Our interview with Stacy Garrity

Broad + Liberty’s managing editor, Kyle Sammin (also the managing editor of Philly Daily,) sat down with State Treasurer Stacy Garrity to discuss the treasury, the budget stalemate, and the issues involved in her run for governor in 2026. The following is a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for length.

Broad + Liberty: Thanks again for joining me for the interview. So you were elected State Treasurer in 2020, reelected in ‘24 with the largest vote total in Pennsylvania history. What are a few things you're proud of accomplishing in your time so far in the office?

Stacy Garrity: Oh my gosh, there are so many things. So we've basically beat every record at Treasury. So we've given back over a billion dollars of unclaimed property, and this is money that belongs to taxpayers. It doesn't belong to state government. So we broke the record in fiscal year 22-23, which was $274 million given back in one year, and then broke my own record this last fiscal year and hit $289.5 million. 

Pennsylvania Money match — that is a brand new program that allows Treasury to proactively return unclaimed property back to its rightful owners up to $500 to a single owner. This year, we will have pushed $40 million out with that brand-new program. And just two weeks ago, we sent 70,000 checks out across the Commonwealth and we're getting ready to send out another batch of good news letters, letting people know “you have on claim property and you're going to get a check from us. It's a real program. It's real money, make sure you cash it when you get it.”

So that's like another 110,000 letters. So we will have given back, gosh, over 528 military decorations since I've been in office, and since I'm a veteran that's really near and dear to my heart. That includes thirteen Purple Hearts, three Bronze Stars and a Gold Star medal. 

Our PA 529 college and career savings plan: that is gold-rated, the investment plan. We are only one of two states in the nation to be gold-rated two consecutive years. So that means that our plan is very affordable and it's one of the best in the country. And I think part of the reason that we achieved gold is we've reduced fees for parents by over $22 million. 

When you think about it, that is money that goes right back into the pockets of hardworking parents and grandparents that have accounts for their kids and their grandkids. The other thing is ABLE, so that is our program for people with disabilities. ABLE stands for Achieving a Better Life Experience, and that's exactly what the program does. Over the last three years, the assets have more than tripled and the accounts have more than doubled. And our ABLE program is the fifth-largest in the nation. So I'm incredibly proud about the work we're doing to help people with disabilities. That's just a few things

Broad + Liberty: That's a lot already. Is there any preconception about state government that maybe you had before you became an elected official that's changed? Is there anything that you've learned in office that you didn't expect you would come across?

Stacy Garrity: Yes. So what was surprising is that the legislators love to spend taxpayer dollars — that's both sides of the aisle. There isn't one of your dollars they don't want to spend. And just this past year we spent $3 billion more than what we brought in. 

With the initial budget proposal from the governor of $51.5 billion, that would be $6 billion more than what we bring in. And that would mean we would wipe out the surplus and then tap into the rainy-day fund to the tune of $1.6 billion. And those are his numbers, not my numbers. That is just so fiscally irresponsible. You should never use a rainy-day fund to plug a budget hole. I'm hopeful we'll come up with a more reasonable number, but I'm really not involved in that process.

Broad + Liberty: Let's get into the 2026 race and start with the big picture question: Why do you want to be governor?

Stacy Garrity: I never planned to run for anything in politics. So I served, I think you know this, I spent 30 years in the Army Reserve, so three deployments all to the Middle East. So Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom. And if I had not hit my mandatory retirement date, I would've never run for state treasurer. I would still be serving, because serving was and is the honor of my lifetime. 

But I am proud to serve as our state treasurer. In fact, I like to say that every day that I get to wake up and serve hardworking Pennsylvanians is truly a blessing. So I'm running for Governor against Shapiro because he's failed the state. I travel to all 67 counties every single year. And what people tell me is that state government does not work for them. 

The governor cares more about Pennsylvania Avenue than Pennsylvania, and his priority is just simply Josh Shapiro. Throughout my career, I have always fought for what's right, and that's exactly what I'll do as Pennsylvania's next governor. 

I just have a totally different vision for our Commonwealth than Josh Shapiro. If I'm elected, I'm going to lower taxes. We have the fifth-highest tax burden in the nation. Pennsylvanians can't afford it. Once we blow through all of this money — which will be in two years, possibly into year three — they're not going to stop. They're not going to cut programs, they're not going to stop spending. And so what's going to happen? Our taxes will go up and Pennsylvanians simply can't afford it. 

