Feds Open Criminal Investigation of McCrory's DHHS

Aldona Wos, gone but not forgotten

You're excused if you don't remember that Aldona Wos, the serial bumbler at the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, resigned from her office last August 4 (Gov. McCrory actually shed a public tear over it), precisely one week after she received a Federal subpoena delving into possible criminal misappropriation of public funds and no-bid payouts to close personal and political friends.

Targets of the subpoenas, aside from Wos herself, who during her tenure handed out high-dollar no-bid contracts like the Easter Bunny bestowing chocolate eggs:

1. Les Merritt (there's that marvelously prophetic name again!), who had been the Republican state Auditor until he was defeated by current Auditor Beth Wood. He was hired by Wos via a no-bid contract as chief financial officer for the state’s mental health division. "During the first six months of the contract, in 2013, Merritt said he worked 200 hours and he was paid $52,000. That rate of $260 an hour made him the highest-paid hourly employee working on a personal services contract in state government that year. The contract paid Merritt $312,000 for a year, after which he left the department."

Merritt (!) was also appointed to the state Ethics Commission by Gov. McCrory and was enjoying his no-bid contract with DHHS at the same time that he was overseeing other people's ethics until WRAL questioned the potential conflict of interest. He promptly resigned from the Ethics Commission.

2. Thomas L. Adams, who was hired as Wos's "chief of staff" for an eye-blink -- one month -- after which he got his golden parachute ... "severance pay" of over $37,000.

3. Joe Hauck, "senior advisor" to Wos, whose main qualification appears to have been his close financial relationship with Wos's husband. Hauck got another of those no-bid contracts, worked a total of 11 months, and pocketed $310,000, which, according to the N&O, was "$50,000 more than the annual salary of the agency’s highest-paid doctor." It came out via AP reporting that Hauck had produced literally three whole pages of "work product" for that $300K.

4. Alvarez & Marsal, a D.C. "consulting firm," which was hired on a no-bid contract to manage the state's Medicaid finance office. Alvarez & Marsal has so far soaked the state for up to $9 million.

To their credit, members of the General Assembly with oversight responsibilities did grill Wos about this contract, making their skepticism about her management abilities crystal clear to everyone except our clueless governor.

5. Angeline Sligh, who was hired to manager the overhaul of the state's Medicaid billing system. Sligh has already been the target of three different state audits (thank you, Beth Wood!), which found that Sligh had wasted at least $1.6 million "through excessive pay to temporary employees, paying temp agencies instead of the state’s less expensive in-house service, paying unjustified overtime, and giving holiday pay to ineligible employees. At least 15 people with personal connections to Sligh were hired in her office. She had hired friends and others she knew, including some from the church she attended and her hairdresser’s sister."

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article36601143.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article36601143.html#storylink=cpy

Buh-Bye

Editorialists testify to the accomplishments of Dr. Aldona Wos.

Jobs? Naw. Gotta Get Women Under Control First

The Republican paint-strippers in the NC General Assembly are not happy with the new abortion clinic rules put out by the McCrory administration a couple of months ago. Their legislative plan had been to impose such strict rules that most abortion clinics would have to close, but the writing of new rules went to Aldona Wos's Health & Human Services department, which suddenly became all squishy and moderate on the topic of women's rights.

The new clinic rules -- turns out -- wouldn't force the closing of any clinics.

The hard right in the General Assembly ain't taking that lying down. They say that they'll now write a new law with their own regulations. With Rep. Paul "Skip" Stam, who intends to end abortion forever for everyone, no matter what, you can guess what's coming down that pike.

The priorities of the Raleigh Republicans: punish gays and sexually active women, keep people who don't agree with them away from the polls, and make sure the poor know their place.

Their notion of getting more jobs into the state seems confined to the mortuary industry.

McCrory Now Backing Into Medicaid Expansion

We certainly missed this story from earlier this week, but it appears that the McCrory administration is caving -- slowly caving -- on the issue of Medicaid expansion in North Carolina, which health care advocates have been screaming about for almost two years. "Options" are supposedly being developed for McCrory, who will present his recommendation to the meat grinder in the General Assembly.

