation and call balls and strikes, regardless of how I feel about the politics of the situation. So what I plan to do in my reelection is look at the first two and a half years, three years of my time in office and run on the record, run on the... promises I made in my first campaign to start looking at schools more closely and more frequently looking at the COVID spending that has taken place over the last several years. And we have a lot of stories to tell about audits we've done of school districts, of audits we've done of local governments where COVID money has gone missing or has been misused.

And in the state government, we've done a lot of audits of state programs that are going to be part of that messaging. And we're getting ready to release one very soon on the marijuana program, which has been a long time coming. It's a very in-depth look at how that program was established by the state government after Missourians put those programs in the Constitution, both the medical and recreational use marijuana programs. So my plan is to run on my record, and, you know, I think that that'll hopefully carry the day. When do, when does the marijuana audit land publicly? Like, are we in the ninth inning? Are we in the third inning? Where, where is that process? We're in the ninth inning. I think that that audit will probably come out. I'm going to guess it's going to be late November or early December. Oh, we're definitely going to have you back on when that one comes out because that'll be a big one. I know a lot of people are paying attention. Scott, obviously, you've got reelection next year, but your office also, aside from your city work and your county work and your municipal work, your office also puts out some podcasts, tries to make the audit process a little bit more transparent for the public. If people want to follow you on social media, keep up with what the auditor is doing, figure out where the issues are going on in Missouri and maybe talk about how, you know, ideas that you have that would fix what's happening in Washington, D.C. How do they follow you on social media? So on X, it's at Auditor underscore Fitz. That's where we post most of the time. Facebook, you can just look upstate auditor, Scott Fitzpatrick. I personally am at Fitzpatrick Moe on Twitter, and you can find the campaign page on Facebook by looking for Scott Fitzpatrick as well. We always tell people if you have anything that is happening in one of your political subdivisions, whether it's your city government, your ambulance district, whatever it is that is concerning to you. You can get a hold of our whistleblower hotline. You can go to auditor.mo.gov. Click on the whistleblower hotline link, and it has a form where you can submit information, an email address. If you prefer that method or a phone number, you can call to report. suspected wrongdoing and governments across the state. Very good. Scott Fitzpatrick, Auditor to the State of Missouri. Thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Thanks, man. All right. All right. We're going to be right back. Don't forget coming up next hour, 505. We're going to have County Commissioner Bob Dixon. We talk about... Donald Trump, we talk about the state government. We don't focus a lot on Green County. We'll talk to Bob Dixon about what's happening in the county. What are the challenges? What are the opportunities for the future? And of course, the snake draft later on with Garrett Bulls. You don't want to miss that. I'm Elijah Har. This is KWTO. And we'll go right back to discuss Columbus Day here in Missouri.