Harvard Kennedy School Student Government Ran Up $46,000 Budget Deficit Last Year

The Harvard Kennedy School Student Government ran up a nearly $46,000 budget deficit in the 2023-24 academic year, leading the school to impose new restrictions on the student government’s funding, according to an email obtained by The Crimson.

The deficit is the largest in the KSSG’s history and only the second overage in the last two decades, according to an early September email from Senior Director of Student Services Melissa Wojciechowski St. John.

Wojciechowski St. John notified members of the KSSG’s executive board of the deficit and wrote that the Kennedy School would implement new rules regulating the group’s funding and would require the KSSG to cover a portion of the losses.

“Next year’s KSSG will have 15k taken out of the funding pool prior to receiving the budget number for the year in order to cover part of the deficit,” Wojciechowski St. John wrote.

HKS spokesperson Daniel B. Harsha confirmed the deficit in a statement to The Crimson but said the Kennedy School would cover the entire deficit through an $15,000 emergency reserve fund and $31,000 in funding from other sources.

Harsha added that the Kennedy School asked KSSG to “establish its own $10,000 reserve fund moving forward to help prevent such budget deficits in future years.”

The deficit was incurred under the leadership of former KSSG President NanaEfua Afoh-Manin, who a source close to KSSG said spearheaded the group’s finances. When reached by phone, Afoh-Manin declined to comment on the budget issues and abruptly ended the call.

Members of KSSG expressed frustration to Wojciechowski St. John about having limited visibility into how the Kennedy School was disbursing and handling funding earmarked for KSSG, according to emails obtained by The Crimson from early September.

Uche Nwachukwu — the KSSG vice president of finance last year — called the deficit “worrisome” in an email to Wojciechowski St. John, adding that KSSG “tried to balance our budget, restricted activities, and didn’t make approvals beyond what we had a view of.”

“The main issue I would assume came from changes that are made directly to the KSSG account and does not pass through the finance committee approval process,” he wrote.

While KSSG approves funding for student groups and events, the Kennedy School’s Office of Student Services is responsible for distributing the money to students, according to Nwachukwu. Nwachukwu added that KSSG does not have insight into how much the OSS distributes to students and instead relies on internal figures of approved expenditures, which were under the budget according to his calculations.

KSSG had a strained relationship with the OSS throughout the 2023-24 academic year, according to documents reviewed by The Crimson. In an April meeting, the group discussed what they could do to “move the admin to be more transparent about disbursements” and lamented that “admin just doesn’t like showing kssg numbers,” according to a copy of meeting minutes obtained by The Crimson.

In an end-of-year report produced by KSSG and obtained by The Crimson, the group alleged that OSS’s current system of reimbursements “has students delayed more than 8 weeks (about 2 months) with some reporting never receiving their refunds.”

An HKS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its reimbursement system.

At least two other members of KSSG’s finance committee — a body that votes on requests for funding by student organizations — expressed similar frustration in emails sent to Wojciechowski St. John on Sept. 9 and 10.

But Zubair Merchant, the former KSSG executive vice president, said in an interview that the Kennedy School has yet to respond to the group’s requests for clarification over the last two weeks.

“They just have not responded at all — I think there was like four or five emails from the collective body of multiple people,” Merchant said.

KSSG’s funding comes primarily from an annual $220 student activity fee each student pays as part of their tuition. For the 2023-24 academic year, KSSG was allocated $212,055 in funding, around $50,000 less than what was given to the group the year prior, according to a KSSG report obtained by The Crimson. (Enrollment at the Kennedy School dropped from 1,130 students in the 2022-23 academic year to 1012 the following year, partly explaining the drop in funding)

In the 2022-23 academic year, 40 percent of the KSSG’s funding went towards student activities and events, while the remaining 60 percent went to student groups and caucuses, per the document.

But in the 2023-24 academic year, KSSG chose to allocate the funding evenly. It earmarked $106,028 — 50 percent of the total pot — to fund the school’s 125 clubs and caucuses and the remaining half to KSSG-sponsored events like formals, balls, and quorums, according to the document.

Though the KSSG ran up a large deficit last year, some members of the student government was concerned as late in the year as February 2024 that it would underspend during the spring semester, according to a copy of meeting notes from a Feb. 5, 2024, KSSG session obtained by The Crimson.

At the end of the 2022-23 academic year, the KSSG still had $20,000 of its budget left over, per the document.

By March, the group had spent nearly 70 percent of its budget. But according to meeting minutes from an April session, the group began tightening its finances in the spring, bringing the funding cap for large groups down from $2,500 to $1,500.

The budget deficit has become a contentious issue among candidates running for the KSSG executive board. Merchant — who is now running to serve as KSSG president — has distanced himself from the budget issues, saying he only had limited knowledge during his tenure as executive vice president.

Allan E. Cameron V — a candidate for KSSG executive vice president who is running with presidential candidate Lily Kang — slammed Merchant over his comments, saying he is “taken aback that the Executive Vice President, the second-most senior figure in KSSG, would not know about the finances of KSSG.”

Voting in this year’s election began Monday afternoon and closes on Tuesday night.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.