A federal judge has been asked to order Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration to reveal details concerning how a number of unqualified people, including relatives of state workers who held no college degrees and worked at places like ice cream shops and laser tag arenas, were hired as “clinical lab techs” by the state’s public health department to help with the state’s response to COVID-19, under emergency hiring orders issued by Pritzker.
The request comes as Pritzker continues to argue the courts should strip a court-appointed hiring monitor of her review powers, because, Pritzker argues, his administration has made the state’s historic government hiring abuses a relic of the past.
On March 23, Noelle Brennan, a lawyer appointed by the court as a so-called special master charged with reviewing certain state hiring practices and employment decisions, filed a motion in Chicago federal court to compel the Pritzker administration to release more information about the hires at the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Noelle C. Brennan
| Noelle Brennan & Associates
Brennan’s motion builds on a memorandum issued March 10 by the head of the Office of the Illinois Executive Inspector General’s Hiring and Employment Monitoring Division (HEM).
Brennan filed the HEM memo in court as an exhibit attached to her March 23 motion to compel.
The HEM memo and Brennan’s motion both take aim at the Pritzker administration’s use of so-called “personal services contracts” (PSCs) to hire dozens of clinical laboratory technicians at IDPH in the spring of 2020.
Such PSCs can allow state agencies to bypass typical review and monitoring procedures for hiring for temporary and emergency positions.
Normally, most state government employment decisions are subject to provisions spelled out in the state’s so-called Comprehensive Employment Plan (CEP) and state law, known as the Illinois Personnel Code. Those provisions are in place, ostensibly, to make it more difficult for state agencies to dole out so-called patronage jobs to people who either have political connections or who have family and friends within Illinois state government.
Such anti-patronage provisions have been placed on the books to help the state ultimately emerge from under a series of federal court decrees that, for decades, have required the state to work under federal oversight of the state’s historically corrupt government hiring practices.
Since the summer of 2020, Pritzker and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul have sought to persuade judges to lift those decrees. Over that time, Pritzker has repeatedly contended that he believes the federal court’s supervision has gone on long enough, and state government under his administration no longer needs the federal court’s supervision to prevent the illegal political patronage hiring.
Known as Shakman decrees – named for Michael Shakman, the lead plaintiff on the cases since 1969 - the orders have been entered by judges through the decades since 1972, requiring state and local governments in Chicago and Springfield to allow court-appointed monitors to review most hiring practices across a range of government agencies and offices.
At the same time as they have been in court pushing for the removal of federal court oversight from state hiring practices, Pritzker and Raoul have also spent large amounts of time in the past two years defending Pritzker’s response to the COVID pandemic. This has involved defense against numerous lawsuits accusing the governor of overstepping the limits of his authority in imposing a broad range of restrictions on Illinois’ society and economy.
While nearly all those restrictions have been lifted, Pritzker has continued to issue emergency declarations each month, which he and Raoul have argued give the governor the right under Illinois law to govern by executive order, with minimal input and oversight from the state legislature or the courts.
The governor has repeatedly argued he must be left free to follow the dictates of science, in determining how to respond to the COVID pandemic.
Often, he has stated that pandemic response has been guided by input from the federal government and from the IDPH, including former IDPH Director Ngozi Ezike.
Ezike announced March 1 she was resigning from the position she had held for three years. That resignation was effective March 14. According to published reports, the Sinai Chicago hospital system is recruiting Ezike to serve as its new chief executive officer.
In the new court filings, Brennan says the Pritzker administration has refused efforts by the Inspector General and by Brennan’s special master’s office to uncover details concerning how the IDPH, under Pritzker and Ezike, hired a number of people for clinical positions within the state’s public health department.
The inquiry centers on the period of March-June 2020, when the IDPH began hiring people to fill clinical lab tech positions. That hiring took place as part of a wave of actions undertaken by state agencies, apparently to ramp up public health staffing in response to executive orders issued by Pritzker in March 2020.