We hesitate to give McCrory any credit whatsoever for political calculation, but by January 2015 there are bound to be changes in the General Assembly, some of which might improve the ability of the majority there to think beyond their ideological ruts. Nothing focuses the mind like a reminder of mortality.

Below are excerpts from interviews with McCrory's administrator of the Department of Health and Human Services, Aldona Wos, and with NC’s Medicaid Director Dr. Robin Cummings (original, much longer interview by Tim Boyum of Time Warner Cable News is here, and the interview with David Crabtree and Laura Leslie of WRAL News is here). Hattip to Adam Searing for the excerpts and for shining a light on this development.

Raleigh: Where the One-Eyed Man Is King and the "No-Bid Contract" Is Queen

So there's the ineffable Aldona Wos, Governor McCrory's Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), who takes only $1 a year in salary but who more than makes up for that frugality by hiring outside contractors in sweetheart deals who are costing millions just to do the work that DHHS is mandated to do.

The "no-bid" contract that got the spotlight yesterday went to Washington "turn-around" firm Alvarez & Marsal, whose team of "experts" are earning salaries that would choke a South Carolina mule. The lowest paid Alvarez & Marsal "analyst" -- and there are nine of these cats -- make $242 an hour -- an hour -- and the "principals" of the firm are pulling in between $473 and $394 a freakin' hour.

So, thanks, Aldona Wos, for saving us that money on your salary. We're obviously getting what we pay for.

The Comedy Stylings of Aldona Wos

The Charlotte Observer's editorial yesterday highlighting the hilarious mismanagement of NC's Department of Health & Human Services by Governor McCrory's "brilliant" appointment, Aldona Wos, also provides a window into the even more hilarious mismanagement of the state's budget by our Republican overlords in the General Assembly.

A $60 million shell game that was so transparent that even a Federal worker-drone caught it and blew the whistle.

Even our emperor Art Pope is said to be angry at Aldona Wos, and he so rarely stoops to give notice to mere mortals.

All of which is decidedly not surprising to anyone who has observed DHHS since Wos was appointed secretary in late 2012. From grossly overpaying personnel to stumbling through a food stamp backlog to being the only state in the country to halt food and formula to pregnant women and new moms (at least until someone noticed) Wos has displayed an historic and almost comic incompetence.

"Almost comic"? Nay, just plain "comic."

This Smells To High Heaven

This man, Joe Hauck, was hired last year by the NC Department of Health and Human Services at $125 an hour, was paid a total of $310,000 for exactly three double-spaced pages of "work product," according to a public records request by the Associated Press which produced those three pages and nothing else to show that Hauck ever did anything at DHHS.

That's roughly $100,000 per page for government work.

Best part? Hauck regularly works as an executive for DHHS Secretary Aldona Wos's husband, Louis DeJoy (DeLovely!), and returned to that job as soon as he finished dictating those three measly pages.

The DHHS flack told the News&Observer that Hauck did a lot more, particularly coming up with ways to make the knife slip in easily between the shoulder blades when it came to draconian budget cuts enacted by The Clown College down on Jones Street.

Aldona Wos: "Give me a minute while this butter doesn't melt in my mouth."

The Empty Suit Changes Its Shirt

Gov. Pat McCrory did more boosterism yesterday at a press conference in which he used his cabinet secretaries as a cheering section. Oh, rest assured: everything's just hunky-dory, though he wants to raise teacher pay, he said, without also admitting that he never let out a public peep when the Republican-dominated General Assembly continued to grind our teachers into dust with last year's austerity budget.

Admission of reality is not Mr. McCrory's strong suit. Fantasies inspired by ideological boilerplate occupy his mind. So that he continues to claim that he's actually helping the poor by denying them health insurance. And helping the unemployed by cutting them off the meager funds that keep their families in groceries.

Failures at the Department of Health and Human Services? Those have nothing to do with management but with some vague analogy out of Wall Street finance: "Maybe DHHS is too big to succeed." Or, just maybe, the McCrory administration is genetically geared to coddle the rich, and the poor completely flummox them. Just to recap McCrory's DHHS as of approximately 4:16 p.m. yesterday:

Last week, a group of doctors sued DHHS and its contractors over problems with a new Medicaid claims system. Needy people have gone hungry because of problems with another state software program. The pile of unprocessed food stamp applications in the state led the federal government to threaten the state with financial sanctions last month. The state violated federal privacy laws of nearly 50,000 children when it sent their insurance cards to incorrect addresses last month.

