The Gunther Concept is still digging into Gregg Phillips’ background (see this post for more). He’s also still got Blogspotted links, so if this has scrolled off the top, look for the June 24 entry entitled “The Revolving Door of Gregg Phillips”. Apparently, Phillips’ official bio leaves out some of his recent employment history. Here’s Gunther’s summary of the situation:
So to sum up, Gregg Phillips was at one time the Director of Mississippi’s Department of Human Services. He resigned as Director to accept a position with a firm that he had previously approved as recipient of a $875,000 contract with MDHS. At some time or another, he founds and becomes CEO of Enterject, Inc. Enterject gets a large portion of it’s business by helping private companies get tax credits from federal Welfare to Work (WTW) programs, and various similar schemes that allow governments to cut welfare rolls. Phillips worked in this capacity at least until the fall of 2002. Now he is in a position where one of his primary responsibilities will be to reorganize Texas’ social service sector, to make it more “efficient”.
How much of this reorganization will involve granting of tax credits to companies that hire long-term welfare recipients?
How much business will Enterject, Inc. receive as a result of these changes?
Does Gregg Phillips still have any role with Enterject, Inc.?
Will he immediately start working for Enterject when he eventually leaves his current position?
Is there anyone out there who thinks this is a conflict of interest?
Why does’t anyone know about this?
I think those are fair questions to ask, and it would be nice if we knew the answers to them. It is possible that this is much ado about nothing, but I’d still like to know that someone with the time and training to know what to look for has checked it out first.
HoustonChronicle.com
http://www.HoustonChronicle.com
Section: Local & State
This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/1961899
June 22, 2003, 2:23PM
Man with a mission leaves some dubious
TASK IS TO OVERHAUL TEXAS SOCIAL SERVICES
By POLLY ROSS HUGHES
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle Austin Bureau
AUSTIN — Death threats arrived and a brick flew through a window of his
family home, Gregg A. Phillips recalls of his first attempt to dismantle and
privatize government-run services for the needy.
The man recruited to be Texas’ $144,700-a-year leader of the most sweeping
social services overhaul in modern Texas history learned some of his lessons
the hard way.
After three tumultuous years as former Mississippi Gov. Kirk Fordice’s young
political choice to lead a major overhaul of that state’s Department of
Human Services, the embattled executive director could no longer stand the
heat. Facing a tidal wave of opposition, he resigned in 1995.
State employees protested privatization of child support collections.
Legislators, upset by the issue and at odds with Fordice, threatened to
close the agency. Advocates for the poor called Phillips a liar, and a
Jackson Clarion-Ledger editorial cartoon portrayed him as Pinocchio.
“I had a son in second grade at the time. The final straw was when he came
home really upset one day because some of his friends had seen someone being
ugly to me on TV,” he said recently from his new office at the Texas Health
and Human Services Commission.
As HHSC deputy commissioner for program services, Phillips will make key
decisions on downsizing and consolidating 12 agencies serving the blind,
deaf, nursing home residents, abused children, mentally impaired, physically
disabled and other needy Texans into only five agencies.
Phillips also will oversee the privatization of eligibility screening for
services to sick and needy Texans as part of a new state law designed to
shrink government and save $1.1 billion. Instead of the 800 Mississippi
state jobs jeopardized by privatization, Texas aims to eliminate 3,600
health and human services workers during the next two years.
“We are fortunate to have Gregg Phillips’ skills and experience as we meet
the organizational and budget challenges of the next biennium,” Health and
Human Services Commissioner Albert Hawkins said, noting his hire’s
“conscientious approach and broad program knowledge.”
Despite similarities in the missions of Texas and Mississippi in shrinking
government while promising to protect the neediest, Phillips, 41, said the
dynamics are different in key ways.
“At the time, I was fairly young and fairly immature,” he said of accepting
Fordice’s key job appointment a decade ago after serving as the governor’s
campaign finance manager. “I’m a vastly more mature person than I was then.”
Phillips, who later headed Mississippi’s Republican Party, recalled
skeptical lawmakers grilling him in Mississippi about his youth and
inexperience. In retrospect, he said he thinks they had a good point.
“You know, that was really a poor decision on the governor’s part to put me
into that,” he said.
“There’s one huge difference in all of this between my experience in
Mississippi and here in Texas,” he added of his new boss, Hawkins. “I don’t
want it to appear as though I’m trying to blow Albert’s horn too much, but
when I was 31, I was appointed to that job in Mississippi. Both in
experience, intellect and many other ways, I was no Albert Hawkins.”
