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By Kristi Talmadge

Connecticut taxpayers are being asked to swallow another insult dressed up as public service. Gov. Ned Lamont created an unpaid volunteer commission to study career pathways. Then his administration handed the man he named to chair it a no-bid contract worth up to $250,000 so that man’s private company could do the commission’s actual work—facilitate the meetings, analyze the system, and write the report the commission will send to the governor and the General Assembly.

That is not a commission. It is a political payday vehicle.

Miguel Cardona, former Connecticut education commissioner under Lamont and former U.S. secretary of education, chairs the Connecticut Career Pathways Commission. His firm, Cardona Solutions LLC, is being paid by Lamont’s Office of Workforce Strategy to produce the product the commission exists to produce. The other members serve for free. The chair’s company cashes a check larger than Cardona’s annual salary when Lamont first put him in charge of the state’s schools.

House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora called it what it is: “a political patronage job” with “a cloud of nepotism” over a no-bid award to “a Lamont insider.” He also noted the obvious conflict: the state cannot properly scrutinize a consultant who chairs the board he is consulting for.

He is right.

The timeline is the tell:

Lamont signed the executive order creating the commission on April 2, 2026. The order says members serve as unpaid volunteers. Cardona is named chair. Two days earlier, on or around March 30, Kelli-Marie Vallieres, head of the Office of Workforce Strategy, met with Cardona to discuss a personal services agreement with his company. The commission did not yet exist. The contract talk already did.

The state solicited no bids. Officials waived ordinary procurement rules. Vallieres’s explanation: time crunch (recommendations due to the governor by November), Cardona’s “unique qualifications,” and his “credibility.” Cathryn Vaulman, speaking for Lamont, said the money “reflects work Mr. Cardona is doing beyond the role and expectations of a commission chair.”

That sentence is an admission. The chair’s job was supposed to be unpaid. So they redefined the work, routed it through an LLC formed in October 2024, and paid him. Cardona Solutions lists Miguel Cardona as managing member at a Meriden address. He did not respond to questions from CT Mirror.

If the work was always going to require a $250,000 contractor, why create an unpaid volunteer commission and put the contractor in charge of it? If Cardona’s credibility is indispensable, why not pay him openly as chair instead of laundering the compensation through a sole-source consulting deal? The structure exists to look like civic duty while functioning like a retainer.

Conflicts stacked on conflicts:

Let's start with the core conflict of interest. Cardona leads the body whose report his firm is paid to write. Officials say he will not review his own firm’s work, approve payments, or control spending because the commission itself has no budget. OWS will oversee deliverables. That is not insulation. That is the same executive-branch office that chose him without competition now grading the homework it assigned to him.

The ethics office was asked for an informal opinion. It concluded the arrangement “does not appear” to violate the conflict statutes, mainly because advisory-board members are not treated as “public officials” under the full Code of Ethics. General counsel Brian Dowd was explicit: the office has “no jurisdiction over appearance issues.” Appearances and perceptions of conflict are “beyond the code’s scope.” Peter Lewandowski, the office’s executive director, noted that warnings about appearances are “really for the recipient to consider.”

So the state’s ethics apparatus looked at a governor appointing his former commissioner to chair a volunteer panel, then paying that man’s new LLC a quarter-million dollars on a no-bid basis to do the panel’s work, and said: technically fine, and we don’t do optics.

That is not a clean bill of health. It is a confession that the rules were written for a different kind of self-dealing than this one.

Add the rest. Lamont appointed Cardona education commissioner in 2019 after a messy search. Cardona left for Biden’s cabinet, then came home, started a consulting shop, picked up a Yale School of Management faculty fellowship, and walked back into a Lamont-created role that immediately generated a six-figure state contract. The same governor who praises Cardona’s unique knowledge of “what works here in Connecticut” is the one who previously employed him and now writes the check to his firm. The same office that created an artificial deadline is using that deadline to justify skipping competition.

A consultant who chairs the commission cannot be independently overseen by the commission. A contractor whose product becomes the official recommendation of a gubernatorial commission has every incentive to produce what the governor’s office wants. Other qualified firms never got a chance to bid. Taxpayers never got a price comparison. The public never got a process that looked like anything other than an inside arrangement.

