In Bid To Be CPS Savior, Pritzker Tests Positive For Falsehoods

Mark Konkol
Updated ·5 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker continues to struggle to tell the truth about his administration's response to the coronavirus crisis.

[COMMENTARY]

Just last week, for instance, the governor was grandstanding about his behind-the-scenes effort to get a publicly traded company to provide 350,000 coronavirus tests to Chicago Public Schools as a carrot to get the teachers union to end its in-person learning boycott.

He explained to a reporter why the state didn't dip into federal relief dollars to provide tests for the state's largest school district.

"At the state level, we receive a certain amount of money for the state, and then the city of Chicago receives a certain amount of money for the city. Those are two separate amounts of money," Pritzker said.

That's true. Then, the governor kept talking.

"You're not allowed to intermingle the federal funds for testing from the state with the funding that was received at the city," he told reporters at a news conference. "So we couldn't move tests that were acquired with the federal funding for the state to the city."

That statement is false, according to federal rules, the U.S. Treasury Department and experts who track that sort of thing.

Nowhere in the more than 400 pages of "final rules" related to spending COVID-19 relief dollars does the U.S. government ban a state from using federal coronavirus cash to provide coronavirus testing to big cities that received pandemic relief directly from the feds.

National League of Cities legislative director Michael Wallace said the final rule on doling out of federal coronavirus recovery funds "allows states, cities and counties to transfer [federal pandemic relief] grant funds to one another to carry out eligible expenditures."

Indeed, federal coronavirus relief funds can be used to fight public health and economic impacts of the pandemic. The rules allow state governments to make investments across the state, including a jurisdiction that received its own allocation of recovery funds, a Treasury spokesperson told Patch.

I emailed Pritzker's spokesperson and top advisers to ask them to explain why the governor would say such a thing when the coronavirus funding rule book and the Biden administration confirm his pants are on fire. They didn't respond.

I have a few ideas. Pritzker probably thought he could get away with it.

Since the early days of the coronavirus crisis, Prtizker's guided-by-politics pandemic response has mostly gotten a free pass from a dwindling state politics press corps prone to stenography during coronavirus news conferences.

The governor's statements about pandemic policies and coronavirus metrics rarely get fact-checked.

And few reporters have raised questions about Pritzker's efforts to create a COVID-19 testing monopoly in schools backed by $225 million in federal cash earmarked for his pet University of Illinois testing project, SHIELD Illinois.

Pritzker didn't get involved in the CPS labor dispute until after getting criticized for sitting quietly on the sidelines while the Chicago Teachers Union walked out of school buildings and made demands that may have violated state law.

MORE ON PATCH: Where's Outrage From Top Dems As CTU Strike Defies 'Science'?

First, the Pritzker administration told a friendly blogger that for "several weeks," the state tried to give SHIELD saliva tests to CPS, only to have the offer rebuffed.

CPS officials disputed the gadfly's report of the governor's recent offer of additional testing.

But the district did turn down SHIELD testing last year because the U of I-based testing operation failed to provide assurances about the saliva test's accuracy, including the ability to scale up the testing operation. And the district was right to be skeptical about the spit-testing operation.

Pritzker, desperate to look like a CPS savior as his re-election campaign ramps up, took to Twitter to announce that he successfully leaned on the CEO of Abbott Laboratories to "provide" 350,000 rapid antigen tests to CPS.

That might have sounded like a gift, but it wasn't, Mayor Lori Lightfoot responded on Twitter.

"Thank you @GovPritzker for agreeing to sell @ChiPubSchools 350,000 antigen tests," she wrote.

Rather than tap federal coronavirus relief funds earmarked for exactly this kind of emergency, the Pritzker administration went shopping, sent CPS a bill and tried to explain why with a fib about federal rules.

"We wanted to make sure they provided what they needed, but [CPS has] to use the dollars," Pritzker told reporters, referring to the non-existent federal rule about intermingling federal coronavirus funds.

On Tuesday, CPS officials issued a statement thanking the governor for agreeing to "facilitate the sale" of coronavirus tests owned by the Pritzker administration for $1.8 million in federal cash, all of which goes to the state of Illinois.

CPS officials say they've agreed to pay SHIELD Illinois about $1 million for 200,000 rapid antigen iHealth kits, which happen to be the same tests the Biden administration paid $1.3 billion to send to individuals across the country for free.

And the district will use a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant and "other federal funds" to cut that a check and make a second payment of nearly $777,000 to the Illinois Department of Public Health for 150,000 Rapid BinaxNOW manufactured by Abbott Labs, which received a $306 million order from the Biden administration for tests that will be sent directly to individuals.

When it comes to providing Chicago Public Schools with testing, Pritzker isn't a savior.

He's just running for re-election — and testing positive for falsehoods.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

Read More From Mark Konkol:


This article originally appeared on the Chicago Patch