Members of a bipartisan committee of North Carolina senators are asking the state auditor to investigate how money intended to stop human trafficking had been spent and managed, in response to ProPublica’s reporting.

ProPublica had reported how the Republican-dominated legislature had directed $15 million for sexual abuse survivors away from Democratic-led agencies that had long overseen such money, sending it to a tiny commission in the Republican-helmed state court system. The Human Trafficking Commission struggled to disburse the funds in a timely manner, according to its former grants administrator. Staffers at 18 crisis centers told ProPublica payments were delayed for months and led to cuts, some of which continue to limit urgent, potentially lifesaving services.

“It sounds like something that we can definitely put the auditor on,” said Sen. Steve Jarvis, a Republican co-chair of the Committee on Regulatory Reform, after a Democratic senator highlighted ProPublica’s reporting in a meeting last week.

The committee subsequently advanced a bill to empower the state auditor to create a team to investigate waste, fraud and inefficiency in state spending and report to lawmakers what can be cut. The DAVE Act — named for Republican State Auditor Dave Boliek — would create under him the Division of Accountability, Value and Efficiency. This division has been widely described as North Carolina’s version of the federal Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Boliek told the senators that he was moving quickly to respond to ProPublica’s reporting. Boliek said that he had read the article and put it on his team’s “whiteboard,” and that he had established a “rapid response team” as “a way for us to be proactively reactive” even before the division is officially established. Boliek did not respond to questions about the nature and timing of the investigation sent to his office.

Sen. Woodson Bradley, a Democratic member of the committee, said in the meeting that as a survivor of domestic violence, “this story broke my heart. It broke my trust.” Bradley said she had heard from numerous survivors across the state about the story.

“So I’m asking publicly, before the DAVE Act goes to the Senate floor, to explain to all of North Carolina what went wrong here? How can we fix this?” Bradley said, leading to the promises from the Republican senator and state auditor to look into the Human Trafficking Commission.

Bradley said that after the meeting, “The auditor gave me personal assurances that he or his team would look into this. Though the existence of such investigations is rarely made public, I followed up to ask for a formal investigation, and I’m waiting for” written confirmation.

In the meeting, Bradley also raised concerns that the DAVE Act could be politicized, with investigations targeting agencies led by Democrats or serving them, as Democrats have accused DOGE of doing. She argued that the redirection of the $15 million to the Human Trafficking Commission had happened through a partisan maneuver in a past state budget and worried that the DAVE Act could be similarly skewed. “It needs to be an honest and bipartisan review,” Bradley said.

Boliek promised to do his job in “a nonpartisan way that’s data-centric” and based on “what we’re actually getting as a return on investment on taxpayer dollars.”

In addition to the $15 million redirected to the Human Trafficking Commission, lawmakers gave the commission additional money specifically for faith-based groups. The group that received the most money from the commission — $640,000 — had been 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 its quarterly report to the court system that it had assisted only four victims, and its executive director said that at least three of those women had been given only food and gas and no long-term services. The executive director told ProPublica that as of March 2025 the group had helped about two dozen victims.

A spokesperson for the court system declined to comment for this article, pointing ProPublica to its past statements.

“Our experience is that support for fighting human trafficking is nonpartisan in the legislature,” the spokesperson had previously told ProPublica, “as it is in the Judicial Branch.”

After the meeting, Jarvis told ProPublica that the DAVE Act was meant to address situations “exactly” like those with the Human Trafficking Commission.

The goal of the DAVE division, Jarvis said, would be to get down into the details of how efficiently agencies are working to make sure they are “operating the right way.”