North Kent News

Currently facing accusations for her own lack of transparency, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer once said on the Michigan Senate floor in 2013 that then-Gov. Rick Snyder was working in a “cloud of secrecy,” according to reporting by Bridge Michigan.

When Whitmer was the Senate minority leader, she verbally thrashed the governor for convening a private “skunk works” commission in an effort to develop public school policies. Additionally, she criticized him for funding a top aide with money from a nonprofit that doesn't disclose its donors. 

Snyder’s “actions have been a far cry from the open and transparent governor he promised the people of Michigan that he would be,” Whitmer said on the Senate floor eight years ago.

Sen. Jim Runestad | #MiSenateGOP

"Whitmer is facing similar accusations from critics who say she has failed to live up to the transparency pledges she made in her 2018 campaign," Jonathan Oosting of Bridge Michigan writes.

Controversies about severance payouts and reported confidentiality agreements with the former Michigan Health and Human Services (MDHHS) Director Robert Gordon and the former Unemployment Insurance Agency Director Steve Gray have been the focus of Whitmer’s administration in recent months. 

The accusations come amid her time developing COVID-19 executive orders, allegedly behind closed doors. State senators and representatives have commented on the efforts of Whitmer in a speech by firing accusations of their own. 

“Don’t-say-anything, cover-things-up, no-transparency-type contracts,” Sen. Jim Runestad (R-White Lake) said in a fiery speech outside the Michigan Capitol at the beginning of March, reports Bridge Michigan.

Gordon had signed several of Michigan’s most contentious COVID-19 executive orders, and Steve Gray had supervised a department that grappled to settle claims and discourage fraud while the pandemic cost Michigan residents thousands of jobs.

“This is an unprecedented time where there’s no transparency in how (COVID-19) decisions are being made,” Rep. Matt Hall (R-Marshall) said, according to Bridge Michigan. “Because of that, the public doesn’t know how they were made.”

Additionally, in 2019 Whitmer made a statement claiming that the government must be held accountable for its actions. “We are going to hold our government to the highest ethical standards that Michigan’s ever seen,” Whitmer told the Michigan Press Association in February of 2019. The question is whether she has kept her promise over the last two years; congressional Republicans would say no.