The other thing is we need to bring jobs here. We need to make our communities safe and we need to make our state more affordable. I look at our state and we have too many regulations, we have too much red tape, and we need to open up Pennsylvania for business.

We are so blessed to have such an abundance of natural resources in the state. Just if you look at natural gas, we have 25 percent of the country's natural gas. So if we would unleash what we have underneath our feet responsibly, that would create tens of thousands of jobs. 

I think people are tired of educating our kids and these wonderful trade schools we have in these great universities that are top-notch, best in the country. And then you know what? Our kids go to Ohio, our kids go to Virginia, they go to West Virginia because that's where the opportunities are. So if we could unleash these jobs, we would create jobs that are going to keep our young people here. And that's what everybody wants. And that's what families in all four corners of the state tell me. They want opportunities for their kids and their grandkids, and they want those opportunities to happen right here in the Commonwealth.

The other thing about unleashing natural gas: it would create billions and billions of dollars of economic opportunity for our communities that we desperately need. And it would give us a little bit of financial breathing room. So when you look, ever since I've been the treasurer, we have run a deficit every single year. Like I said, last fiscal year, we spent $3 billion more than what we brought in. The only way I see to balance that budget is really to take advantage of the liquid goal that we have right under our feet and we can do it and we're behind.

Broad + Liberty: Growth instead of more extraction of taxes. I hear you on that one.

Stacy Garrity: Exactly.

Broad + Liberty: Do you think your experience in the private sector gives you an advantage in thinking about that sort of thing compared to somebody like the governor who's mostly been in government office for his adult life?

Stacy Garrity: A hundred percent. So I am not a career politician at all. And in the private sector, you have to pass your budget and time. You can't spend more than what you bring in. And you have to be focused on the mission. And I think I've shown since I've been the treasurer that I will work with anybody, I don't care if you're a Republican, a Democrat, an independent. I will work with anybody to make Pennsylvania a better place to live, work and raise a family. I've shown that from the very first day. 

So when I came into office, apparently I was the only row office that when they changed parties, they didn't gut the place. And I got calls from some legislators saying, Stacy, we know you're new to politics, but you really need to get rid of the other side. And I said, “well, I ran a battalion in a war zone, and so I think I can put together a staff and I'll know right away if somebody needs to move on or if I've put the right staff together.”

And that is why we were able, I'm convinced, to break all these records. So I've really tried to make sure that we run this treasury like a business, we're here to serve the people not the other way around and to take the bureaucracy out of it and be solution oriented. I don't know if you saw that we initiated a $500 million bridge loan.

Broad + Liberty: Yes, because of the lack of a budget.

Stacy Garrity: Exactly. I think this is day 100 of the Shapiro shutdown. And so I was thinking about “what tools do I have at Treasury to help our vulnerable populations?” And I've been thinking about it since July when some Head Starts had reached out to me personally and said, “Hey, we're going to be running out of money and we're going to have to shutter services. What can you do?” 

So I went back and forth with the Office of the Budget to say, “explain to me what's classified as health, safety and welfare, because I'm fairly new to this game.” And since I've been treasurer, the longest budget stalemate there had been, I think was a couple of weeks. And so now, people are starting to really feel the effects of it, vulnerable populations that shouldn't because had we passed a budget on time, they would have their money for their programs. And so why should our kids be hurt? Why should our seniors be hurt? So I went back and forth and back and forth, and then it occurred to me, we do short-term investment pools and we do this. 

We've done this in the past. When the state is waiting for tax revenues to come in, we have done a short-term loan, of course charging interest because that's within my investment authority. And so I said, why can't we do it for counties? Why can't we help the rape and abuse crisis centers? Why can't we help the domestic violence groups? Why can't we help the Head Starts and the pre-Ks? And so that's exactly what we're doing. 

And people were like, “why do you have to charge interest?” Because my investment authority comes from prudent person. So I have to maintain, I have to conserve the money, make sure that we maintain enough liquidity because we make every payment that's from the Commonwealth — fun fact: three payments a second — and a reasonable risk-adjusted rate of return. And so I can't just dole out money. We have to earn interest. But as you know, the Senate today is trying to pass a bill to allow us to waive the interest, which I'm fine with because this is interest that, had we passed a budget on time, we wouldn't be earning the interest on this money anyway.

Broad + Liberty: So it's no loss.

Stacy Garrity: No. So we're trying to do it very responsibly. We're only looking at 25 percent of certain prior year appropriations. And so the applications are starting to roll in and that's fantastic. It looks like we're going to be able to help some of our most vulnerable.