The state agencies used those Pritzker orders to justify the creation of an emergency hiring plan, which used the PSC method to hire temporary and emergency workers. That emergency hiring plan specifically suspended the anti-patronage oversight provisions of the state’s comprehensive employment plan and the Illinois Personnel Code, for certain positions within IDPH and other agencies, according to the March 10 HEM memo.
The HEM memo noted the special emergency hiring process for the temporary and emergency IDPH positions would also include no requirement for actual job interviews.
The HEM memo particularly took note of hiring conducted at IDPH’s lab in Chicago. There, 29 people were hired to fill clinical lab tech positions, out of 316 applicants. Of those hired, however, HEM said it determined only six of those 29 clearly met the minimum qualifications for the job.
The minimum qualifications included at least a bachelor’s or associate’s degree, depending on the position, and at least two years of clinical laboratory experience. One of the positions specifically included a call for experience with “molecular testing … specifically Real-Time PCR” testing, such as was used to document COVID levels.
Pritzker repeatedly used such PCR testing results to guide and justify his various COVID-related restrictions.
However, in the March 10 memo, HEM reported that of the 29 positions examined by the OEIG at IDPH’s Chicago lab, at least 19 of those hired clearly failed to meet the minimum qualifications spelled out in the job descriptions posted by IDPH.
The HEM memo noted several of those hired even had no college coursework in science. A number of those hired, instead, had job experience in retail and sales, such as working at a computer and electronics store, or at an ice cream shop; experience as a summer lifeguard; experience as a student caterer; “summer experience providing IT support for a school district;” and “10 months as a Laser Tag Marshall.”
According to the HEM memo, some of those hired also appeared to be relatives of IDPH employees, including of an unnamed Public Service Administrator in IDPH’s Division of Laboratories. At least two of those hired had the same last name and same home address as that Public Service Administrator, according to the HEM memo.
The HEM memo notes that it determined at least 64 of the 316 applicants clearly met or exceeded the minimum qualifications for those clinical lab tech jobs, yet were not hired. These other 64 applicants included “a medicinal chemistry Ph.D. student with five years of laboratory experience and technical skills that included Real-time PCR testing;” a “Biological Sciences Ph.D. student with six years of laboratory experience;” and a “Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics candidate nearing degree completion, with eight years of laboratory experience.”
“It is difficult to believe that all of the 64 qualified but unhired applicants did not apply during the posting period or declined an offer, leaving IDPH no choice but to disregard the Emergency Hiring Plan and its own protocol and hire unqualified individuals,” the HEM wrote in its memo.
According to the HEM memo and Brennan’s motion to compel, the state hiring monitors have asked the Pritzker administration for more information to justify hiring these allegedly unqualified people to such positions within the IDPH during a public health emergency.
However, to date, the HEM and Brennan said they have received little response.
According to the HEM memo, IDPH said in December 2021: “We made sure the position was advertised everywhere in Chicagoland, since we needed people. Some were referred by other IDPH departments (Environmental Health). We even followed up on some of those who declined. The only criteria used to select candidates was their qualifications and availability to work any shift – whoever was qualified, and accepted was hired.”
In January 2022, IDPH allegedly said: “[a]pplicants were contacted based on [IDPH’s] need and until such time that an adequate number of positions were filled,” according to the HEM memo.
HEM has rejected that explanation, and has requested more information, to no avail, to date.
In her motion to compel, Brennan said the Pritzker administration has also refused to cooperate with her requests for more information concerning those hires. She said the Pritzker administration has claimed those requests fall outside the scope of Brennan’s oversight, as defined by previous federal court orders.
Brennan disputes that assertion, saying she has been assigned to review the use of personal services contracts by state agencies to sidestep federal oversight in state government hiring.
She has specifically asked the federal court to order the Pritzker administration to “produce information and documents” related to the IDPH clinical lab tech hiring decisions, and “any follow-up requests for information and documents relating to PSCs.”
Brennan is represented by attorney Kristi Nelson, of the firm of Gair Eberhard Nelson Dedinas, of Chicago.
The Illinois Attorney General’s office, which has represented Pritzker in Shakman-related matters, has not yet responded to Brennan’s motion.