Children at play in Jeff City: Secretary of state and legislature upend 22 lives | Opinion
Missouri’s coffers are so flush with cash that the governor and legislature have committed $1.5 billion to keep the Chiefs and Royals from moving to Kansas.
Meanwhile, nearly two dozen state employees have been needlessly fired, their lives upended because of a secretary of state who appears to have no human decency and a childish feud among Jefferson City politicians.
I have seen the resulting carnage firsthand. As one of dozens of volunteers at the Missouri State Archives, I visit the wonderful research room in Jeff City once a week to help staffers dig into public requests for information.
This past week, the research room was emptier and significantly less joyful.
Secretary of State Denny Hoskins had mercilessly eliminated 17 of the 60 employees under his purview in the Records and Archives Division the previous Friday. For good measure, he canned five of 16 workers in the State Library upstairs from the Archives.
Hoskins became Missouri’s secretary of state, a job that includes running elections, handling business filings and protecting the state’s public records, after winning the November election in a landslide. He ran on a pro-MAGA, anti-woke platform, so maybe it’s no surprise he would pull such a stunt.
You might remember Hoskins, a former state senator, as one of the three Freedom Caucus members who maliciously — and wrongly — identified an Olathe man in social media posts as the shooter at the Chiefs’ deadly Super Bowl celebration in 2024. He never apologized, and the falsely accused man was found dead in April as he pursued lawsuits against the three public officials.
Now Hoskins has turned his attention to other innocent victims, and the situation stinks to high heaven. It resulted, by all appearances, from a feud between him and his former Republican cohorts in the state Senate — primarily Mike Cierpiot of Lee’s Summit.
This much is certain: Hoskins is solely responsible for how he dismissed these 22 state employees under his leadership.
No notice, employees escorted out of building
With no notice or even a suggestion that anybody might be fired, his victims were ambushed at their desks one by one. They were walked into a meeting room, where a supervisor, a human relations person and a state legal counsel informed them they were unemployed as of the end of the fiscal year on June 30. Then, after getting a few minutes to clean out their desks, they were escorted out of the building.
Hoskins was nowhere to be found, of course. He evidently didn’t have time in his schedule, just as when he was asked for an interview on the matter. He did send an email statement in which he boasted about his agency’s operation, then said, “This is not a decision I wanted to make, nor one I would ever make lightly.”
His spokeswoman, Rachael Dunn, followed with, “Secretary Hoskins did not choose these cuts — the legislature did.”
As that great Missourian, Col. Sherman T. Potter of “M*A*S*H,” liked to say, “Horse hockey!”
Usually, a story about job cuts such as these transitions into something like, “This is part of wider cuts caused by the budget crisis” or “an economic emergency.” But, no, there is no budget crisis or economic emergency in Missouri.
Just some grownups acting like children.
It is no secret in Jefferson City that Hoskins and his Freedom Caucus cronies made a lot of enemies in the General Assembly over the past three years by holding the lawmaking process hostage as they promoted their far-right agenda.
Things got personal between Hoskins and Cierpiot. The Lee’s Summit Republican decided to lob a grenade at his foe by pushing through a budget amendment earlier this year to cut 25 of the secretary of state’s roughly 60 unfilled full-time equivalent employees (of 267 total positions) and $680,000 from a fund that helps pay salaries.
But Hoskins chose to trim real people instead of unfilled positions.
Caught up in the fracas were 22 faithful employees, including at least two who were due pay raises of 10% in the next fiscal year under the new budget rewarding longtime employees. It’s probably just a coincidence that Hoskins eliminated them just before their raises were to kick in and put a bigger dent in his budget.
State Sen. Mike Bernskoetter, a Jefferson City Republican, issued a statement saying in part: “The budget we passed did not require any layoffs or cuts to current staff. … The decision to cut current employees and use that money elsewhere ultimately lies with the secretary of state.”
Although Cierpiot and other senators have confirmed that sentiment, Dunn insists her boss “had no choice” and “our hands were tied.”
Even if that were true — and she and Hoskins might be the only people who think so — Hoskins could have distributed the cuts throughout his agency so that one department wasn’t so thoroughly ravaged, especially when that department works so intimately with the public.
He could have stepped up to publicly defend the reasons for his actions.
He could have treated the victims of his purge with some semblance of humanity.
Instead, he issued canned statements and played the blame game.
‘Some grownups in the room’
Dunn used the word “dignity” in describing the firing process. Sure, if you consider it dignified to treat your employees as if they were enemies of the state.
“There’s no dignity here,” Bob Priddy said.
Priddy knows dignity. The near-legendary Missouri broadcaster also knows the State Archives, which he called “the most visible part of the secretary of state’s office.” He’s on the board of directors of the Friends of Missouri State Archives and is a former president of that group.
The veteran of Missouri politics also writes a blog, and he was working on a new entry last week.
“It basically says that the state Senate and the secretary of state are engaging in a urinary contest, and the only people getting wet are the more than 20 people who don’t deserve to get wet.”
Still, Priddy maintains a somewhat optimistic outlook.
“I’m hopeful there can be some grownups in the room that can get together and work this thing out,” he said. “But history is not in favor of grownups these days in the Capitol.”
This story was originally published June 8, 2025 at 5:06 AM.
