{"id":4331,"date":"2005-05-31T11:28:49","date_gmt":"2005-05-31T15:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4331.html"},"modified":"2005-05-31T11:28:49","modified_gmt":"2005-05-31T15:28:49","slug":"windy-hill-got-a-head-start-on-the-three-day-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/windy-hill-got-a-head-start-on-the-three-day-weekend\/","title":{"rendered":"Windy Hill got a ‘Head Start’ on the three-day weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s see, late Friday afternoon in advance of Memorial Day weekend, a time when DC is quiet and political reporters are headed out of town. The Bush gang has a habit<\/a> of taking advantage of these opportunities to make announcements they don’t want people to hear about. Predictably, last week was no exception<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The director of the federal Head Start preschool program, Windy M. Hill, resigned abruptly Friday.<\/p>\n

Ms. Hill has been under review by the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general over accusations of financial abuses at the Head Start center she ran in Bastrop, Tex., before becoming associate commissioner of the federal program in 2002.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hill’s resignation took effect immediately and the announcement made no mention of why she was leaving. It’s no wonder the administration would hold onto this for a time when it would generate little attention — Hill’s tenure has been an embarrassing debacle, even by Bush standards.<\/p>\n

Hill’s leadership of the administration’s Head Start program started badly. As soon as the White House started announcing its intention to cut the program’s budget, Hill’s office sent terse letters to Head Start center across the country, telling parents and teachers that if they shared their concerns about the program’s future with members of Congress, it would constitute illegal lobbying<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The sad attempt at intimidation was a sign of things to come for Hill. An HHS review later held her responsible for serious misconduct involving Hill’s mismanagement<\/a> of more than $150,000 when she was the executive director of the Texas Head Start program. (The HHS review findings were confirmed in an outside audit<\/a>.) Reports also indicate Hill received three large bonuses<\/a> that were not reported to the IRS as income.<\/p>\n

Bush sure knows how to pick ’em, doesn’t he? Hill mismanaged federal grant money for the Head Start program in Texas, so the president asked her to — you guessed it — lead the national Head Start program to disburse federal grants. And once the controversy broke, Bush waited until he thought no one’s looking to throw Hill overboard.<\/p>\n

Alas, it largely worked. Hill’s abrupt resignation seems to have received very little attention. Political reporters in DC would be wise to keep a few people around on late Friday afternoons, especially on holiday weekends, for instances like this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s see, late Friday afternoon in advance of Memorial Day weekend, a time when DC is quiet and political reporters are headed out of town. The Bush gang has a habit of taking advantage of these opportunities to make announcements they don’t want people to hear about. Predictably, last week was no exception. The director […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}