Broad + Liberty: That's fantastic. That kind of leads to my next question too. That's what you're doing through the Treasurer's office to help with the budget problem now. But if you were governor, here we are, it's been almost a hundred days, like you said, what would you do to get a budget deal done if you were in his place right now?

Stacy Garrity: So, it's called the Governor's budget. It is not called the Senate Republicans’ budget. So if I were the governor, I would be in Harrisburg. I would show up, I would roll up my sleeves, I would be in that room, and I would be negotiating. 

I would not say, here's my proposed budget. Let me know when you guys have a deal and leave and go on Steve Colbert and go fundraise and do all the other things that he's doing. Going to the West Virginia-Pitt game. I would be there negotiating, and we wouldn't leave until we had a budget. It's really too bad in my opinion, that people get paid when there's a budget impasse. If they didn't get paid, we'd have a budget.

Broad + Liberty: We wrote about that recently. And I think more and more people are saying it.

Stacy Garrity: Yeah, it's absolutely true. Because what incentive is there to pass a budget now if you're going to miss a paycheck? And a lot of these folks that work for government, they're paycheck to paycheck. They can't afford to miss paychecks. I think that there would be a lot more willingness to negotiate and to compromise and to be solution oriented.

Broad + Liberty: Back in 2023, the Commonwealth Court ruled that the current system of school funding in Pennsylvania was unequal, unconstitutional, and told the legislature and the governor to fix it. Since then, nothing's really changed. In the meantime, we spend more money on schools every year at the state level, and test scores continue to decline. Even before Covid, they were going in the wrong direction. And since then, it's even worse.

Education's on the top of a lot of voters' minds. What would be some steps you would take as governor to reverse that decline and to make Pennsylvania schools better for every student?

Stacy Garrity: Since Josh Shapiro has been in office, we spend a billion dollars more on education than we did then when he came in. And yet about half of our eighth graders can read and write at grade level. And so if you look at things as a state treasurer, through the lens of return on investment, that's not a very good return on investment. 

When you look at the governor, he has held not one, not two, but three positions on school choice. So he was for it, he was against it, and now I believe he's neutral. It's up to the General Assembly. So me, it won't surprise you to know that I've always had the same position. I think parents, not bureaucrats, should be in the driver's seat of their kid's education. And your zip code shouldn't determine your kids' success. So I'm for expanding education savings accounts or school choice, however you like to call it.

I'm for cyber charters, I'm for homeschool private schools, and also reforming our public schools, our kids. This is a lifeline that we could give them if we were to embrace school choice. And so that's what I would do, because I don't think we can have a cookie cutter model for our kids. Everybody learns differently. 

I’ll give you a quick example. So there's a young girl, Marisa Wise from Bradford County, where I come from, which is very, very rural. So she was going to school, she was in the tenth grade, and she was getting harassed and bullied because she was biracial living with a single mom and her brother. So she went to the school, the school didn't really offer any solutions, so she decided to enroll in a cyber charter. And guess what? Her grades went up. Then she made honor roll every single year. And then she participated in this internship with people all around the country. For Marisa, school choice was absolutely a lifeline and the answer for her, and I can imagine that that would help thousands of kids across the Commonwealth.

Broad + Liberty: So just to shift gears to more of a horse race kind of question, like we talked about earlier, you set the record for the most votes in Pennsylvania history. The previous holder of that was Josh Shapiro. He also tends to run ahead of the ticket. And even in the recent polls, opinion polls, most Pennsylvanians approved of the job he's doing. Do you have a battle plan to convince people that you would do an even better job? 

Stacy Garrity: Well, Josh Shapiro has never been challenged, and because he has never been challenged, he's been able to pull the wool over a lot of Pennsylvanians’ eyes. 

So when we get the message out that Josh Shapiro is for biological males competing against our girls and women in sports, when we get the word out that he supports gender-affirming care for trans — by the way, using your taxpayer dollars — when we get the word out that we're going to be out of money in two or three years, and guess what? Your taxes are going to go up. When we get the word out that Josh Shapiro supports Medicaid for able-bodied adults with no dependents, with no limitations, and again, your taxpayer dollars, I think that a lot of the moderate folks will come home and that it's going to be a totally different race.

Broad + Liberty: All right. Well, that's all the questions I have, thanks for joining us.

Stacy Garrity: Thanks for having me.