Mr. McCrory's "Carolina Comeback," his fantasy sloganeering, hinges apparently on off-shore drilling and the fracking of the state's underground water supplies, both terrifically similar to this present governor: full of empty promise and fraught with all sorts of hidden dangers and a heightened threat of environmental suicide.

Instead of putting on a new starched PR shirt, this governor needed to take a long shower with some strong lye soap to wash that Pope stench off his agenda.

Let Them Eat Pencil Shavings

Aldona Wos with The Guv

We have abundant evidence of how Pat McCrory and his top people feel about the poor in North Carolina. Deny them Medicaid assistance, cut off their unemployment, call them "morons" if they show up in Raleigh to protest, discourage their participation at the polls. It gets worse...

Also starve them.

The Department of Health and Human Services, ruled over by Duchess Aldona Wos, is supposed to help families in great need obtain food stamps. Instead, the department has dragged its feet, fumbled the ball, shown a callousness that passeth understanding, and now, as of Dec. 31, some 30,000 NC families had waited more than a month for food stamps. That figure represented a 10,000 jump in supplicant hunger, from numbers released in mid-November. Over 9,000 families have waited three months or more for relief.

The situation is so bad that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which supplies most of the funding for the food stamp program, is threatening to end North Carolina's share of the money because of Aldona Wos's failure to deliver.

Wos and McCrory blame computer programs. They blame former Governor Bev Perdue. They blame every Democrat who every walked the earth. We blame their failure to give a good goddamn what happens to the poor and hungry.

Their attitude toward people stupid enough not to be as rich as they are is as plain as the maid in Aldona Wos's kitchen.

Rinse. Repeat.

Governor Pat McCrory, what a mensch! What a guy! What a brave and responsible fellow, to stand right up there yesterday and blame both Obama and former Gov. Perdue for the screwup in his Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), a screwup that mailed personal and confidential information about 49,000 children on Medicaid to 49,000 total strangers.

The Governor was apparently wearing his Deflector Ring (or does DHHS Secretary Aldona Wos have some compromising photos of him?).

Micah Beasley, a spokesman for the North Carolina Democratic Party, said, "Pat McCrory ... fills state government with over-priced, under-experienced campaign aides and political donors and then refuses to take responsibility for unending errors created by this administration. Protecting North Carolinians’ private information shouldn’t be a part of the governor’s political blame game.”

He'll be whining that the NC press is out to get him by cocktail hour.

Kevin Siers, yesterday, in the Charlotte Observer.

McCrory Administration Seizes Another Opportunity To Starve the Poor

Aldona Wos

North Carolina is abruptly shutting down Work First, which supplies temporary aid to families (especially families with children). Last month, more than 20,700 people were served by the program statewide, including 13,761 children.

The money comes from the Federal government, so naturally, with the Republican shutdown of the government, the money ain't there. But ... but the federal Office for Family Assistance, which administers the program, promised the state offices that if they could keep the program going temporarily, until the U.S. House Republicans decide to let the government function again, states would be reimbursed as soon as the government reopens.

But, no-o-o-o, that ain't good enough for NC's Department of Health and Human Services under Duchess Aldona Wos, who has never passed up an opportunity to punish the poor. Last week, it was the WIC program (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children) that Wos's department decided to stop, though that decision was abruptly reversed last Thursday evening following media inquiries about it. (Laura Leslie, WRAL)

North Carolina was the only state to halt WIC. Now North Carolina is the only state to suspend Work First and its Temporary Aid to Needy Families safety net, despite assurances that the Federal government will reimburse any money spent out of the state's "rainy day fund."

The world the Republicans in Raleigh have wrought for us. When it rains, it rains especially hard on the poor.

FourEggeritis Spreading in State Government

We know about sanitizing official meeting minutes in Watauga County, in order to present to history a version of frictionless voter suppression.

Now we learn about a higher-stakes game of rewriting official government documents in order to deny poor people access to relief under the Affordable Care Act and to build a bogus case for privatizing Medicaid in North Carolina.

Whizzes at creating fantasy realities, these Republican overlords.

