sisyphusshrugged | looks like Jeb(!) is losing his director of children and family services, as opposed to the children

Cast your mind back to the scandal in Florida - no, not that one - when the discovery that a young girl had been missing for over a year without her caseworker noticing led to the discovery that the Department of Children and Family Services had lost 532 of the children under their supervision. 37 others were dead. Our Fearless Leader's little brother brought in Jerry Regier to replace the Director of Children and Family Services.

Mr. Regier, the founder of the Family Research Council, turned out to be a supporter of, among other things, loving christian discipline which leaves superficial bruises and welts, womens' godly duty to stay in the home, husbandly supremacy and (counterintuitive, this one, for a DCF director) the inappropriateness of government care for abandoned children and the unique theory that the state has no power to protect in any way "children and other family members" unless a court has found that there is abuse, neglect or abandonment. Tough luck if the judge is busy when the cops find a kid bleeding, but those are, in more than one sense, the breaks. He had also pledged to work to erase any line between church and state.

Jeb said they didn't know about Mr. Regier's views, but as it turned out, that wasn't true.

Then he announced that he was going to serve as a campaign consultant for a candidate in Oklahoma in his copious spare time. He later decided not to do that, since in the wake of the discovery that a young child who had been left alone for three weeks in a locked apartment when her mother was taken to jail was in her mother's custody because the DCF ignored warnings about the woman's unfitness, it just didn't look good.

Well, now Mr. Regier is on his way out too. It turns out that his many moral strictures don't preclude his accepting considerations from state contractors.

Department of Children & Families Secretary Jerry Regier announced Monday that he will resign, saying he can't be effective amid continued criticism of the department.

Regier, 59, offered his resignation to Gov. Jeb Bush during an early afternoon meeting. He said he will step down sometime over the next few weeks.

Regier said at an abruptly called news conference that while the agency had made progress, he had been frustrated that so much negative attention was focused on the department, most recently created by an audit last month by Bush's inspector general that concluded that Regier and two top aides took favors from contractors.

The aides resigned and Regier apologized, but the controversy remained. Regier said that the perception of the department as "beleaguered" has made it difficult for him to do his job.

"At some point perception overtakes reality," he said, adding that the audit played a role, but was not the reason for his resignation. "Here we have seen tremendous progress and yet we continue to have people talk about the beleaguered department and (that) we can't get it right."

He cited nearly eliminating a backlog of 35,000 child abuse investigations and substantially increasing the number of adoptions.

"There were several goals that we reached that people thought were totally unattainable," he said.

Regier was a controversial pick from the start. Before actually taking over the agency, there were news accounts detailing conservative Christian articles associated with Regier that said spanking children was OK and that women should focus on being homemakers instead of seeking careers.

Since taking over the agency other stories followed. Bush was angered when Regier agreed to chair the political campaign of an Oklahoma friend. Regier quickly rescinded that decision. He also faced accusations that he fired several workers to please a state senator, Republican Rudy Garcia, who said they were rude to his grandmother.

But the recent audit escalated the controversy to a new level.

Deputy Secretary Ben Harris and Information Technology Director Glenn Palmiere resigned after a report found they took gifts and trips from companies contracting with DCF.

The report also found that Regier and other DCF officials attended a birthday party for Regier that was hosted by a personal friend of the secretary, Jim Bax, who was director of the Florida State University Institute for Health and Human Services Research. The institute at the time had nearly $2 million in contract work from DCF. On another occasion Regier and his wife stayed overnight at Bax's Longboat Key beach home.

Bush, however, accepted an apology from Regier and said he had no plans to ask him to step down. On Monday, the governor said Regier told him about the decision to resign last Thursday, but he asked the secretary to give it some more thought over the weekend.