As recently as two years ago, Pennsylvania’s Public School Employee Retirement System (PSERS) was among the top 25 public pension funds in the nation. 

Every year, it sends out approximately $7 billion in retirement checks to 250,000 former school employees. In FY 2020, PSERS collected $3.2 billion from taxpayer-funded employer contributions, $400 million from school workers, and $3.4 billion in investment profits.

Despite that huge infusion of money, however, the plan reported a $40 billion deficit, and retirees had not seen a benefit increase in nine years.

Meanwhile, according to The Inquirer, PSERS “is still paying lawyers to deal with the fallout of a scandal touched off by an exaggerated profit report and scrutinized land deals.

More than $6 million has been paid already, and ongoing litigation suggests an internal probe that coincided with investigations by federal authorities left some unanswered questions.

The PSERS fund is also offloading $1.4 billion in “directly owned real estate,” some of it priced at a loss, but officials wouldn't say how much of the proceeds would go to the agency or how it might be reinvested.”

After the $34.5 billion fund botched a crucial financial calculation in 2020, exaggerating investment returns, the FBI launched an investigation, the fund’s board began its own, and 100,000 public school employees suddenly faced paying more into the system.

By June 2021, following months of controversy and amid an ongoing federal investigation, Pennsylvania’s biggest pension fund announced that its top two executives were leaving their jobs.

With no explanation and after a meeting closed to the public and media, the PSERS board said that executive director Glen Grell, 64, and investment chief James H. Grossman Jr., 54, had both retired.

To put it mildly, it sounds as if the operation is having a few problems. And that being the case, it might be nice if the taxpayers of Pennsylvania ⎯ a.k.a., the people paying five times as much into the system as the teachers’ union members themselves ⎯ were at least given someone with proven skills at cleaning up such messes to run the agency.

What they got instead was a political hack.

In early November, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced the appointment of Gregory C. Thall, a longtime government official who now works as a lobbyist, as chair of the $71.2 billion PSERS system.

You read that right. This would be the same Josh Shapiro who, upon taking office himself in January, announced a “complete and total zero-tolerance policy toward lobbyists.” 

Apparently, Shapiro edited out the proviso where he was supposed to concede “…unless they lobby for my friends.”

Thall was the secretary of the budget in former Gov. Tom Wolf’s cabinet and had previously served the Pennsylvania Office of the Budget as Special Advisor to the Budget Secretary since December 2016. 

He was also senior transition advisor to former Wolf’s transition team and worked for the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Caucus. Most importantly for his current position, Thall served as assistant director of government relations for the Pennsylvania State Education Association.

And the loop closes.

Rather than look outside the circle of lobbyists, union bigwigs, and career bureaucrats for someone qualified to actually fix the problem, Shapiro looked through all the resumes and settled on a candidate who’s wet his beak in all three levels.

At whose suggestion do you suppose Shapiro reneged on his half-hearted pledge to hire no lobbyists? Better yet, in his new position, is it more likely Thall will hold his former employers at the teacher’s union accountable or shift even more of the burden to the taxpayers?

After all, PSEA spends a whopping 20 percent of the dues revenue it collects on member services, with the rest going to overhead and political activity. While the union was contributing only $1.1 million to its own members’ pension liability, the union somehow managed to funnel nearly $3 million to a full spectrum of wildly liberal candidates and causes.

Is anyone expecting those percentages to improve now that PSEA has installed its own handpicked fox in the PSERS henhouse? Good luck with that.

Hunter Tower is the East Coast director of the Freedom Foundation. www.FreedomFoundation.com