Weaponized Bureaucrats Part 2

My vocal opposition to the DeSantis agenda has earned me a spot on the enemies list.

If you haven’t read Part 1 of Weaponized Bureaucrats, that’s the place to start. All the way back in 2012 in Florida’s 6th Congressional District.

In 2014, Congress passed the Workforce Investment Opportunity Act (WIOA), which governs America’s workforce development engine. The eight-hundred-and-eleven-page bill, which replaced the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, took ten years to make its way through Congress. Nationwide, taxpayers spend fourteen billion dollars to help their unemployed and underemployed neighbors increase their skills for better employment opportunities.

Congressman Ron DeSantis voted “yea” and on the day he was sworn in as the Governor of Florida, he became responsible for every single dollar used to administer unemployment insurance and training programs like YouthBuild, Job Corps, and Apprenticeships. On that day, he agreed to faithfully administer programs for ex-offenders, Native Americans, migrant seasonal farmworkers, Veterans, Floridians living below the poverty line, and Floridians who have a diagnosed disability.

Abuse of Power Is Fed By Fear

In Florida, the VR budget is nearly two hundred million dollars, of which - at a minimum - around thirty million dollars must be used to provide school-to-work transition services to fourteen to twenty-one-year-olds who have been diagnosed with a disability that impacts their daily life at home, school, or work. Despite a scathing federal audit which, resulted in the return of $18 million in unspent funds to the US Department of Education, slowly Governor Rick Scott’s education team began making progress on implementing the law, including contracting with organizations like mine to serve students.

Over the Spring of 2018, Vocational Rehabilitation authored a contract for services. They strutted the pay rate and established the roles and responsibilities for each party. I accepted the terms in their entirety with no recommendations for change. For the next two years, my team submitted monthly reports to our assigned contract manager. In his role as a contract manager, Jason was contractually obligated to review and reject or approve those reports. Jason never pointed to any concerns or deficiencies in what we reported or how we reported it.

In January 2021, Tiffany at the Florida Department of Education, Office of Inspector General notified me that three of our contracts would be reviewed by their office. No problem or so I thought.

On January 12th and 29th, I had onboarding calls with the auditing team. During those calls, the auditors (Tiffany and Shannon) shared information about the process and our obligations to provide supporting documents. I was told that the team would spend the next several weeks reviewing documents internally and that they would reach out to me directly if they had any unanswered questions. The lead auditor, Tiffany, specifically shared that the team’s job was to assess all parties. In other words, the Florida Department of Education, the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, and my organization were all subjects of the audit.

In April, when Eric Hall and Allison Flanagan called to notify me that “the Department” - as they call it - would be holding off on discussions about next year’s contract due to “very troubling concerns” uncovered by the audit, I was shocked. And I was pissed.

I Am Not The One

I informed Eric that the auditors had not given me the slightest indication of any concerns. I also made it known that I viewed private conversations shielded from the view of all relevant subjects of the audit as wholly inappropriate and outside the expressed ethical guidelines governing Inspector Generals. (Side note: this is why Inspector Generals should not be housed within the agency they are tasked with auditing. The risk of bias or the perception of bias is too great.)

By May, I was documenting every word uttered. I also broader involvement including the Florida Department of Education, Division of Vocational Rehabilitation attorney, Brent McNeal and the head of the Office of Inspector General, Mike Blackburn.

Eric, of course disagreed with me, responding a few hours later that “while we respectfully disagree with your summation, we want to offer the opportunity to do a follow up call this Friday May 7^th at 4:30 PM…” When I asked him which summation he disagreed with, he did not respond. Tossing our inflaming, unfounded allegations while refusing to provide a shred of evidence is a tell-tale that power is being abused and when it happens, the only recourse is to hire an attorney.

That call, that email, that day kicked off what is now twenty-four months of finger-pointing, retaliation, abuse of power, and unproven allegations that continue to this day. Well, not for Eric. He was promoted to Secretary of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice in November 2021.

Next up?

A dive into the audit, the findings, and the resulting settlement agreement. I might even be able to fit in a little word to the wise about the effect the stress hormone, cortisol, has on your body. Stay tuned.