Finance
A new blueprint for financing community development – Part III
Hegseth, a Fox News host who served in the Army National Guard, was named by President-elect Donald Trump on November 12 as his pick for defense secretary. Since then, Hegseth has been the subject of a number of allegations of sexual misconduct, alcohol abuse and financial mismanagement. The most recent spate of news stories have detailed allegations, which Hegseth has denied, related to excessive alcohol consumption and appear to be the main topic of concern on Capitol Hill.
“It’s just been very troubling to see how unconcerned many members of Congress are with men who are accused of sexual assault,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. While the House does not vote to confirm Cabinet nominees, Hegseth met with Republican House members on Wednesday to shore up support.
“The issue that apparently, I heard, came up in his meetings was his alleged alcohol abuse,” she said. “But I guess his abuse of women doesn’t seem to bother as many folks.”
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Credible allegations of impropriety have often been cause for withdrawal or disqualification. Hegseth is one of a number of Trump’s Cabinet-level nominees who face accusations of sexual misconduct.
In 2020, Hegseth paid a confidential settlement to a woman who filed a police report accusing him of raping her in 2017 at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California. No charges were filed against Hegseth in connection with the encounter, which he and his lawyer maintain was consensual. The New Yorker and other outlets have reported on additional allegations that Hegseth mismanaged funds and abused alcohol while leading two veteran-focused nonprofits, and that his colleagues at Fox News witnessed him drinking to excess while he was a weekend co-host at “Fox and Friends.” Hegseth has strenuously denied those claims, including in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, and told Megyn Kelly in an interview on her SiriusXM show that he wouldn’t drink alcohol as defense secretary.
Representatives for Fox News and the Trump transition did not immediately return requests for comment. Several of Hegseth’s current and former Fox News colleagues, including current “Fox & Friends Weekends” co-host Will Cain, have spoken up in his defense.
“The press is peddling anonymous story after anonymous story, all meant to smear me and tear me down. It’s a textbook manufactured media takedown,” Hegseth wrote in the Journal. “They provide no evidence, no names, and they ignore the legions of people who speak on my behalf. They need to create a bogeyman, because they believe I threaten their institutional insanity. That is the only thing they are right about.”
Democratic women serving on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees argued that Hegseth getting confirmed would not only undercut years-long bipartisan efforts in Congress to address sexual assault and abuse in the military but also the armed services’ efforts to recruit more women.
“This is very concerning,” said Escobar, a Democrat. “We have been trying to address recruitment for a long time, and women are a key component of that. This is the last thing we needed, and it is my hope that those members of the Senate who are committed to these reforms and who know how important women are in the military will have very candid conversations with him, and he will drop out.”
Nearly 1 in 4 women in the military report having experienced sexual assault and more than half report harassment, according to a 2016 analysis of articles published in the peer-reviewed journal Trauma, Violence and Abuse. The vast majority of incidents go unreported, according to the RAND Corporation, which provides research to the U.S. Armed Forces. In 2018 alone, about 6,000 sexual assaults were reported to the Department of Defense, but surveys suggested more than 20,000 service members were sexually assaulted. And amid a broader military recruitment crisis, a 2020 government study found that women were leaving the military at higher rates than men and citing sexual assault as a major factor.
Michelle Simpson Tuegel, a Texas-based lawyer who does not practice in the military justice system but has represented survivors in several high-profile sex abuse cases, said Hegseth’s nomination marks “a scary moment” for women service members.
“I get calls every year from women who have faced sexual assault and sexual harassment in the military, I’ve represented people on the bases when I used to do criminal defense,” Tuegel said. “There’s a lot of violence on our military bases.”
Reports of sexual assault in the military have risen by an estimated 25 percent since 2018, according to the military’s own data, which include both anonymous surveys and formal reports.
Military justice reform advocates have gained ground in recent years, particularly in regards to how military sexual assault and harassment investigations are handled. After the end of World War II, one Supreme Court ruling — known as the Feres doctrine — barred service members from suing the government over any injuries incurred while on active duty. Though typically applied to cases of medical malpractice, this ruling had expanded to include sexual assault allegations. However, the high-profile murder in 2020 of Vanessa Guillén, a soldier who was sexually harassed by a supervisor and violently murdered while stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, acted as a catalyst for reform. Guillén’s death led to major changes in the National Defense Authorization Act, guaranteeing that certain crimes like sexual assault and domestic violence would be prosecuted outside the chain of command.
Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a veteran, called it “insane” that Trump would nominate someone like Hegseth after the “decades” of efforts within the Armed Services.
“There are simply too many reasons proving that Pete Hegseth is not the right person to lead our military men and women, and he will not have my vote,” she said in a statement to The 19th. “Republicans confirming him to this position wouldn’t just be an insult to our men and women in uniform—it would be dangerous for our national security and military readiness.”
Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey was a student at the Naval Academy 30 years ago as part of the first class of women eligible for combat ships. She served for nearly a decade, including a stint in London when she worked for a Navy fleet commander overseeing the deployment of troops to Iraq, at a time when she said the culture was not great for women.
When young women interested in the service academies come to her office, Sherrill said, “they’re not interested in going into a force as second-class citizens, and they’re not interested in being given special treatment.”
“What they want is the challenge that all people that go into our military service want. What they want to do is to serve the public, to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and to make sure that people here can sleep at night,” said Sherrill, who is also running for governor of New Jersey. “And so, why you would ever put someone in charge that didn’t respect that, that didn’t respect the service of about 20 percent of our armed forces, is shocking to me.”
The implications stretch beyond the ranks of the Armed Forces, said Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, who served in the Air Force and Air Force Reserve. Changes that enabled women like her, Sherrill and others to serve in the military put them on the path to public service in Congress, she said.
“They served because we made some real reforms that mattered in how women are able to serve and what kind of roles they’re able to serve in,” Houlahan said. “And I think it’s not a coincidence that you then see those people, decades later, showing up in places like Congress, because they’ve had equal opportunity.”
The U.S. Senate vets and confirms the president’s nominees to Cabinet posts and other high-level positions. In some ways, Hegseth’s nomination and the scandal surrounding it are not new. The first time a new president’s initial Cabinet nominee was rejected was in 1989 when the Senate failed to confirm John Tower, former President George H.W. Bush’s pick for defense secretary, after he was accused of being an alcoholic womanizer.
Then Sen. Sam Nunn, a Democrat and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman at the time, led the charge against Tower’s nomination on the grounds that his character was unfit for the position.
“The committee is also concerned about the personal example the secretary of defense must set for efforts of the Department of Defense to end discrimination toward, and any sexual harassment of, women. … Mr. President, leadership must be established from the top down,” Nunn said during the 1989 Senate debate.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, has made it a priority of his tenure to combat sexual assault in the military, establishing a commission early on to make recommendations to the military. Meanwhile, Hegseth has signaled a different set of values and priorities when it comes to women and people of color. He wrote a book arguing that military standards have been lowered for women, that “America’s white sons and daughters” are walking away from the military because of ideology that is too “effeminate” and that diversity, inclusion and equity efforts are bad for national security.
“I’m straight up just saying we shouldn’t have women in combat roles,” Hegseth said in November during a podcast interview. “It hasn’t made us more effective. It hasn’t made us more lethal. It has made fighting more complicated.”
On Wednesday, Hegseth mounted another lobbying blitz on Capitol Hill, meeting with several key Republican senators. GOP Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, an Army veteran and a sexual assault survivor herself who has been outspoken against sexual assault in the military, posted on X that she had a “frank and thorough” conversation with Hegseth.
His mother, Penelope Hegseth, is also doing a media tour on behalf of her son after The New York Times reported on an email she sent him in 2018, in the midst of his contentious divorce from his second wife, excoriating Hegseth as an “abuser of women.” It is against military law to commit adultery, which could result in dishonorable discharge. Penelope Hegseth, who said she since apologized for and disavowed the contents of the email, took to Fox News with her hopes that lawmakers, “especially our female senators,” to “not listen to the media and that you will listen to Pete.”
Houlahan said she’s using the influence she has as a woman veteran in Congress to register her concerns with her colleagues in the Senate about Hegseth’s nomination.
“To the degree I can, I’m trying to have conversations, and directly have conversations with my Senate companions, to do my best to explain that I am really worried about this,” she said. “And I’m hoping that me being really worried is an indicator, a canary in the coal mine, of other people who are worried about it, who don’t have the voice that I have.”
DULUTH — The Duluth Homegrown Music Festival is seeking both new operational leadership and a solution to financial filing issues that caused the organization to lose its federal tax-exempt status, which it has not held since 2022.
The organization is currently operating as a taxable nonprofit, confirmed Don Ness, the former Duluth mayor who serves as president of Homegrown’s
board of directors.
Ness and the board are working to discern whether there might be any outstanding tax liabilities in the wake of an apparent filing lapse.
“It’s a serious matter that requires diligence to do things right, and to correct past oversight, and to make sure that we are in full compliance with all tax and regulatory requirements,” Ness said. “The board is 100% committed to that course of action.”
As the Duluth Monitor first reported, Homegrown had its federal tax-exempt status revoked in 2022 after failing to make required financial reports for three years. The Monitor also reported that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office has notified the organization it may be in violation of state law requiring the proper registration of soliciting charities.
Clint Austin / Duluth Media Group file photo
“All but one of us have been on for less than a year,” Ness said of the current board members. “We’ve been committed to saying, ‘hey, we need to improve the points of accountability.’”
The organization will also require new operational leadership. Co-directors Cory Jezierski and Dereck Murphy-Williams resigned earlier this month, after leading Homegrown through four successful festivals.
“My contract ended at the end of May, and I knew a few days later that I did not want to continue in that position,” Jezierski said. “Simply put, it was the best thing for my mental health. It’s a job that requires many, many hours and a lot of work, and it can be very stressful as well.”
Amy Arntson / Duluth Media Group file photo
Murphy-Williams did not respond to an interview request for this article, nor did preceding Homegrown director Melissa LaTour. According to LaTour’s
LinkedIn profile,
she was Homegrown director from 2016 to 2022.
Jason Beckman, a recent president who is no longer serving on the board, responded to a News Tribune email but did not provide an interview availability before this article went to press.
Ness does not believe the reporting lapses were due to any ill intent. He praised Jezierski and Murphy-Williams for their success managing festival operations. “They cared deeply about the festival,” he said. “It’s amazing to see that our community continues to support this really unique and special festival.”
“Those guys run a hell of a festival,” said Scott Lunt, festival founder and a current board member. “I think they needed help with bookkeeping.”
Clint Austin / Duluth Media Group file photo
By Jezierski’s account, issues with the festival’s tax status became apparent shortly after he became co-director. “We went to file taxes, they were rejected,” Jezierski said. “At that time we, of course, didn’t know why right away, but once we started pulling on that thread, we unraveled a whole lot of the problems that were going on.”
Jezierski said “it took a long time to try to get any sort of help” from the board, but said that by the time he and Murphy-Williams left the organization, “everything had been turned over to be reconciled” with a financial professional.
Ness, like Lunt, was deeply involved with Homegrown in its first decade but had not had an official role with the festival since then. After launching the festival in 1999 and running it on his own for several years, Lunt was “burnt out,” Ness remembered.
Derek Montgomery / Duluth Media Group file photo
After a transition period during which the festival was run in partnership with the Ripsaw newspaper, Homegrown established a nonprofit organization in 2006 with Ness as festival director. Ness subsequently stepped down when he was elected mayor in 2007.
By 2025, Ness was in his current position as executive director of the Ordean Foundation.
“I was approached by a couple of longtime music scenesters,” Ness recalled. “They said, ‘There are questions about (Homegrown’s) nonprofit status. There are questions about some governance issues. We’re concerned.’”
Ness agreed to join the board, and became president. The 2026 festival ran smoothly from an operational standpoint, but Ness found the financial reporting to be lacking.
Clint Austin / Duluth Media Group file photo
“The last board meeting that we had prior to the (co-directors’) resignations was intended to be an overview of the festival that was a month before,” Ness said. “I certainly felt very uncomfortable with how little financial information we were receiving.”
Lunt also joined the board in 2025, marking his first time serving in that capacity. He said the new board has been spending significant time addressing the accounting and reporting issues.
“Every year at Homegrown time I’m like, ‘I should get more involved,’ and then I don’t,” Lunt said. “Then this board thing came up, and it was kind of sold to me as, like, four meetings a year. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s perfect.’ And now we’re meeting weekly.”
Clint Austin / Duluth Media Group file photo
Although it’s unclear how the organization’s finances will look when the accounting and reporting issues have been fully addressed, along with any outstanding tax liabilities, both Ness and Lunt said they are confident the annual festival will continue without interruption.
“The organization will continue,” Ness said. “The festival will continue. Homegrown is in no danger in terms of its viability.” The financial documentation Ness initially received indicated budgeted revenues of about $140,000, against about $130,000 in expenses.
“Financially, I think we’re in a great spot. We have the money to hire the (financial) professionals, and we have (done so),” Lunt said. “We were hoping that we could get all this sorted out before it had to become more public.”
