e legal arm of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute on