Former Cabinet Secretary Calls Out Scott Walker in The Atlantic
“National attention made the governor care more about his standing in the GOP than the people of Wisconsin.”
Today, Scott Walker’s former cabinet appointee Peter Bildsten published a scathing op-ed in The Atlantic about the Wisconsin governor. He writes of Walker’s politicization of state agencies to serve his own political career ambitions and insistence that state government cater to his special interest campaign backers.
Four of Walker’s former cabinet secretaries have spoken out against his failed leadership–so far.
See below for excerpts from Bildsten’s op-ed below, or read it online at The Atlantic
I Respected Scott Walker. Then I Worked For Him.
By Peter Bildsten
I joined Walker’s administration at the very beginning, in 2011, and at first I enjoyed my job and respected the governor. I thought he was more of a technocrat than a partisan, driven to improve governance of the state he loved.
…Even early on, however, I noticed that not everything was as it should be. At more than one Cabinet meeting, the Secretary of the Department of Administration, Mike Huebsch, told us never to send him or the governor any electronic documents of consequence, and to avoid the use of our state-issued cell phones. “If you send me an important report electronically, I won’t open it,” I remember him saying, “and if you call me on your state phone, I won’t answer it.” If we had any important documents, they were to be “walked over” and hand delivered to the governor’s office. As a result, open record requests by the media or political opponents would be almost futile.This lack of transparency would be a hallmark of the Walker administration.
Read more here.