McCrory praises Wos' brilliance
Published September 13, 2014
by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, September 12, 2014.
Long-embattled DHHS Secretary Aldona Wos was on the hot seat again this week, facing questions from state lawmakers about a no-bid $6.8 million contract she awarded to an out of state firm to manage the finances of the Medicaid program.
Wos’ response was telling. She told a legislative oversight committee that the department was simply overwhelmed.
”We had an emergency in the department. We didn’t have enough people, and the right people, and we couldn’t get it right with the information, and the data, and the numbers and the budget, and everything else you’re asking us. That was an emergency.”
But the firm was hired months after Wos took over DHHS and after experienced people fled because of her unusual management style and internal problems at the agency. She created the emergency she then had to solve with a massive no-bid contract.
DHHS still has many important vacancies and an unusually high turnover rate. It’s clear that legislative leaders of both political parties have little confidence in Wos’ leadership, a crisis that started last year when she gave huge raises and key jobs to young former campaign workers for Governor McCrory who had virtually no management experience or health care expertise.
Her tenure at DHHS has been one scandal or crisis after another, and almost all of them caused by the leadership of the department itself.
And Governor McCrory’s reaction to it all? He told WUNC-TV in a recent interview that he had the best cabinet in America and the best in North Carolina history and that included Sec. Wos, who McCrory said “for some reason the media has been critical of.”
And then he added that “she is a brilliant, brilliant individual and is doing an outstanding job.”
Apparently the troubled reign of Aldona Wos won’t be ending any time soon.
