Faced with an out-of-control appointee, Gov. Doug Ducey is not “operating at the speed of business.”
You may recall that was the catch phrase Ducey used after taking office, that he would oversee a government that moves as fast as businesses do.
It seems this appointee, Department of Economic Security director Tim Jeffries, took Ducey’s phrasings to heart. He pioneered the use of “same-day exits” — firing someone seemingly as soon as the idea occurred — in state government. That was last year, and the terminations have piled up to nearly 500 even as Jeffries established a cult-leader style tolerating no apparent deviations from his party line.
But Ducey is doing his due diligence, awaiting a review of the activities of Jeffries before deciding what to do about him. Nothing rash.
“The governor takes the management of state agencies very seriously,” Ducey spokesman Daniel Scarpinato said. “The governor has directed staff and the Arizona Department of Administration to review all of these issues, to take them very seriously and to report back to him.”
In principle, this is a good thing. When Ducey says the government should “operate at the speed of business,” the implication is he means “lightning fast.” But best of all would be a government operating “at the fastest speed possible while still making good decisions.”
By now, the best decision of what to do about Jeffries should be obvious.
In 21 months leading DES, the state’s largest agency, Jeffries has not just purged hundreds of employees but has lambasted “haters” in the agency and created a “do-not-hire” list effectively barring fired employees from getting state jobs.
The purge has hit people across the state and from different levels of the organization, but seems to have disproportionately targeted managers, many of them older and at higher pay levels.
It’s gotten so bad that Ducey took away Jeffries’ power to fire employees and put an Department of Administration employee in charge of personnel decisions. That was an important interim measure, but again methodical, not decisive.
Ducey’s deliberate response is nothing like what Jeffries offered those he fired. One victim of the purges was Tucsonan Peggy Feenan. She had worked 27 years and three months at DES and risen to the position of state administrator for the division of employment and rehabilitation services.
On March 4 she was called into an unexpected meeting. In Jeffries’ administration, everyone has come to know what that means: You were about to be fired. She didn’t want to go but turned in a retirement letter. Thankfully for her, she’d put in enough time.
“The work environment was so toxic. Everyone was looking over their shoulders, especially management level,” she said.
Jeffries took an evangelical approach to the job after he was hired in February 2015, whooping up the employees to build team spirit, highlighting his Catholic faith on the job and speaking in spiritual tones of the agency’s mission of serving the poor.
He also encouraged employees to complain about problematic colleagues. Specifically, Feenan said, he encouraged the rank and file to complain about the managers.
“I have a visceral loathing for bullies,” Jeffries told DES employees during a videotaped 2015 meeting. “Some of you have heard about the exit of bullies. If you know there are more out there, exit them.”
“Exit,” in Jeffries’ parlance, can be a transitive verb that means “fire.”
The result was predictable: Employees reported not just poor-performing coworkers and managers but also those who were tough bosses who held them to account, Feenan said.
“If you interpret accountability as bullying, then there’s a mixed message going on there,” Feenan told me. “We didn’t just fire people.”
Get that? DES supervisors weren’t allowed to simply fire somebody. They would put them on a performance improvement plan but couldn’t make drastic, life-altering decisions in a snap. That’s what Jeffries did.
“It’s changed lives and families,” Feenan said. “Many of the people who he let go were not in a position to retire or have medical coverage.
Among his other impulsive and ill-advised decisions as leader of the agency, he has highlighted his Catholic faith on the job. He sent out an agency-wide email in April, telling about his upcoming pilgrimage to Lourdes, France and saying he’d take offerings for employees who wanted him to.
After some employees complained anonymously to the press about the religious nature of the email, he dashed off a new email in August, addressing part of it to the “haters” in the department. When queried about the email by the Phoenix New Times, he expressed no regrets at calling out his “haters.” That should have shown Ducey the man lacks the necessary judgment for the job.
But worst were the firings. At least one happened for political reasons. Emails obtained by the Arizona Capitol Times through a public records request showed a simple email requesting that the department not be so political in its mass-mailings led to a rapid “exit.”
On June 24, DES spokeswoman Tasya Peterson sent out an email to DES employees that said, “Please see the breaking news about State Representative Cecilia Velasquez dropping out of her LD29 race as a result of her Arizona State Grand Jury Indictment.”
Velasquez was a Democratic state legislator who had been indicted on welfare-fraud charges. Peterson had sent out previous emails about her case, and this one was passing on rumors published in the Yellow Sheet Report about her political future. A 22-year veteran employee, Andy Hall, responded.
“This is purely politics. It has nothing to do with DES programs.”
He was right, of course. Other emails obtained by the Arizona Capitol Times showed Jeffries was trying to get conservative news outlets to cover the Velasquez story — clearly, he was pushing his partisan interests. But Hall’s mild email didn’t sit well with Peterson or Jeffries. The spokeswoman forwarded the exchange up the chain of command.
The director’s response? He told the department’s operations director, “It is abundantly clear this colleague is not on The Team, and he is not particularly smart either. Move him out by next Friday.”
Then he had the firing accelerated. Not even mild dissent is permitted in the cult called DES.
It gets worse. The Arizona Republic researched some of the firings and found that many of those fired had good performance reviews. The Republic also found the department created a “do-not-hire” list of some of the hundreds fired, effectively ending their chances at employment with any state agency. Jeffries denied such a list existed.
Many of these firings would not have been possible just five years ago, when state employees served under a merit system, which required a deliberate process that included appeals for firings. In 2012, the Legislature passed a law that bribed existing employees into giving up their protections — they got a 5 percent raise if they opted out. New employees were not offered merit protection.
Anyone who follows the news or has worked in a government job knows it can be ridiculously hard for a public agency to get rid of a bad employee. The reforms under then-Gov. Jan Brewer were not without reason.
But the merit system also existed for a reason. Such systems were created in part to stop newly elected administrations from wiping out civil-service employees and replacing them with their political supporters. The merit system protected employees from these politics and allowed expertise to stay in place.
Jeffries’ use of firings to build up his cult of personality shows why some protections are needed — not just to protect the employees, but also the taxpayers, from liability.
Wisely, Ducey’s administration has opened a hotline so that employees who were fired can appeal their treatment.
But again, Ducey is being too deliberate and almost hypocritical in his treatment of Jeffries. The man has shown he’s temperamentally unfit to lead a government agency. If Ducey were operating at the speed of business he could have “exited” Jeffries months ago.
