Whiz kid whizzes out

Well, you knew there would be some inconvenient news dumped on the eve of the holiday weekend. And so it is that we learn today that the director of the Oregon Health Authority, Sejal Hathi, is stepping down. She's been on the job for two and a half years and accomplished not much. Her tenure has been marked by some bizarre moments, including her decision to moonlight as a doctor at Stanford Medical School on weekends and her odd op-ed piece in the New York Times last month complaining about how hard it is to get in to see a doctor around here. Geez, Doc, I thought it was your job to do something about that.

The vacancy in the top health job means that Governor Kohoutek will be running for re-election with a caretaker in that critical position. And facing questions about her personnel management skills. Although they're better than Kate Brown's. The guy running OHA before Hathi, from the motor pool, darn near killed us all during Covid.

So what's next for young Dr. Hathi? It's not clear, but given that her husband is worth about a half-billion dollars, she won't be desperate to find a new gig in a hurry. Maybe we'll see her at a Blazer game or two, but I suspect she'll be living somewhere else before the All-Star break.

UPDATE, Friday morning: According to the O, apparently there's some sort of "investigation" going on regarding Dr. Hathi. You wonder what that's about. 

Meanwhile, the Oregon Department of Administrative Services, which is responsible for human resources investigations for state agency directors, confirmed to The Oregonian/OregonLive last week that it opened an investigation June 9 into a complaint regarding Hathi.

Agency spokesperson Bryanna Duke said she could not share more details about an open investigation, but wrote in an email Monday that “investigations may be conducted for a variety of reasons related to workplace conduct.”