It’s no secret that money and politics are inexorably intertwined. However, politicians are generally as subtle as possible when it comes to making sure they take care of them and their allies. Politicians – current or former – rarely go hungry, but it’s equally rare to see a news story about where the money is coming from. Every once and while, though, someone gets sloppy. This is precisely what happened last week when a $500,000 dollar grant was awarded to the United Sportsmen of Wisconsin Foundation.

On the surface, this grant appears pretty innocuous – $500,000 for a group to promote hunting and fishing in the state. While the question of whether or not it’s necessary to promote hunting and fishing in Wisconsin is open to debate, let’s take for a given that it’s a worthwhile way to spend money and move on to some of the hints that something might not be quite right with this story, as reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Red flag 1: United Sportsmen, the group receiving the grant, has significant ties to Republicans in the Legislature, including one of the draftees of the grant, former Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford. One of United Sportsmen’s “educators,” Luke Hilgemann, was Suder’s chief of staff before taking several positions with the extremely conservative group Americans for Prosperity.

Red flag 2: United Sportsmen isn’t particularly (read: at all) qualified to accomplish the goal specified in the grant. They have no history of training people in outdoor activities or really doing anything besides applying for one grant.

Red flag 3: United Sportsmen was the only group to apply for this grant. This appears to be for two reasons. First and most importantly, the requirements of the grant ruled out many older groups with well-established educational programs. Second, the grant was not extensively publicized. The Department of Natural Resources listed the grant on one web page and did not issue a press release about its availability.

On its own, any one of these things could have been explained away as an unfortunate coincidence. However, these three facts combined tell a different story. This is not a well-intentioned effort to help hunters and fishers in the state of Wisconsin. It is a way for politicians to take care of their own with taxpayer dollars.

Most ironic is the fact that the legislators responsible for and the people receiving the grant are strident conservatives. After all, you know the first tenant of modern conservatism: Eliminate as much government spending as possible, except a little bit to take care of yourself and political allies. There’s nothing quite as beautifully ironic as the idea of an ardent conservative ideologue – a self-described “freemarket [sic] warrior” fervently suckling on the government’s teat.

This is the exact sort of corruption that needs to be eliminated in order to both save money and restore the public’s faith in the political process.

Ordinarily I would call for the person behind this to be voted out of office. The kicker here is that Suder, one of the legislators responsible for the grant, resigned from the Assembly and will not be seeking re-election. This leaves voters with essentially no means of recourse.

Since we can’t actively vote Suder out of office, the best we can do is ensure things like this don’t happen again. The best way to do this is to make sure our representatives on the Square are hyper-vigilant for items like this that are slipped into otherwise-innocuous bills. While legislators can’t be expected to read every word of every bill – the sheer volume of legislation makes that impossible – they should at the very least have trusted staff members become intimately familiar with any piece of legislation coming to the floor.

The Wisconsin political process is far from perfect. However, by actively holding legislators accountable for this type of cronyism, we can go a long way toward cleaning up the system. This grant is not only embarrassing for the state, it’s a waste of money.

Wisconsin Republicans never cease to disappoint.

Joe Timmerman ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in math and economics with a certificate in computer science.