FRANKFORT, Ky. — Was a reported $6,000 outlay for a Lexington Legends baseball game an example of executive branch overspending or a chance to give hundreds of foster kids their first experience in a professional ballpark?
In Frankfort, it depends on who you ask.
A long-running conflict over executive branch spending came to a head this week at the Capitol, with the state’s Republican auditor and Democratic governor clashing over a spending presentation that Gov. Andy Beshear called a “political attack.” That Lexington Legends expense was a drop in the bucket among dozens highlighted in House Appropriations and Revenue Committee testimony Feb. 10 by Auditor Allison Ball’s office, including several that ran into the millions.
The report was not a complete audit, noted Ball, who presented it to legislators along with attorney general Alex Magera. It was a review of fiscal year 2025 spending in eMARS, which tracks state payroll and other spending, as Kentucky lawmakers work through the current session to craft the commonwealth’s FY 2027-28 budget.
But the review highlighted several expensive tabs and other eMARS entries that may raise some eyebrows.
Nearly $7.5 million went to out-of-state travel — Beshear made several trips nationwide over the past year, but some of that total was collected by the Kentucky Department of Education and other state offices — while more than $23 million went to in-state travel.
More than $16 million was spent on training, conferences, food and trade shows, with the presentation often describing in great detail where that money allegedly went, down to menu items on meals that were served to attendees.
Nearly $70 million was spent on “temporary worker services,” including about $8 million from the Department of Vehicle Registration’s Driver Licensing Division, which was under investigation for an alleged scheme involving temporary workers Magera described as an “alleged underground black market of ID sales to undocumented non-citizens.”
And a little more than $118 million fell into the bucket of “other” expenses, used by entities when “they don’t know where to put spending,” said Magera.
Kentucky Auditor Allison Ball, left, and attorney general Alex Magera speak at a state House budget committee meeting on Feb. 10, 2026.
Rep. Jason Petrie, R-Elkton, the chairman of the committee and the sponsor of this year’s executive branch budget bill, noted that the presentation was “not an exhaustive list of points of interest” and they are “just some that were pulled out that are odd, or their aggregates are odd, or the process is odd or unknown.”
“The money the state receives is tax revenue,” Petrie said, ending his remarks by telling attendees he wasn’t there to pass judgment. “If you get a group of just regular people in a room and you start cutting these expenses with them, what do you think they’re going to say? What are you going to feel in response? What are you going to think in response? It’s just a good time to take a moment (as) we’re looking at the (budget) base.”
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There are some big numbers on that list. And in his weekly news conference two days later, Beshear acknowledged that there are “costs here and there that we can do better.” The executive branch budget bill approved by the state legislature in the 2024 session included more than $125 billion in spending over the next two years.
But the report presented to the House committee was put together without input from members of the executive staff who could have provided key context, the governor said – “I don’t think it can be (called) a report, because they never asked us any questions, and you have to do that if it’s an audit report” – and amounts to a “political attack” from the auditor’s office.
Some entries were inaccurate or not properly characterized, he said. Expenses of the Department for Aging and Independent Living of $198,000 described as going towards a media campaign for the Senior Meals Program of the state, amid a lack of funding for the service, was in fact “a membership fee they have to pay to be part of a federally required public education program”, said Beshear.
Some listed expenses were paid with federal funds and not taxpayer dollars, he added, and he disputed the description of the alleged driver’s license scheme as a “black market” of sales to “undocumented immigrants,” a controversy under investigation that led to five indictments earlier in February — “the United States attorneys were very clear that no one from the country involved was illegal.” The recently announced charges related to licenses issued to non-citizens who were in the United States legally.
And while the $6,000 line item for the Lexington Legends baseball game was one of the smaller expenses highlighted, Beshear said the money was “purely federal.”
“And what did he do? Four hundred and thirty foster kids got to see what is probably their first professional baseball game,” he said. “During the game, the team runs ads that educate people about what it’s like to be a foster parent and why you want to be a foster parent.”
Gov. Andy Beshear speaks in his annual State of the Commonwealth address in January 2026. Beshear is pushing back against a report by Auditor Allison Ball that highlighted spending by the executive branch.
Cutting his office out of the process as the report was being put together, Beshear added, meant key context was left out of the presentation.
“They didn’t ask questions because it was simply a political attack,” he said in conclusion. “If you’re in the auditor’s office, just do the job. That’s all we’re asking. We have nothing to hide.”
This is not the first time Beshear has clashed with Ball, an Eastern Kentucky Republican who was elected auditor in 2023 after spending eight years as state treasurer.
The governor was critical of Ball before the session on the crackdown on potential budget cuts in her office, saying she had told him that her staff had discovered “wasteful spending” that could be used to balance the budget amid a projected shortfall of more than $150 million.
Ball also sued Beshear last year over the administration’s failure to implement Senate Bill 151 of 2024, which passed with bipartisan support in an effort to support family care in Kentucky. The governor said he could not implement it because the required $20 million was not included in the budget.
The case was dismissed in September, but the issue continued to simmer among lawyers along with Republicans in the legislature. It was one of 11 bills in recent years Beshear said he could not implement due to a lack of appropriated funds — in response last spring, House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, said the legislature would “remove any doubt that it does not have the ability to spend money going forward” in the 2026 budget cycle.
Petrie’s initial budget proposal this year was much smaller than previous years, described by the longtime Western Kentucky representative as “bare bones.” During this session, cabinet members and other administration officials are appearing before budget review subcommittees to make their case for funding.
Ball also sued Beshear and other administration officials in 2024 over access to iTWIST, a database that tracks abuse and neglect cases in Kentucky, which has since been settled. And Beshear called a 2024 audit by her office of significant issues within the Juvenile Justice Department a “political tool” after the report blamed the problems in part on a “lack of leadership” by the executive branch.
For her part, Ball is with the report presented to the House committee.
In an emailed statement after Beshear’s Feb. 12 comments, her office said everything in the report “came directly from eMARS as logged by Beshear administration officials,” and the presentation was “simply a review of spending on what is reported by the Governor’s administration in eMARS.”
The email provided invoices related to some of the expenses Beshear disputed, including a $6,000 invoice from the Lexington Legends to the Department of Community-Based Services for a sponsorship that included a 30-second commercial to be played during home games — there is “no evidence provided to us to show that this expense was to take foster children with an added baseball statement,”80. an invoice billed to the Department of Aging and Independent Living, with “12-month statewide PEP advertising campaign” listed as its description.
“In short, the Governor has failed to address the most concerning expenditures that we have testified about, and has provided no evidence to support his assertions about the expenditures that he spoke about today,” said the statement from Ball’s office sent after Beshear’s comments.
Legislators will continue to meet until mid-April as they work through the legislative session and continue to build House Bill 500, this year’s executive budget bill.
Reach Lucas Aulbach at laulbach@courier-journal.com.
This article originally appeared on the Louisville Courier Journal: Beshear hits back at auditor’s accusations of wasteful spending