Uri Monson, Gov. Shapiro’s financial wizard and childhood friend, now runs Pa.’s $85 billion teacher pension

Uri Monson is one of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s oldest friends and advisers. He’s the guy who handles the money.

Since January, Monson has been executive director of the state’s largest pension fund, PSERS, which invests around $85 billion to fund pensions for more than half a million school staff and retirees. He works with a sometimes fractious board of teachers, school board representatives, governors’ aides, and state lawmakers.

For Shapiro’s first three years in Harrisburg, Monson was the budget director in marathon negotiations with Harrisburg legislators. Before that, he was the Philadelphia School District’s top operations officer; Montgomery County’s chief financial officer, when Shapiro headed county government in the mid-2010s; and a policy analyst under Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell.

He holds two degrees from Columbia University and one from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Monson talked with The Inquirer about his latest job and career in government over breakfast near his Main Line home, where he works when he’s not in Harrisburg. Questions and answers edited for clarity and brevity.

Things are just different in the government. Imagine the CFO of a $4 billion company with 25,000 employees, each of whom has no compunction about emailing you personally if the paycheck is off by 10 cents.

There are some who take advantage. There are others who are definitely underpaid. Particularly unelected folks. And especially in the state budget office last year: You had a federal funding impasse, a state impasse, the One Big Beautiful Bill that changed public funding, the tariffs that changed procurement. My folks were working on three budget years at once. It was insane.

That crew did not get overtime. Some get comp time.

The ones who deal with the people are all right. The ones who play the politics game, who talk about their public service but don’t respect public servants, and the ones who cheered for DOGE’s type of job cuts, they don’t respect the public.

Long ago I worked for Vice President [Al] Gore’s Reinventing Government team. That was a successful re-creation of the government. It reduced the [nonmilitary] federal government by 800,000 to 1 million people. They did it employee-first, going to the people who did the job and knew the job and gave them the tools to do it better.

I did that with the state Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program [which grants matching funds for developer and nonprofit projects, often backed by district lawmakers]. I went to the senior people working on it since they created the program. I said, “What would you do differently?” They said no one had ever asked.

The basic rules in government are don’t surprise me and don’t embarrass me. Tell me what’s going on; I’ll have your back. And you can say anything in front of me, except for “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” The governor uses that line, too. It’s from our county days.

He was in my brother’s class at Lower Merion High School. His parents were active in Jewish education circles. His father was a really popular pediatrician.

I’ll always remember his bar mitzvah. It was famous at the time. One of the things in the Soviet Jewish movement, if a Jew was of bar mitzvah age, a local kid would twin with him and celebrate the bar mitzvah for both of them, since the Soviet kid couldn’t get his own. But the governor’s “twin” got out of Russia two weeks before, and they got to do the bar mitzvah together.

Then we were in Washington at the same time. He worked for [then-U.S. Rep. Joe] Hoeffel (D., Montgomery) and was doing Georgetown Law School. My wife was at Georgetown Law. We’d see each other at Eagles games.

Then he was a state rep, and I worked for PICA [the state’s financial oversight agency for Philadelphia]. He’d use me for city intel, and I’d see him for state intel.

When he won for county commissioner, he asked if I’d meet with his team to talk about some ideas, things they could do for residents. It took me 20 minutes into the meeting to realize it was a job interview.

When they posted the job [PSERS executive director], I found out because one of the Republicans who’s involved with the pensions texted me: “APPLY.” The chairman, Richard Vague, called me. He said, of course, he had talked to the governor. Then I had a long talk with the governor.

The county commissioners didn’t have the background to make informed decisions when Goldman Sachs came in to sell investments. Private equity investors now are having trouble getting their cash back. A lot of people didn’t see it coming.

But you can’t just flip a switch and be out of private equity, those investments have a life span. And the county pension back then invested $400 million; PSERS has $85 billion, and a professional investment staff of 50 or 60.

Our performance is going in the right direction; the stock market has been on the best run you’ve ever seen — if you aren’t doing well these last two years, you are really bad at this.

It’s not just financial performance; it’s also the constraints, the internal controls that you put in place, that improves your credit.

[Bond analysts] look at financial reserves. I would tell them, having a good-looking balance by itself doesn’t mean anything. You have to use it. Invest in real economic development, better healthcare, things that will help grow the community.

They are not used to hearing that from people in government. In the private sector, the CFO knows business. At the school district, I could explain charter funding better than the ratings agency could.

But too often in the public sector, the chief financial people are either the accountant who reached a high level as a pure numbers person and doesn’t know policy, or a political person who doesn’t know accounting.

When Biden said he wasn’t running for another term, my son was at summer camp and he texted me: “I am not moving again!”

I like to fix problems. I’ve already taken two pay cuts for Shapiro, to solve problems for him in the county, and in Pennsylvania.

My wife says I have a hard time keeping a job.