Different Can, Same Swill

Secretary of Health and Human Services, Aldona Wos, has felt compelled to hire herself a "branding" director. Make that rebranding.

Aldona Wos is our dollar-a-year public servant and worth every penny of that dollar! She's one of those sterling appointees by our governor, made during an infrequent break from "stepping on toes."

Who did she hire to "rebrand" her dismantlement of health and human services in North Carolina? A political hack named Aaron Mullins, 38, who's making $68,000, which is almost $20,000 less than a 24-year-old former McCrory campaign staffer almost hired by Wos to pretend to be some sort of health-care "analyst." Mullins should ask for a raise. He's old enough to be that boy's father.

What's the re-brander's qualifications for the job? He once held Senator Elizabeth Dole's handbag, and he worked recently for former NC Republican Party Chair Tom Fetzer. So we guess he had high-powered references. And there's this: "Mullins also produced a glowing biographical video on Pat McCrory that was shown as part of the future GOP governor's 2012 election night victory celebration." He got $7,000 for that video and learned an important lesson: flattery is a pretty good career track.

He apparently has a whopping 150 Twitter followers, which, to dollar-a-year Aldona Wos, makes him an expert at social media.

Face-Palm or Giggles: Seven Pieces of Debris for a Saturday

Fluffing himself up. Why would Phil Berger spend that kind of money on that kind of TV ad unless he was planning to rough up Thom Tillis in a Republican senatorial primary? Inquiring minds want to know.

"DHHS is an example of cronyism gone wild." The NC state agency named for "Health & Human Services" may soon be changing its name to "High and Unjustified Salaries." A couple of weeks ago, the issue was 20-somethings who used to work for McCrory's campaign getting jobs in DHHS in the $80 thousand range. Now it's the 20-somethings who make over $80,000 defending a crony of the husband of the department's head making over $220,000 for eight months of "consultation."

Tip of the iceberg? Those high salaries being paid cronies of the ruling elite at DHHS don't even account for other sweetheart contracts being issued there, for example, to washed-up politicos like Les Merritt, whose name seems remarkably apt in this context.

When You're In a Bubble, Everyone Looks Like a Bubble-Popper. The Guv is still being followed everywhere by protesters who don't like his policies and are beginning to really detest him personally, and under those circumstances it was bound to happen that a news reporter would get kicked off the premises where The Guv was grippin' and grinnin' at a private function designed to fluff his image.

The Guv's Flack Uses a Fake Name. No Kidding. According to Greg Flynn, "With all the fuss by Pat McCrory about Voter ID you'd think that matching real names to real people was a major priority of his, yet Kim Genardo is not the real name of his Communications Director. It's a stage name based on her mother's maiden name. It's not the name she is registered to vote under. It's not the name she uses to register her vehicle or pay her property taxes. It's not the name on her government paycheck. Now, I understand why TV personalities use stage names for privacy, but shouldn't the Communications Director for the Governor of NC use a real name?" Stuff like this helps account for the uncontrollable giggles I'm prone to this week.

In Your Face, Non-Profit-Dissing Watauga County Commissioners!

"Always Low Wages, Always." We won't be satisfied until every Walmart in the country has a flash mob like this one in Raleigh.

McCrory Shows Some Courage While Soucek Shows His Ass

Dan Soucek

With his heart no doubt beating like a telephone book in a dryer, Gov. McCrory hid in his mansion while his minions delivered a written statement to reporters yesterday that the governor found it convenient to hide behind the skirts of his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Aldona Wos, who had already expressed concerns about the abortion bill to an NC House committee. "More study needed," said Wos. "Veto," suggested the governor.

Hoo boy!

This on the same day that Sen. Dan Soucek bragged to the Watauga Democrat: It was me, me, ME who introduced the anti-abortion amendment into the No Sharia Law bill. It was little me who poked a stick in the eye of every thinking woman in this state and caused an uproar that is far from dying down. It was little adorable me who cornered my own governor with no prior warning and caused a massive case of indigestion for House Speaker Thom Tillis. Ain't I a remarkable boy!?

For a man who's now bragging about putting this abortion law forward, he was certainly a no-show during what debate there was in the Senate. You can make up your own mind about the political brilliance of Dan Soucek, but someone needs to be prepping a campaign to run against him next year. Possibly a woman.