This is a pattern, not a one-off:

Connecticut’s nickname, "Corrupticut," did not materialize out of nowhere. Under Lamont it has been refreshed.

• Konstantinos “Kosta” Diamantis, a former Democratic legislator who served as Lamont’s deputy budget director and ran the school-construction grants office, was convicted in 2025 on more than 20 federal counts including extortion, bribery, conspiracy, and false statements. Contractors paid him in cash at Dunkin’ Donuts, his home, and a Hartford restaurant men’s room. Lamont said he didn’t hire Diamantis, removed him after allegations surfaced, and called the conviction a reminder that public service is a public trust. The grants office Diamantis ran sat inside the administration.

• Jonathan Dach, Lamont’s former chief of staff, used a state vehicle as a personal car for nearly two years and drove at speeds that met the definition of reckless driving. An investigation Lamont commissioned documented hundreds of personal trips. State auditors later found the governor’s office failed for years to log vehicle use properly, approved timesheets without knowing whether work was performed, and kept a surplus of laptops far beyond headcount.

• Terrence Cheng, chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, ran up expensive meals, alcohol, and chauffeured rides on accounts funded by taxpayers and tuition while the system faced chronic deficits and sought tuition increases. Lamont called the spending “small ball.” Cheng stepped down as chancellor and was kept on as a special advisor at more than $400,000 to produce a report—later scrutinized for heavy use of AI. The parallel writes itself: a politically connected education official exits a messy job and is paid handsomely to write a strategic document.

Add the earmark and nonprofit scandals around funds tied to Democratic legislators, pension-spiking that lets state workers retire with benefits exceeding final salary, and serial audits of sloppy controls. Republicans have spent years calling it a culture of corruption. Democrats have spent years treating each case as a rogue actor. The Cardona contract is not a briefcase full of cash in a restroom. It is the respectable version: legal enough to survive an ethics memo that refuses to discuss how it looks, generous enough to matter, and structured so the beneficiary sits on both sides of the table.

The résumé they are paying for:

Lamont and Vallieres sell Cardona’s “unique qualifications.” Look at the record they are buying.

As Connecticut commissioner and then U.S. secretary, Cardona presided over years of pandemic disruption, learning loss, and declining National Assessment scores. Critics on the right called him the worst education secretary in the department’s history: union access, politicized data releases, and the Department of Education’s coordination with the National School Boards Association around treating angry parents as a domestic-terrorism concern. A Republican-American editorial, when Lamont first named him to this commission, called him a failed bureaucrat elevated by the Peter Principle and noted he had done little to promote job-ready curricula.

None of that makes him uniquely qualified to write a five-year career-pathways plan that every competent workforce consultant in New England could also draft. It makes him uniquely connected. Credibility in this context means political cover, not a monopoly on competence.

Cardona Solutions launched after he left the Cabinet and quickly partnered with the Connecticut Association of Schools. Now the same brand is on a state contract to advise the state on connecting schools to jobs. The man who ran the state education agency and then the federal one is being paid by the state to tell the state how its education-to-work pipeline should work. That is not independent analysis. It is an incumbent reviewing his own era.

What Connecticut is actually buying

A volunteer commission whose chair’s company writes the report. A no-bid contract justified by a deadline the administration itself set. An ethics opinion that shrugs at appearances. A governor with a lengthening list of aides, appointees, and allies who treat public money as a revolving door.

Lamont likes to talk about more taxpayers, not more taxes, and about preparing workers for AI and automation. The first test of that seriousness is whether the people designing the system are selected in daylight or rewarded in a side deal. Paying $250,000 to the chair of an unpaid board, without competition, after discussing the contract before the board legally existed, fails that test.

Candelora said there will be a cloud over the selection process. The cloud is already there. The ethics office will not talk about it. Cardona will not answer emails about it. Lamont’s office calls it work “beyond” the chair’s role, as if the extra work and the extra money were a coincidence rather than the point.

Connecticut has seen this movie. Sometimes the ending is a federal courtroom. Sometimes it is just another six-figure check and a report no one will remember in two years. Either way, the public is not in on the joke. They are paying for it.

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