HARRISBURG — Ethics experts are raising concerns after state Treasurer Stacy Garrity campaigned at a gala hosted by a firm from which she purchased millions in bonds in her official state role.
Garrity has invested $45 million in taxpayer money into Israel Bonds since the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, a move that overrode earlier concerns within the Treasury that the bonds could be a risky investment. In gratitude, the firm behind the bonds invited her, in her capacity as state treasurer alongside an unknown number of other Pennsylvania investors, to a thank-you event.
Garrity attended — but she paid for her ticket, costing $450, out of her campaign funds.
“Treasurer Garrity believed that the Israel Bonds event crossed the line beyond her official capacity as Treasurer and into the political, so she decided to pay for her ticket from her campaign funds because she did not believe taxpayer dollars should be used for those purposes,” campaign spokesperson Matt Beynon told Access Harrisburg.
“It's positive she had this self-reflective movement,” said Davina Hurt, a former local government official who now serves as the director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.
But the unknowns, such as who Garrity knew in the room, how she made the determination to treat the event as political, and the timeline of her decision, “has me asking more questions,” Hurt added.
As an elected official, Hurt said, “You want to be in every room to see everybody. But when you arrive to this role, you need to be very thoughtful about what rooms you sit in and how you separate the individual from the public benefit.”
The exact details of the event are unclear.
The payment was made on June 12, 2025 to Israel Bonds, the colloquial name for the Development Corporation for Israel, a for-profit corporation that floats debt with proceeds going to the Israeli government. These investments have “played a decisive role in Israel's rapid evolution into a groundbreaking, global leader,” the firm's website claims.
Nathan Miller, a spokesperson for Development Corporation for Israel, said in a statement that “the event that Treasurer Garrity attended was billed as a ‘Thank You Event’ and the invitees were investors in Israel bonds in Pennsylvania.” The firm did not respond to follow up questions.
Pressed on the campaign’s reasoning, Beynon said it anticipated that “there would be discussions with other individuals at the event that would make conversations disproportionately political for her.”
Beynon did not respond to follow-up questions on the political content of the event, what relationships Garrity developed at the event, if she consulted anyone on the ethics of the event, and if she raised any campaign dollars from individuals linked to Israel Bonds. A Spotlight PA review of her campaign finance reports since 2020 found no one who lists the firm as their employee
The event occurred as Garrity, a Republican, challenges Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro in a race where she has criticized Shapiro’s own ethics — attacks Beynon included in his response to Spotlight PA.
There “is a clear distinction between Treasurer Garrity’s efforts for transparency and Governor Shapiro, who uses a public-private slush fund to attend the Super Bowl,” Beynon said.
Shapiro has a gift ban in place for his administration, but has allowed economic development nonprofit Team PA to use a bank account funded by anonymous donors to pay for him to attend a variety of sporting events, including two Super Bowls. Shapiro has also accepted football tickets from a lobbyist and helicopter rides from a sports apparel billionaire, calling them campaign contributions.
Hurt acknowledged Garrity’s critiques of Shapiro, and said that elected officials overall need to “find out where bright lines are between official capacity and campaign capacity.”
But of the overall deflection, she concluded: “Whabaoutism doesn't really work in ethical conversation.”
Since the Oct. 7, attacks by Hamas on Israel, Garrity has bought $45 million of Israel Bonds using public dollars.
She has framed the investments as not only a sign of support for “our greatest ally in the Middle East” but as a sound financial move. The state Treasury has “been invested in these bonds since the ’90s,” Garrity told the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent in 2024. “They pay above-market returns and they’ve never defaulted.”
As a percentage of funds under her control, the investments are small. The Pennsylvania Treasury directly manages $55 billion in public dollars, including money in state-managed college savings accounts as well as unused tax dollars waiting to get pushed out the door to contractors and state workers. The office’s investments rarely draw public attention, let alone protest. But the Israel bonds purchases did, as reported by Spotlight PA.
Previously unveiled documents also showed the bonds weren’t always seen as a safe bet. According to emails obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a former top state Treasury staffer cautioned Garrity in a May 2021 memo that Israeli bonds could be a risky investment for Pennsylvania, noting Israel’s political instability, that the country is “frequently involved in military violence,” and that the bonds, as designed, cannot be sold on the open market.
The staffer proposed “investing in more liquid securities, with fewer risks to the investment capital.” Garrity’s office did not end up following the advice, instead deciding to invest in Israel within a week after Hamas’ 2023 attack. But the 2021 memo’s logic rang true for Richard Painter, a former White House ethics counsel for President George W. Bush who has also worked in securities law.
He compared the role of a state treasurer to that of a judge. Just as judges must follow the law and precedent when making a potentially far-reaching ruling, treasurers have a fiduciary responsibility to spend public money in a fashion that minimizes risk and maximizes return.
“Politics needs to get out of the investment sphere because it’s other people’s money, and we can’t be putting taxpayer money at risk to make a political point,” Painter told Access Harrisburg. He thought the same would be true if a candidate won the office and promised to divest from Israel.
As for Garrity’s political attendance, Painter was blunt. “It gives the impression,” he said, “that investment decisions are made for political reasons.”
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