Hawkins, widely regarded as a budget wizard with a depth of government
knowledge, is well liked and respected by both Republicans and Democrats. He
previously worked as a key staffer during George W. Bush’s tenures as
governor and president. Phillips reports to Hawkins, who hired him; Hawkins
reports directly to Gov. Rick Perry.
The ambitious social services overhaul in Texas might take up to six years
to complete, Phillips said, predicting the most complex and challenging
tasks will be privatizing eligibility screening and splitting mental
retardation and mental health services into separate agencies.
He said he no longer believes the argument should be whether privatization
saves more money than government-run services. The focus should be to create
competition by preventing either public or private monopolies, perhaps
splitting tasks among several bidders.
Republican leaders who pushed through the changes in Texas human services
predict it will lead to greater efficiencies and better outcomes for the
needy and taxpayers. But advocates for the poor who remember Phillips’ work
in Mississippi, predict his leading role could end in chaos, disaster and
perhaps squandering of tax dollars.
“He really knows his stuff,” said Rep. Arlene Wohlgemuth, R-Burleson, author
of House Bill 2292, the health and human services overhaul, noting Phillips
played a critical role in drafting the new law.
She said he possessed a wealth of knowledge needed for such an ambitious
reinvention of government and if he didn’t have an answer, he quickly got
one.
“There are not very many conservatives who are all that involved in health
and human services issues. I knew he was,” she added. “He had an excellent
reputation.”
Larry Temple, who worked for Phillips in Mississippi before landing at the
Texas Workforce Commission as the director of welfare reform, predicted a
successful future for his friend in Texas.
“He’s no-nonsense, very direct, very focused, extremely loyal,” Temple said.
“He’s a good soldier, the kind of guy you can depend on to carry out any
mandates you’re given.”
Temple said Phillips is the “perfect person” to pull off changes in the
landmark legislation, but several civil rights advocates and others in
Mississippi disagree.
“Mr. Phillips has been identified as one of those people that can come in
and make all those drastic cuts and not feel any compunction about what he’s
doing to the poor people of Texas,” said Wendell Paris of Mississippi Action
for Community Education in the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta. “If he
does in Texas what he did in Mississippi, I feel sorry for the poor people
of Texas.”
Many recall controversial welfare-to-work policies, which reduced welfare
rolls by more than 80 percent, sometimes by putting welfare recipients to
work in poultry processing plants or casinos. Their benefit checks went to
employers to subsidize their low-wage jobs. Phillips described the approach
as “tough love,” but Paris saw the impact they had in less flattering terms.
“Those Texas legislators ought to research what his history is, and they
ought to be ashamed of themselves,” he said, noting the state’s recruitment
of both Temple and Phillips. “They’re bringing in that whole crew of these
ruthless wolves hiding in sheep’s clothing.”
Carol Burnett of Mississippi’s Low Income Child Initiative said Phillips was
a “very controversial choice” to head Mississippi’s human services
department because he was so inexperienced with the issues faced by poor
families.
“I think his work in government is more political than it is really trying
to promote any kind of improvement over time for human services for
low-income families,” she said. “I regret that type of person is the choice
to head agencies that have such incredible influence over how programs are
shaped that so influence the lives of children and families.”
Warren Yoder, director of the Public Policy Center of Mississippi, said
Phillips’ controversial privatization of child support collections under a
contract to Maximus Inc. was limited by the Legislature in scope.
Even so, he said the experiment was a failure, and the Legislature later
turned both child support collections and welfare-to-work training programs
back to the state.
Phillips maintains that under his watch, child support collections doubled
in two years and a literacy project for welfare clients won an international
distance learning award. Welfare recipients graduating from the reading
program told touching stories of how they hitchhiked from the Delta to
attend the classes, he said.
Phillips also said he’s learned a lot since his maiden venture into health
and human services. He blames part of his public relations woes on one of
his biggest mistakes — immediately firing his entire human services
communications staff.
His interest in contracting with private technology companies for government
services continued after he left Mississippi, as a senior manager at
Deloitte Consulting and as founder of Enterject, Inc.
Enterject, his résumé said, developed business ideas for using private
technology for delivering health and human services.
He worked for the Republican Party in Alabama and participated in national
and local GOP campaigns as well. However, he said if anyone harbors concerns
about his past as a political operative, they should set those fears aside.
“Yes, there is an open door,” he said, inviting all sides of the social
services debate to the table. “All of our efforts, whether they be
Republican, Democrat or otherwise, have to focus on service delivery.”
HoustonChronicle.com —
http://www.HoustonChronicle.com
Section: Local & State
This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/1961899