Since 2010, Kenya has transitioned to a devolved system of governance whereby the central government redistributes more of its revenues to recently established county governments. In the Gusii highlands, these new political positions have brought aspirations for upward mobility in sharp relief. But many local aspirants are struggling to come to terms with the demands that their aspirations have in turn occasioned. Not only do they find themselves under increasing pressure to redistribute, but to do so in a way they fundamentally disagree with: to ‘mill’ or hand out small amounts of money to individuals, groups or crowds. Their voices echo discourses that frame such transactions as an exchange of cash-for-votes. And yet they also recognise that power demands ostentatious expenditure and redistribution. By investigating the upsurge in popular expectations for ‘milling’ money, this paper proposes the practice as marking a distinct type of cash transfer. Though it links up with indigenous ways of translating wealth into power, it was mainly colonial and postcolonial changes in political economy that midwifed ‘milling’ into its current form as a social practice. Crossing socioeconomic divides, milling money is at once celebrated and castigated. It introduces moral hazards while operating across relations of care and dependency. These indeterminacies make milling a peculiar mediator of (mis)trust. On the one hand, to political aspirants, milling is essential to demonstrating one’s credibility as a responsible and redistributive patron, a condition of possibility for votes as decisions of trust. On the other hand, both aspirants and incumbents are widely regarded as untrustworthy. The discourses and actions that surround milling events suggest that milled money’s value rests neither in a deferred return of votes for cash nor in expectations of continued redistributions. Instead, as this paper argues, what makes milled money valuable is its immediate destruction, its non-utilitarian expenditure as an end in itself. As such, the popularity of milling money appears consequential to political subjectivities that desire autonomy and unmediated access to wealth.