“We poured countless hours into this festival, and this is how it ends, with everyone talking about this,” Jezierski said. “It’s rough.”
“There’s a DIY ethos that is really at the core of Homegrown,” reflected Ness. “We’re throwing a music festival that isn’t waiting for some famous band from the East Coast to bless us with their presence. We are doing this on our own.”
Clint Austin / Duluth Media Group file photo
That DIY spirit also means “you’re kind of passing wisdom down from person to person, and sometimes that’s imperfect.” Ness continued. “The ways that we do things evolve over time, because it’s not a buttoned-down corporate sort of thing. That can create its own set of challenges.”
“It’s self-supporting,” said Lunt about the festival. “It’s widely volunteer-run. You do need to pay a couple people, obviously, to keep track of some things, but it’s going to be strong into the future. It’s gone through its bumps before.”
While most AI in financial services remains advisory, LUMIQ has built the layer that owns the decision — autonomous, auditable AI agents making regulated calls in production at leading banks, insurers, and capital markets firms. Today, LUMIQ serves clients across India, the United States, and Southeast Asia — leading institutions across insurance, banking, and capital markets.
NEW YORK and SINGAPORE, June 19, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — LUMIQ, an AI-native financial services company, today announced a strategic funding round to scale auto-decisioning for financial institutions across the United States and Southeast Asia. The round was led by Bajaj Finserv, one of India’s largest and most diversified financial services groups, with participation from existing investor Info Edge Ventures.
Right now, thousands of customers are waiting for a policy to be issued, a loan to be disbursed, a claim to be adjudicated, because somewhere an FSI employee is drowning in decisions, held back by the risk of getting it wrong. Today, when e-commerce delivers the same day, banks and insurers still decide in weeks. We built LiteCone to take that burden: AI decides the routine cases, completely and accountably, so humans spend their judgment on the one case that actually needs it. This round lets us bring that to every financial institution in the markets that matter most.
Shoaib Mohammad, Co-founder and CEO, LUMIQ
From AI that assists to AI that decides
For decades, financial institutions have bought technology that made their people faster — faster data, faster scoring, faster copilots. The decision still landed on a human. LUMIQ is changing that. Through its LiteCone platform, the company deploys AI agents that read the file, apply the institution’s own guidelines, and reach the decision end to end — escalating only the cases that genuinely require human judgment. The output is not a recommendation. It is a decision, with full reasoning attached, cross-referenced to policy, and defensible under audit.
The results in production speak clearly. At a leading life insurer, LUMIQ’s LEO agent decides 75–80% of underwriting cases with zero human touch, reduced policy issuance cost by roughly 25%, and compressed turnaround from days to under eight minutes — running 24×7 with complete auditability. Across its client base spanning insurance, banking, and capital markets in India, the US, and Southeast Asia, LUMIQ now processes millions of decisions annually.
LiteCone turns a real financial-services role into a working AI agent in weeks. Every agent we deploy is consistent, explainable, compliant, and auditable by design — not as an afterthought. This capital lets us go deeper on the platform and broader across roles. And through our cloud and AI lab partnerships, institutions will increasingly find LiteCone already embedded in the platforms they run today.
Vaibhav Dobriyal, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, LUMIQ
Consumer confidence has plunged among traditionally optimistic younger adults amid fears for their personal finances and the wider economy, figures show.
GfK’s long-running Consumer Confidence Index remained unchanged at an overall score of minus 23 in June.
However, the analyst said this was was “misleading as, beneath the surface, there are new signs that confidence is weakening”.
Neil Bellamy, consumer insights director at GfK, said: “The biggest fall this month is among those aged 16 to 29, traditionally one of the most optimistic groups.
“Here confidence has dropped 11 points over the past month to minus two, the lowest level seen for two years, driven by large falls in views on both their own personal finances and the wider economy.
“More broadly, there are now no demographic groups with a positive confidence score, including higher-income households earning £50,000 or more, who have slipped back into negative territory as of June.
“Confidence remains subdued and vulnerable to further economic or political uncertainty.”
Overall, confidence in personal finances over the coming year remained flat at minus two, four points lower than this time last year.
The measures of both personal finances and the economy over the previous 12 months were both slightly down, by two points and three points respectively, “reflecting the sense that things have been extremely tough over the last year for so many”, GfK said.
The only measure to increase was expectations for the wider economy over the next 12 months, up two points to minus 36 but still eight points below this time last year.
The major purchase index, an indicator of confidence in buying big ticket items, remained at minus 20, four points lower than June last year.
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