Baby bonds saga shows Lamont team’s darker side

He could have just vetoed the bill. Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration wanted to kill baby bonds, and may have successfully done so. The baby bonds program is a nationally recognized poverty-fighting initiative that was successfully pushed through the Legislature by Shawn Wooden, who served four years as state treasurer. Lamont’s people, though, didn’t like it, and worked feverishly to delay it and, possibly, kill it outright.

Why they allowed it to get that far is a different question.

The back story is detailed in a stunning CT Mirror investigation that plums texts, emails and other communications to shed light on the Lamont team’s inner workings. The upshot is that a program with great intentions and a national base of support was quietly hobbled, possibly permanently, and it all happened away from the public’s attention. Without this investigation, no one would have been the wiser.

Since baby bonds don’t start paying out until 18 years after the first participants are enrolled — that would be 2041, if the program started this year — there’s no one to complain about missing dollars. The backlash so far has been mild. Still, baby bonds were approved by the General Assembly and, just as importantly, signed into law by Lamont.

The idea behind the program is simple. The program would set aside and invest money on behalf of children born into poverty. When they reach adulthood, recipients could then use that money, which would have grown significantly in the intervening years, for purposes such as education, starting a business or buying a home.

These are the kind of wealth-building activities that are freely available to people on the upper ends of the income ladder, but too expensive for people at the bottom. Baby bonds aim to help close the ever-widening income gap by giving people with limited resources more opportunities.

But there were complications, as the Mirror story details.

For one, the governor’s people appeared to have thought the funding mechanism bypassed the governor’s authority on bonding, which may have some validity, but hardly seems like a reason to kill the whole thing. There were questions about tracking and eligibility, which surely could have been figured out.

Another problem cited by the governor’s staff was that choosing to fund baby bonds meant choosing not to fund something else, which has no validity, since that describes anything in any government budget. And that decision had been made — the General Assembly approved it.

Beyond that, Lamont’s then-Chief of Staff Paul Mounds sounded an awful lot like he just didn’t believe in the idea. In a text exchange with the governor’s wife, he implied that without support from parents, the prospect of success was questionable at best.

Maybe that’s true. But it seems like something that should have been decided in public, by elected officials, rather than behind the scenes by someone with virtually no public profile.

Much of the blame in baby bonds’ apparent demise is laid at Wooden’s feet. He successfully pushed the proposal through the Assembly, but failed, according to the story, to secure its all-important funding. Minus that second piece, there were too many ways for opponents to chip away at the project, which they did.

How all this plays into Wooden’s decision not to seek a second term as treasurer last year in uncertain, but he certainly shocked everyone when he said he wasn’t running again. It’s hard to think the decision by the governor’s staff to kill his signature policy didn’t play a role somehow.

Still, there is a major unanswered question: Why did Lamont sign the bill if his administration was going to slow roll the program and try to kill it?

It’s not a coincidence that baby bonds’ strongest supporters were members of the Assembly’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus. Picking a public fight with minority lawmakers during a reelection campaign would have been a bad idea. We can look back now and see that Lamont won reelection easily, but that was no given at the time.

Most years, Democrats count on turnout from heavily minority cities to push them over the top statewide. Putting those votes in jeopardy in a year when Democrats were already expected to struggle nationally would have been political malpractice.

So, instead, the governor’s people did their work quietly.

Lamont is famously not much of a detail guy when it comes to policy, and that’s putting it charitably. Maybe he was behind the demise of this program passed with such promise in 2021, but the texts and emails uncovered by the Mirror show his people almost gleeful at its end at their hands. “Lol @ baby bonds,” thenComptroller Natalie Braswell wrote in a text to Mounds at one point.

Mounds, for what it’s worth, has left the Lamont team for term No. 2. Braswell is still around, now as general counsel.

No one needs to be naive about what goes on concerning big legislation when the cameras are off. Of course there’s a lot of backroom dealing and tradeoffs.

But when the General Assembly passes a bill and the governor signs it, the public is in its rights to expect the program will be enacted or, if not, that a public process will determine its future.

The Lamont administration appears to believe otherwise.