A mandate for your money
American Experiment’s annual award highlights the state’s wasteful spending of taxpayers’ money.
Let’s talk turkey! Golden Turkey, that is. In what turned out to be a two-project race, the new state flag and seal defeated Gov. Tim Walz’s DEI staff to win American Experiment’s 2024 Golden Turkey Award. The Golden Turkey Award is a light-hearted contest to bring attention to wasteful government spending and allow Minnesotans to weigh in on the silliest projects of the year. Past winners include the new House Office Building, Feeding Our Future fraud, the governor’s $6.9 million unused morgue, and an extravagant rest stop on Highway 35. In 2021, the Southwest Light Rail project became the first to receive a lifetime achievement award, putting it in the Golden Turkey Hall of Fame.
The 2024 winner
Minnesota’s new state flag and seal
It wasn’t enough for the 2023 legislature to spend the entire surplus, raise taxes, and add thousands of new government bureaucrats. They had to do one more thing: change the state flag and seal. Democrats in the House and Senate put together a rushed process that lacked any real input from citizens, resulting in a bland new flag design and a state seal that violates the very law used to create it in the first place. Worst of all, the legislature added language forcing every city, county, and school board to immediately replace all flags and seals using the old design, instead of allowing them to be replaced over time. For this reason, the new flag and seal design earned a 2024 Golden Turkey Award nomination.
The new flag received the most nominations from our online nomination process, second only to Gov. Walz, whose perennial nomination is consistently the most popular. (Reminder: the Golden Turkey Award goes to a project, not a person.)
The bill establishing a commission to replace the flag and seal allocated $35,000 for the design phase. That was just to kick things off. The Department of Corrections alone estimates spending $2.1 million to replace flags and seals. The Department of Public Safety is expected to spend $4 million in 2024 to update more than 188,000 pieces of equipment — including squad cars, badges, license plates, uniforms, hats, and signage. The legislature mandated all old inventory must be replaced by Jan. 1, 2025.
The mandate for immediate replacement is wasteful and is why the new flag and seal are nominated for a Golden Turkey Award, but just as outrageous is the false narrative used to justify it. The entire redesign was based on the idea that the old seal was racist because it depicted a Native American on horseback riding away toward the setting sun. But according to the Minnesota Historical Society, the “racism” of the original state seal was removed with each of its two subsequent revisions.
The original territorial seal did include a Native American on horseback riding west into the setting sun, a clear depiction of their displacement to reservations in southwestern Minnesota and South Dakota. However, the 1983 legislature changed the direction and meaning of the Native American depicted on the seal.
Our May 2024 Thinking Minnesota Poll showed an overwhelming majority of Minnesotans opposed the new state flag — a harbinger of Golden Turkey voting. In that poll, 52 percent of respondents preferred to keep the old flag and 16 percent wanted to come up with a different design. Only 24 percent supported using the new flag designed by the committee empowered by the legislature. It’s no surprise the new flag and seal won the 2024 Golden Turkey Award.
Runner-up
Tim Walz’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion staff
For the fifth straight year, Gov. Tim Walz received the most nominations for American Experiment’s Golden Turkey Award. Even though the award goes to a program or project and not a person, in an effort to appease the voters, the Golden Turkey Committee nominated the 173 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) staff members embedded across Walz’s administration for a 2024 Golden Turkey Award. With each staff person costing the state at least $100,000 (when you figure salary and benefits), that’s $16 million that could be spent elsewhere or returned to taxpayers. The Walz administration is full of DEI positions with dubious titles like Equity and Inclusion Officer, Inclusion and Engagement Supervisor, Chief Inclusion Officer, and our favorite, Culturally Responsive Arts Education Art and Equity Systems Specialist. Nothing says Golden Turkey like a made-up title for a government bureaucrat who provides nothing of value to the people.
The 173 state employees in the Walz administration working in DEI are real-life examples of the growth in state government under this governor and his predecessor, Mark Dayton.
The stated goals of DEI are to recruit and retain a diverse workforce and create an environment where employees “feel welcome to bring their whole selves to work.” Goal one is met by setting arbitrary numbers for hiring and retaining certain groups of people and then conducting regular counts of staff to see how the agency is meeting or not meeting the goals. Yay!
The second goal is met through programming. State agencies require employees to “build cultural competence” for their “personal DEI journey” through mandated training courses. Taxpayers pay for state employees to spend part of their week sitting in a circle contemplating their navels. Instead of plowing snow, investigating fraud, or delivering health care, state employees are spending valuable (and expensive) time understanding their white privilege.
This is the classic problem with DEI initiatives. It’s hard to pin down what the objective is and how government agencies are going to achieve it. The more you read, the more you think, “What do these people do all day?”
Lots of words, lots of activity, and not a lot of measurable results for taxpayers.
Corporate America has figured out that DEI is a waste of time and money, and many companies are now finding the courage to gut their DEI departments and return focus to the bottom line. Unfortunately for Minnesota taxpayers, Gov. Walz will be the last person to join this movement, and his DEI staff will continue to grow, which makes it deserving of our ridicule and a nomination for the 2024 Golden Turkey Award.
