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Members of the North Carolina Senator’s bipartisan committee of North Carolina Senators are asking state auditors to investigate how money intended to stop human trafficking was spent and managed in response to Propublica’s report.
Propublica reported that Republican-controlled Congress had departed from the democratically-led institutions that overseen such money, directing $15 million for sexual abuse survivors, to a small committee of the state court system that became Republicans. According to previous grant managers, the Human Trafficking Committee struggled to pay the funds in a timely manner. Staff at 18 Crisis Centres said Propublica payments were delayed for several months, leading to cuts.
After Democrat senators highlighted Propobumica’s report at last week’s meeting, Sen. Steve Jarvis, Republican Republican co-chair of the Regulation and Reform Committee, said:
The committee then proceeded to state auditors with bills to create a team to investigate the waste, fraud and inefficiency of state spending, and reported to lawmakers what could be cut. Named after Republican auditor Dave Boliek, the Dave Act creates a division of accountability, value and efficiency under him. This department is widely described as the version of the federal government’s Department of Efficiency in North Carolina, or Doge.
Boliek told the senators he was moving swiftly to respond to Propublica’s report. Boliek said he read the article and placed it on the team’s “whiteboard” and even before the department was officially established, he set up a “quick response team” as a “way for us to react proactively.” Boliek did not answer questions about the nature and timing of the investigation sent to his office.
Sen. Woodson Bradley, a Democrat on the committee, said at the meeting, as a domestic violence survivor, “this story broke my heart. It broke my trust.” Bradley said he heard about the story from many survivors in the state.
“So before Dave Act goes to the Senate floor, before I explain what went wrong here to everything in North Carolina, how can I fix this?” Bradley said he’ll look into the Human Trafficking Committee, leading to promises from Republican senators and state auditors.
After the meeting, Bradley said, “The auditor gave me a personal assurance that he or his team would consider this. The existence of such an investigation was rarely made public, but I am following up and asking for a formal investigation and waiting for written confirmation.
At the meeting, Bradley raised concerns that Dave Act could be politicized in an investigation into Democrats leading or serving them as Democrats accused Doge. She argued that a $15 million redirect to the Human Trafficking Commission took place through partisan operations in the past state budget, and worried that Dave’s Act would be distorted as well. “It should be an honest, bipartisan review,” Bradley said.
Boliek promises to work in a “data-centric, nonpartisan way” and is based on “what you can actually get as a return on investment in taxpayer dollars.”
Will extreme spending and partisanship undermine trust in the state Supreme Court?
In addition to the $15 million redirected to the Human Trafficking Committee, lawmakers gave the committee additional money for faith-based groups. The group that received the most money from the committee ($640,000) was created by the former head of the state GOP about two months before it was named in the 2021 budget. In October 2024, the group wrote in a quarterly report to the court system that it was supporting only four victims, the executive director said at least three women were given food and gas and not long-term services. The executive director told Propublica that as of March 2025, the group had supported around 20 casualties.
A spokesman for the court system declined to comment on the article and pointed out previous statements to Propublica.
“Our experience is that support to combat trafficking is nonpartisan in Congress,” the spokesman previously told Propoblica “as if it’s in the judicial department.”
After the meeting, Jarvis told Propobrica that the Dave Act was intended to “accurately” deal with situations like the Human Trafficking Committee.
Jarvis said the goal of the Dave division is to fall into details of how efficiently the agency is working to ensure that it “runs the right way.”
