By Gema G. Hernández

We all understand we serve at the pleasure of our boss, but few of us have a job description that literally states you serve at the pleasure of someone, and if you don’t please him you are gone, no protection, no explanation, not even the consolation of being able to blow the whistle if wrong doing was discovered while performing your duties.

This part of my job, as the former Secretary of the Florida Department of Elder Affairs, to please the Governor, was the most difficult part of the job, a part of my job I never fully understood. To get my bearings as to what pleases him I thought that because he was elected by the people based on a set of promises, if I addressed those promises and placed the needs of seniors and caregivers at the forefront of my administrative task I will be pleasing the Governor. I was very wrong. Pleasing the Governor within the context of my position meant accommodating all his friends and business associates that once he was elected were ready to claim a piece of the pie. It was immaterial to them that the pie in question was paid by taxpayers’ dollars. It was also immaterial to them that some of them lack the academic degrees they said they hold. They wanted their rewards regardless of the regulations and they will put all political pressures at play to get it.

To complicate things further for me, my training has been in Public Administration, and accountability, effectiveness, ethical mandates and equal access to resources have been drilled in my mind as key components in public administration. As a Public Administrator it was very hard for me to see the manipulation of contracts and the abuses in the way services were given or not given to elders and caregivers. It was hard to support the expansion of monopolies with public monies and the award of contracts to agencies that should have been on probation. Definitely my training, personal experience as a caregiver for 18 years for my parents and the fact that I am a product of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs put me in a direct collision course with what pleases Governor Bush. It was just a matter of time before his displeasure became obvious.

It was therefore very discouraging for me to see how Medicare and Medicaid laws were being disregarded. In retrospect I should have seen the writing on the wall much sooner. The pre approved list of people to hire, the appointment of a Deputy Secretary announced the same day I was hired, the directive to leave some providers alone and the constant control over the day to day operation of the office including orders not to testify on 9/11/2001 in front of Carole Green, House Committee on Aging on issues regarding Medicare fraud and violation of Medicaid laws.

While my attempts to do the best job I could for elders and caregivers were displeasing my boss, he appears to be very pleased with the performance of other secretaries and other senior level staff that the media has exposed for: 1) accepting gifts and trips from agencies they were supposed to regulate, 2) physically attacking workers, 3) living in the house of contratees while looking for a place to live in Tallahassee, 4)awarding contracts to individuals that were assigned to evaluate the same department, 5) being charged with fraud and 6) benefiting family members.

He has been so pleased with their performance that he has refused to accept their resignation, going to the extreme of placing a person on administrative leave even as the person was in custody. What pleases a Governor was therefore very puzzling to me.

It can be said that the question is more complex because what pleases a Governor is one question and what pleases a Bush may be another question for which I have no answer. Some people would say that I could have asked the Governor what he wanted from me and at that time determine my course of action, but the realities were and are still different. This is a particularly important point because to maintain a position of complete deniability Governor Bush was not inclined to tell his subjects point blank what he wanted from them. He purposely built communication walls so the message will never come from him but it will come from others letting you guess as to whether or not he knew about the specific situation or not. In some cases these communication walls extended to his chief of staff who was at that time a protégé of Vice President Cheney.

I can honestly say that Governor Bush never fired me because he never face to face told me. He avoided looking at me for weeks prior to the pubic termination in a press conference. It is sad to say that I found out I was fired and not “leaving to go back to my first love, teaching” while I was on sick leave undergoing medical evaluation for a what the doctors suspected to be a Metastasis of my previously diagnosed Thyroid cancer, Metastasis that Thank God ended up being a misdiagnosis and sick leave that was abruptly cancelled by the administration, leaving me without leave and insurance. People has told me I should have kept my mouth shut and this way the job he secured for me at FSU will be there. But this is not who I am or how I like to get my living.

It can be said that this was the first official time that my boss was caught misinforming the public, but as we know now it was not the last time. Misinformation has continued. This is why I am proud of the fact that I was able to displease my boss, because when it comes time for compromising your personal integrity I would rather be fired for not getting along with crooks than to have a job and no moral values.