A bad use of COVID dollars in Iowa

Gov. Kim Reynolds used hundreds of thousands in COVID-19 relief money to cover a personnel budget shortfall that was not caused by the pandemic, according to a report published this week by the State Auditor’s Office. Worse yet, she apparently used sneaky budgeting tactics to obscure her misuse of federal funds.

This is not the first time the Reynolds administration has used the pandemic as an excuse for shifting around money in questionable ways. It’s another reminder of the need to hold our supposedly fiscally conservative executive accountable.

State Auditor Rob Sand warned the governor in October 2020 that spending CARES Act funds on staff salaries may not be a qualified use. In a report filed in response to a request from federal auditors, the state auditor found that state officials shuffled more than $400,000 through the Department of Homeland Security to cover staffing expenses in Reynolds’ office.

The issue was first reported by Laura Belin of the progressive blog Bleeding Heartland last September.

For fiscal year 2020, the governor’s office tallied an unexplained budget shortfall of $448,000. According to documents reviewed by the auditor, the governor’s staff simply replaced “FY 2020 shortfall” with “COVID-19 personnel costs” on a spreadsheet. With a few keystrokes, they balanced their budget by making up COVID-related expenses.

The governor’s office is defending the move by saying the 21 staffers affected were doing pandemic-related jobs.

"During this time, the Governor's staff spent a vast majority of their time responding to the pandemic,” a spokesman for Reynolds said in a statement to the Des Moines Register.

The federal government has been vague about how exactly various streams of COVID-19 relief can be spent. However, the rules are clear that funds can be used for salaries only if they are dedicated to pandemic duties and entities must keep documentation to verify it. The governor has no such records, according to the auditor’s office.

Reynolds has previously been criticized for giving lavish raises to staff during the pandemic, using COVID-19 money for unrelated software upgrades and letting political favoritism influence the state’s spending decisions during the public health crisis.

It’s a bad look for a governor who has joined her Republican colleagues in forcefully criticizing the federal government’s pandemic spending.

(319) 398-8262; editorial@thegazette.com