Third place
National Loon Center
The Golden Turkey Committee tried to warn Minnesotans during the election not to continue sending lottery money to the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund (ENRTF), but not enough listened. The result will be 25 more years of stupid spending from this fund and 25 more years of projects to feature in our annual award. A prime example set to break ground soon is the National Loon Center in Cross Lake, Minn., with a price tag of $18.5 million. Apparently, the lunatics backing our state bird became jealous of the National Eagle Center in Wabasha (also funded with state money) and decided the state needed a center dedicated to loons. The lunacy of this huge expenditure of taxpayer money to build an extravagant center to honor a bird earned this project a nomination for the 2024 Golden Turkey Award.
The Loon Center’s funding followed the familiar pattern of past Golden Turkey winners from the ENRTF money bag. First, ask for a small grant to get the idea moving. In this case, it was $4 million in 2019. Project backers used that money to hire architects to conceptualize beautiful design site plans to help Minnesotans dream about what the finished project would look like. Next, they created a webpage and set up a foundation to begin raising money for a “local match.” But the local match is always dwarfed by the different government money handouts.
In 2023, loon backers hit the jackpot in the bonding bill — receiving another $2.5 million, enough to plan the groundbreaking. At this writing, Minnesota’s U.S. Senators Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar are working hard to convince their colleagues in the world’s most important deliberative body to donate another $1.7 million in federal money to this loony project.
The center will take up 10 acres of prime waterfront real estate in Cross Lake — including a 15,000-square-foot building, a bird sanctuary, boardwalks, and docks.
Adding to its $18.5 million cost, the building will be built using the expensive B3 design process required of any project funded with state money. The B3 (Buildings, Benchmarks, and Beyond) process artificially inflates construction costs to comply with progressive environmental regulations. Among other things, the B3 guidelines require buildings to be 90 percent more energy efficient than the average newly constructed building.
This project is a great example of how legislators can compartmentalize funding. They can argue for hours over an additional $20 million for the public safety bill without any regard for the $20 million this project will take from taxpayers because it’s from a different funding source. The taxpayers can’t tell the difference, which is why the Golden Turkey Award exists. First the eagle, then the loon — maybe next year we can get millions of dollars to build the National Golden Turkey Center. A bird can dream.
Fourth place
A Dungeons & Dragons podcast
The Golden Turkey Committee returned to the State Arts Board’s Creative Individuals grant program for this year’s low-dollar-but-high-outrage Golden Turkey Award nominee. In this case, $10,000 of sales tax revenue was sent to a guy in Duluth to produce four live Dungeons & Dragons podcast episodes in Greater Minnesota. According to his application, “these live events will be free to the public, continuing a five-year storyline.” To his credit, he fulfilled the requirements of the grant and did, in fact, produce more episodes of the podcast — including several live events at a small theater in Duluth. But in what fantasy kingdom is giving some geek $10,000 to play Dungeons & Dragons on a podcast a good use of taxpayer money?
The Dungeons & Dragons grant was made possible by the Legacy Amendment to the State Constitution, which dedicates a portion of sales taxes to pay for Arts and Cultural Heritage programming. The amendment expires in 2034 and programs like this are a strong reason to let it expire. Hopefully, the ballot language won’t be so biased toward a “yes” vote like this year’s lottery amendment.
To make matters worse, 2024 was not the first year of funding for the D&D podcast. They received $5,999 in 2021, $6,000 in 2022, and $10,000 in 2023 in addition to this year’s grant. That’s $31,599 of your money over the last four years. Where do we sign up?
The full list of Creative Individuals artist grants can be infuriating to read. The State Arts Board split up $3.5 million to 363 “artists” across the state in 2024. Some examples of your sales tax revenue at work:
- $10,000 for a Hmong paper doll and adult coloring book, artfully showing intricate Hmong cultural designs.
- $9,791 to guide area youth in painting self-portraits in the shape of leaves and incorporate them into a “Tree of Community” mural to be installed on the exterior wall of the Harmony Food Co-op in downtown Bemidji.
- $10,000 to design and embroider three framed pieces that tell a story of Natives thriving and flourishing despite the traumas inflicted through the doctrine of discovery and subsequent colonization.
- $10,000 to develop skills to produce and publicly present reimagined transgender flags to fly in June 2024 through a project called Freak Flags.
- $10,000 to create a public installation about top surgery that celebrates queer, trans, and two-spirit identities.
- $10,000 to research and create a contemporary Khayamiya Egyptian tent structure to gather queer community in conversation and healing.
The Creative Individuals grant program of the State Arts Board continues to provide perfect examples of Golden Turkey spending. The Committee is working on our own application for $10,000 to develop original songs and artwork about the spending habits of wayward Minnesota politicians.
The bottom line is that another year of worthy nominees and award winners has ended and what have we learned? That the Golden Turkey committee is always watching Minnesota’s bottom line.