Human Services Director Jerry Foxhoven resigns at governor's request

Tony Leys
The Des Moines Register

Gov. Kim Reynolds pushed out the leader of Iowa's Department of Human Services on Monday without explaining why.

Leaders of the agency, the state's largest, are often the target of criticism — and Jerry Foxhoven was no exception. But he was an upbeat champion of the department's work, and he had repeatedly drawn public praise from the governor.

Reynolds announced Foxhoven's departure early Monday afternoon in a news release announcing a new interim department director, Gerd Clabaugh. The release ended with, "Clabaugh replaces Jerry Foxhoven, who resigned effective today."

About two hours later, Foxhoven released a statement of his own, saying, "at the request of the governor, I submitted my resignation."

"It was an honor to serve Iowans at the Department of Human Services during an important time of transition," he wrote. "I wish the many hard-working employees at the department the very best and know that they will continue to serve the people of Iowa well."

Department of Human Services Director Jerry Foxhoven talks to reporters at the Statehouse after testifying to the Senate Human Resources Committee.

The governor's office did not respond Monday to requests for more information. Under a 2017 law signed by then-Gov. Terry Branstad, when a state employee is fired or resigns in lieu of termination, the public is supposed to be told the reasons.

The department, the state's largest, has a $6.5 billion annual budget and about 4,000 employees.

In his two years as its director, the former Drake University law professor oversaw Iowa's controversial privatized Medicaid system, including the abrupt departures of two of the original three national insurance carriers hired to manage care for 600,000 poor or disabled Iowans whose health care is covered by Medicaid.

Foxhoven's current duties included helping coordinate the transition of more than 400,000 Medicaid recipients from UnitedHealthcare, which is leaving the state program on June 30, to one of two other Medicaid management companies.

A prominent social-service advocate said she was shocked by Foxhoven's unexplained departure.

"There's got to be a reason," said Peggy Huppert, Iowa executive director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Huppert serves on a children's mental-health commission Foxhoven co-chaired. She said they sometimes disagreed on details, but he was always a positive, knowledgeable leader who seemed to have Reynolds' support.

"All I've ever heard from her is she's got full faith and confidence in him," Huppert said of the governor.

Huppert noted that Iowa is supposed to launch a new children's mental-health system on July 1. That could be complicated by Foxhoven's ouster, which comes on top of the imminent retirement of Rick Shults, who is the department's top administrator for mental-health services, Huppert said.

The Legislature's top-ranked Democrat demanded the Republican governor launch a national search for a strong replacement for Foxhoven.

"This means finding an advocate who will fight for more resources, push for stronger policies and ensure that those policies are enforced for the betterment of all Iowans," Sen. Janet Petersen, D-Des Moines, said in a news release.

Republican legislators, who control the House and Senate, did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

State-run institutions attract criticism

Foxhoven's duties also included overseeing state institutions for people with intellectual disabilities or mental illness, and the state's facility for delinquent boys.

Foxhoven recently has parried criticism over a spike in deaths of severely disabled Iowans at the Glenwood Resource Center. He denied the deaths could have stemmed from poor medical care, despite concerns raised by more than a dozen former or current staffers of the state institution.

In March 2018, a physician who was resigning from the Glenwood institution wrote Foxhoven about the problems. "Leadership at the facility has gutted the medical staff in such a way that they have placed our residents, the state’s most vulnerable adults, at risk,” the doctor wrote to Foxhoven in an email, which the Register obtained under Iowa's open records law.

A spokesman confirmed the director received the email but said Foxhoven couldn't recall if he responded.

Kathy King, a retired manager at the Glenwood institution, has helped lead criticism of the medical care the facility has provided in the past two years. She said Monday she shared such concerns with Foxhoven by phone in early 2018. He said he would look into it, but nothing changed, she said.

King said she hopes the governor picks a more responsive director. "I just would like somebody who would listen to what people said to them and acted on what was reported to them," she said.

Foxhoven and the department face a federal lawsuit from former students at the Eldora Boys State Training School. The suit says state workers there violated teens' rights by placing them in solitary confinement or strapping them down with a Velcro and leather device called "the wrap."

Foxhoven testified last week in the trial of the class-action lawsuit, brought by Disability Rights Iowa. He defended the facility's staff, saying they tried to minimize use of restraints and solitary confinement while handling very troubled teens who'd been convicted of serious crimes. For many of the boys, he said, "the alternative to the training school is adult prison. ... It's their last hope."

Foxhoven also testified at the trial that he'd been trying to rebuild the Department of Human Services after it was cut by about 1,000 employees during budget troubles over the past eight years.

Clabaugh replaces Foxhoven

Clabaugh, the director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, will serve as interim director of the Human Services Department, the governor's office said.

"Gerd has done an incredible job at the Department of Public Health and is well positioned to lead the Department of Human Services," Reynolds said in her news release. Clabaugh, who joined the public health agency in 2014, is 56 years old.

Before becoming human services director, Foxhoven, now 66, was a prominent Iowa legal expert on the rights of children, including those in foster care and in the juvenile-justice system.

Reynolds hired Foxhoven in June 2017 to replace Charles Palmer, who served about 16 years as department director during two stints under former Gov. Terry Branstad.

Palmer's retirement came in the wake of controversies over whether the state could have better protected two teens who were tortured and starved to death after being adopted out of Iowa's foster-care system. Palmer also helped implement Iowa's controversial shift to private management of its $5 billion Medicaid system, and he oversaw the closures of two state mental hospitals.

In an interview shortly after starting his new job in June 2017, Foxhoven said his main goal was raising morale among state workers, including child-protection workers, who quietly handle tough jobs while often being battered by bad publicity.

Foxhoven said then that Reynolds asked him to fix problems. "What she did not say is 'Get us out of the paper,' What she did say is, 'Help me make this system safer for kids,'" he said.