LEVER WEEKLY: Cracking Down On Pay To Play

This is Lever Weekly, a recap of our work from the past week. If you only read one email from us all week, this should be it.

Along with a breakdown of our reporting, podcasts, and live events for all subscribers, we are providing paid subscribers with an original column. In this week’s piece, Matthew Cunningham-Cook goes over the role of pay-to-play campaign contributions in driving private equity fundraising from public pensions.

👇 Following is an excerpt of our subscriber-only column, and below that is a recap of all of our other work from the week.

Cracking Down On Pay To Play

By Matthew Cunningham-Cook

This week, I published a two-month long investigation into how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis oversaw a billion-dollar transfer of state employees’ retirement dollars into high-fee, high-risk private equity firms, as the companies’ executives donated to groups supporting his campaigns.

According to our analysis, DeSantis and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz are the only two governors who have a seat on state boards overseeing how pension investments are made. In all other states, governors simply make appointments to the pension fund board, or, in the case of New York and North Carolina, have no influence over pension investments at all.

Arrangements like DeSantis’ pension-board authority present a unique set of problems: To win elections in the United States these days, you have to…