Holy Crap

Dianna Lightfoot, the woman the McCrory administration wanted to put in charge of NC childhood education, resigned the position a hour ago. But as someone on Facebook just commented, "We may have dodged that bullet, but I guarantee you there's another already in the chamber."

This is the viewpoint of the person the McCrory administration would have saddled our youngest learners with ... Lightfoot was interviewed for an article on "Childhood Depression":

Conservative family groups have grave misgivings about counseling being provided at school, just as they objected to medical clinics being established in schools a decade ago. Clinics, they complained then, were dispensing contraceptives to teenagers without parents' consent. 

School-based counseling services threaten to similarly undermine parental authority and invade family and children's privacy, say critics. They particularly object to methods and questions used by health officials to discover whether a child is being sexually abused. 

“Unless done properly, school health programs have a potential to go too far,” says Dianna Lightfoot, director of the Physicians Resource Council of the Alabama Family Alliance. She and other opponents cite a Pennsylvania Head Start program in which preschoolers and kindergartners were required to undergo genital examinations along with their routine eye and hearing exams. The nurses who conducted the exams said they were looking for signs of sexual abuse. 

“Although the parents had given their consent for a checkup, they had no idea the kids would be asked to drop their pants,” says Moloney. 

Holgate, Lightfoot and Moloney all complained that elementary school children have been sent to school psychologists -- sometimes without their parents' consent -- and have been asked intimate questions about the family. One father in St. Helena, Calif., permitted a school psychologist to test his twin daughters for educational aptitude. The psychologist asked one girl whether her parents were sexually abusing her. The child reportedly suffered nightmares and mental distress afterward, and the father is suing the school district. 

Critics also object to the phrasing of some values-based questions on psychological tests given by schools, such as: Would your parents support you or condemn you if they found out you were having sex with your boyfriend/girlfriend? 

“Such questions raise doubt in kids' minds about the validity of their parents' values,” Lightfoot says. 

Or a child may tell a therapist he is attracted to someone of the same sex. The counselor might tell the kid it's OK to feel that way. “We don't think a school counselor has any business giving that sort of approval to a child,” says Lightfoot.

That last paragraph is a doozy. With attitudes like this, no wonder the incidence of suicide among gay teens has spiked up.

Chickens, Meet Your New Fox

Newly inaugurated Republican Governor Pat McCrory chose one Aldona Wos, a major campaign cash pipeline who used to be an appointed ambassador to Estonia under George W. Bush, to head up NC’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

She’s a medical doctor, so she should know something about health and human services. Plus she’s currently working for $1 a year. So far so good.

Dianna Lightfoot

But on Tuesday this week, Wos announced that a woman named Dianna Lightfoot had been appointed the state's new director of Child Development and Early Education. The post comes with a $110,000 annual salary.

Problems with Dianna Lightfoot emerged yesterday. The biggest problem is that she’s been a very public enemy of the very programs that she’s been hired to oversee.

The DHHS press release touting Ms. Lightfoot’s appointment prominently mentioned her presidency of an outfit called the National Physicians Center for Family Resources, a group that she herself founded in 2001. Digging into what the National Physicians Center actually advocates, Laura Leslie found some interesting language on the group’s website:

"There is great potential for early learning institutions to foster more dependency on the government (i.e. taxpayer) and more of an entitlement mentality .... Will institutions focus on character building and teaching strong values? If so, whose values will children be taught?"

So the woman put in charge of early childhood education in North Carolina is a standard-issue, radical government-hater who, under the guise of fearing institutional indoctrination, is willing to make children her own little clay puppets.

Minutes after reporters and other investigators starting looking at Dianna Lightfoot’s Twitter account and her Facebook page, those sources of evidence on her beliefs disappeared (though, of course, they live on in cyberspace). She’s revealed in her Twitter account, again, as a Central Casting ideological radical, a gay-hater, an Obama-despiser, a scenery-chewing, rigid conservative.

So much for Aldona Wos and her notion of human services in North Carolina.

BREAKING NEWS, 1 p.m.
RALEIGH, N.C. — McCrory administration appointee Dianna Lightfoot now says she will not take the job leading the state's pre-kindergarten program.