Bob Mercer said last week that Governor Larry Rhoden has been using the Future Fund the way George Mickelson intended:
In the 18-plus months he’s held South Dakota’s top elected office, Gov. Larry Rhoden has steered the state’s Future Fund back to its original intent as an economic development tool for communities.
On Tuesday, his office announced a $1 million grant to help develop a new Rapid City business and industrial park. On July 31, his office announced a $1 million grant to help develop a new business and industrial park in Mitchell.
These are the types of public investments the Legislature envisioned in 1987, when lawmakers approved the late Gov. George S. Mickelson’s request to establish the Future Fund program. South Dakota’s economy was struggling.
Mickelson’s responses included the Future Fund, which uses a sliver of what employers had previously paid in unemployment tax, and temporarily increasing the state sales tax to raise $40 million and create the business-loan fund known as the Revolving Economic Development Initiative.
The Future Fund legislation that was passed four decades ago created what was called “the employer’s investment in South Dakota’s future fund.” The measure specified its purpose: “Such fund shall be used for purposes related to research and economic development for the state” [Bob Mercer, “Future Fund Being Used as First Intended,” KELO-TV, 2026.08.04].
So, yeah, socialism: the state redistributing wealth to serve economic purposes not fulfilled by market forces.That is the point of the Future Fund.
But socialism does not include skirting the Legislature’s appropriations authority to funnel money from one government pot to another:
South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden announced Tuesday that he awarded $500,000 from a fund under his control to support the continued work of his Governor’s Resilience and Infrastructure Task Force.
The money comes from the Future Fund, which employers support with fees they submit while paying taxes to support unemployment benefits.
…Rhoden established the Governor’s Resilience and Infrastructure Task Force last year, saying it would “serve as a strategic advisory body to develop policy recommendations, assess risks and vulnerabilities, and support long-term planning and investment in critical infrastructure systems across our state.”
The Future Fund money is going to the state Department of the Military, which supports the task force administratively in collaboration with the Governor’s Office and the state Department of Public Safety [staff, “Governor Awards $500,000 to Task Force Working on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Resilience,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2026.08.11].
The Department of the Military has its own line in the budget. In this year’s budget bill, HB 1326, the Legislature appropriated $3,216,728 in state funds to that line. If the Legislature has wanted the Department of the Military to have $500,000 more, they’d have put that additional amount in HB 1326 or in some other special appropriation bill.
Governor Rhoden has thus given the Department of the Military a 15.5% budget increase with no approval from the Legislature. To make that unappropriated (inappropriate?) budget boost happen, Rhoden has raided funds intended to socialisitically boost the economy to fund a bunch of his appointees to sit around and talk about socialistically boosting the economy through certain security-related projects.
The Governor’s task force didn’t need Future Fund dollars to start its study and conversation about security risks. If there’s money to be made by private companies building stronger computer networks and other infrastructure, perhaps we’d get a swifter bang by handing those socialist Future Fund bucks directly to those companies.
Socialists like Larry Rhoden do some funny things. But dodging the normal appropriations process and diluting economic development dollars by handing them to a middleman Governor’s task force doesn’t feel funny; it feels like a misuse of public dollars.