Jackson Jambalaya

 Across Mississippi, government bodies spend public money hiring lobbyists — to lobby government. I would not have believed quite how much of it goes on until we built the tool that lays it bare.

Let me explain how we got here.

Within days of entering the White House in January 2025, President Trump set up DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency — to take an axe to a bloated federal government. Opinions on its record vary. By its own count it claimed to have saved something like $180 billion; its critics insist the real figure is a fraction of that. But to my mind, the dollar tally was never the real prize.

The lasting achievement of DOGE was simpler. It made government spending visible — dragging obscure contracts and bureaucratic line items into the daylight, and giving ordinary people an appetite to see where their money actually goes.

That appetite matters. It is this that expose the scandal in Minnesota, where a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future siphoned off some $250 million meant to feed children — the largest pandemic-relief fraud in American history. Once people get a taste of sunlight, they tend to want more of it.

So here is the question that occurred to me. What about closer to home? What boondoggles might there be in Jackson, when it comes to spending public money?

That is why, here at MCPP, we built TaxToolMS.com — a definitive guide to who gets your tax dollars, and what they do with them.

Type in your income and a detail or two, and it breaks down your tax bill — what you send to Washington, to Jackson, and to your county — and then shows you precisely who receives the portion you pay. Or search our database of more than 20,000 contractors, vendors and recipients, and see what each one took in, down to the dollar.

Want to know who is paid millions for civil-engineering projects? It is there. Want to know which lobbying firms are paid with your tax dollars to lobby the government? We have put that in front of you too.

We call this feature Mississippi DOGE — our own search box for public money. And the numbers it surfaces are striking. The Legislature sets a budget of around $7 billion a year. Yet more than $22 billion of public money flows through state agencies annually — about three times the figure most people picture when they think of “the state budget.” Until now, almost nobody outside those agencies could see where it went.

As I travel around the state, I hear one complaint more than any other: that Mississippi elects conservative politicians who do not always do conservative things. Some are frankly progressive when it comes to spending your money.

The only way that changes is if you can see what they are actually doing. Our tax tool turns what was, in practice, privileged information — known only to the politicians and lobbyists of Jackson — into something any Mississippian can look up in seconds. We have even built a feature that lets you email your representative a breakdown of how your tax bill is spent, and ask them what they intend to do to keep public spending down.

So take a look. Search a name. Follow the money. It is your money, after all — and now, at last, you can see who is being paid to ask for more of it.

Visit TaxToolMS.com.

Douglas Carswell, President of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, authored this column.  

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