Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has asked a federal judge to let his administration prevent a federal state hiring monitor from examining the way the state’s public health department hired a few dozen temporary lab techs in the early days of the COVID pandemic, decisions a state inspector general said resulted in the hiring a number of unqualified applicants, including relatives of state workers with no college degrees who held no relevant work experience.
On April 1, representing Pritzker, the Illinois Attorney General’s office filed a brief before U.S. District Judge Edmond E. Chang, asserting the request from the court-appointed special master exceeded the scope of her mandate, because those hired were purely “external” applicants, hired outside the normal employment processes, for temporary jobs that carried none of the traditional perks and benefits afforded to full-time state workers.
The filing came in response to an earlier request from Noelle C. Brennan, a lawyer appointed by the court as a so-called special master to review certain Illinois state government hiring practices and employment decisions, to combat the state’s long history of politically motivated patronage hiring.
Noelle C. Brennan
| Noelle Brennan & Associates
That request relied heavily 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). That memo was attached as an exhibit to Brennan’s March 23 motion to compel against Pritzker.
Both filings 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, ostensibly to help the IDPH process and evaluate the crushing rise of COVID tests at the onset of the pandemic.
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.
In her motion to compel, Brennan said the Pritzker administration has refused her efforts, and those of the Inspector General, to uncover details about how the IDPH, under Pritzker and former IDPH Director Ngozi Ezike, hired people for clinical positions tasked with helping the department provide state officials, like Pritzker, with information he has long claimed was vital to helping him shape the state’s COVID response.
According to the memos, from March-June 2020, state agencies, including IDPH, used Pritzker’s emergency executive orders to justify the creation of an emergency hiring plan, which used the PSC method to hire temporary workers. The emergency hiring plan specifically suspended the anti-patronage oversight provisions for certain positions within IDPH, 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 emergency hiring process allegedly resulted in the hiring of 29 people at IDPH’s Chicago lab. However, HEM said it determined only six of those 29 applicants clearly met the minimum qualifications of the job, including at least a bachelor’s or associate’s degree, depending on the position, and at least two years of clinical laboratory experience.
Instead, HEM reported several of those hired even had no relevant college coursework, and, before becoming employed by IDPH, had job experience in retail and sales, including applicants who had previously worked only at an ice cream shop or “10 months as a Laser Tag Marshall.”
HEM further noted some of those hired also appeared to be relatives of IDPH employees.
And HEM further noted at least 64 of the 316 total applicants for those temporary lab positions clearly met or exceeded the minimum qualifications, including Ph.D. students with years of laboratory experience. Yet those applicants were not hired.
“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,” HEM wrote in its memo.
Brennan said she filed her motion to compel after the Pritzker administration also refused requests from HEM for more information about those allegedly suspect hires.
In the Pritzker administration’s response, the governor and attorney general argue Brennan’s request falls beyond the boundaries of her authority, established by the court through the Shakman decrees.
Pritzker and Raoul assert the Shakman decrees don’t apply to these kinds of hiring decisions, because they don’t involve any regular state jobs, and are strictly aimed at external applicants, not current state workers.
They assert in prior court arguments attorneys for Shakman have agreed on that distinction and that definition of the special master’s mandate.
However, Pritzker and Raoul say Brennan, with Shakman and his associates, is attempting to push the boundaries beyond the previous limits, to encompass virtually all state hires.
“If the hires made by IDPH to quickly onboard laboratory workers as a worldwide pandemic took hold are not ‘external hiring,’ then literally nothing fits within Plaintiffs’ definition of ‘external hiring,’” Raoul’s office wrote in the state’s April 1 response.
“None of the applicants for these pandemic jobs and, out of the applicant pool, none of the individuals who were hired for these jobs was a current State employee.
“… If (Shakman’s) and the (special master’s office’s) new definition is to be credited, then all hiring is covered by the 1972 decree, and always has been,” the attorney general added.
Further, the Pritzker administration rejected the contention the state had ignored its anti-patronage plan in hiring the IDPH lab techs. The attorney general said the IDPH hires were made before the CEP had been fully implemented, and before the federal court had issued two orders in March and October 2021 broadening the scope of Brennan’s review mandate.
“The State does not believe that the Court intended those orders as a directive to review hiring decisions that pre-dated not only the orders themselves but hiring that occurred before any CEP training, or hiring pursuant to a separate emergency hiring plan developed to address the once-in-a-century pandemic,” the attorney general wrote.
The Pritzker administration has asked Judge Chang to reject Brennan’s motion to compel.
Judge Chang has not yet ruled on that motion.
Brennan is represented by attorney Kristi Nelson, of the firm of Gair Eberhard Nelson Dedinas, of Chicago.