Gov. Katie Hobbs’ nominees for state agencies face an uncertain future after Senate Republicans announced last week that they will continue the same process used to confirm nominees in 2023. 

After Republicans strengthened their majorities in both the House and Senate this election cycle, Sen. Warren Petersen was reelected Senate President and subsequently reappointed Sen. Jake Hoffman to head the Committee on Director Nominations. 

Known as DINO, the committee was created in 2023 to vet and confirm Hobbs’ appointees, but quickly created friction between Hobbs’ office and the Senate, leading the governor to pull her nominees from consideration. What followed was a year-long battle involving a lawsuit and eventual agreement in August to resubmit the nominees for consideration.

Martín Quezada, a former state senator who was nominated by Hobbs to serve as the director of the Registrar of Contractors, was part of a contentious DINO hearing in 2023 before being rejected by the committee and eventually withdrawn from consideration. Quezada said he “wasn’t surprised, but definitely disappointed” to find out that Hoffman would be returning as the committee’s chair. 

“I wasn’t surprised that he’s going to be brought back to lead that committee, or that they’re going to be doing that again,” Quezada said. “I mean, it’s pretty typical of the Republican agenda.” 

Barrett Marson, a Republican consultant, said he thinks the nomination process will be much smoother now that Hobbs and Senate Republicans have come to an agreement to replace three of her appointees. However, he doesn’t think all of the nominees will have an easy go of it.

“There are legitimate issues that some of these director nominees should answer to,” Marson said, referring to recent issues like the Housing Department losing $2 million to a scam and the deaths of children in the care of the Department of Child Services.

Quezada isn’t as optimistic, and said the resubmitted nominees should expect “the same circus that I went through,” during his confirmation hearing. Hoffman and other members of the committee accused Quezada of antisemitism during his 2023 hearing and grilled him over his political views, despite the fact that Quezada was up for a job at a relatively nonpolitical agency. 

“I’ve got a lot of disappointment with Governor Hobbs about a lot of things, but she’s appointed qualified people to do good work in these agencies, myself included in that mix,” Quezada said. “[Senate Republicans] have zero qualifications to judge any of us for any of those positions.”

As of publication, the full roster of the DINO committee has not been released. A spokeswoman for the Senate Democrats said Sens. Flavio Bravo and Analise Ortiz will represent the minority party on the committee, but it’s unclear which Republicans will round out the group. 

Ortiz, who made the leap from the House to the Senate in this year’s election, said she and Bravo are focused on “being as fair as possible to these nominees,” and it was disappointing to see how the process played out in 2023.

“The fact that [Hoffman] is continuing to obstruct Governor Hobbs’ nominees, when the people of Arizona fairly elected her and trusted her to do the job, really shows in my mind that he does not have any interest in doing what is best for the people of Arizona,” Ortiz said. 

In 2023, the nomination process was derailed when Republican senators, Hoffman chief among them, began asking nominees politically loaded questions that often did not pertain to the position they were interviewing for. After Joan Serviss, nominee for the Arizona Department of Housing, was rejected due to accusations of plagiarism made by Hoffman, Hobbs withdrew the remaining nominees from consideration. 

Hobbs then appointed her director of operations as head of each department until he hired her nominees as “executive deputy directors,” allowing them to run the agencies without confirmation from the Legislature. State law says gubernatorial nominees can serve for up to one year without confirmation, but Republicans in the Legislature sued Hobbs, saying the move to circumvent the DINO committee was unlawful. 

Hobbs and Senate Republicans entered into an agreement to end the lawsuit in August and finish the nomination process before the Legislature adjourns in 2025. As part of that agreement, Hobbs withdrew the nominations of David Lujan to the Department of Child Services, Dana Allmond to the Department of Veterans Services and Karen Peters to the Department of Environmental Quality. 

Those three were demoted to deputy directors and replaced by appointed interim directors. Sixteen nominees were resubmitted, but some of them previously saw pushback from the DINO committee. 

Serviss, who was rejected by DINO, was resubmitted, as was Elizabeth Thorson of the Department of Administration. Thorson was held from consideration after Republicans on the committee accused her of being evasive when answering questions during a hearing.

In a statement released after he was reappointed chairman of DINO, Hoffman called Hobbs’ maneuvering an “illegal ploy” and accused her of not taking the Senate confirmation process seriously.

“The committee invites Katie Hobbs to come to the table with sane, nonpartisan, qualified nominees, and we will approve them,” Hoffman said in the statement. “What we won’t do is rubberstamp unqualified radicals.”

Hoffman did not respond to questions from the Arizona Capitol Times about whether there were any specific nominees that would have a difficult time before the committee.

As for the reason why nominees with fractious histories with the committee were resubmitted, Hobbs’ Communications Director Christian Slater told the Arizona Capitol Times that only Lujan, Allmond and Peters were named as sticking points for Senate Republicans. Slater said questions about other nominees would have to be directed to the Senate.

Hobbs said in September that the agreement was made with the “current Senate leadership,” but that there would be a new Senate in January 2025, hinting at her hope that Democrats would take control of the body. Hobbs’ office declined to comment on Hoffman’s return as DINO chair.

Marson said Democrats have to take a bit of responsibility for the fact that the confirmation process will be a repeat of 2023.

“A little bit of this is on the Democrats for failing at the ballot box,” Marson said. 

Quezada said he will always hope that things will go smoothly, but said Hobbs should probably consider what avenues she can pursue if there is a repeat of the 2023 nomination process. 

“These agencies need to have leadership, they need to have stability.” Quezada said. “With the process that the Senate laid out now, we’re depriving all of Arizona of that stability and of that leadership and that’s a recipe for disaster. So she has to do something. I don’t know what it is, but I think that she should reexamine all of her options right now.”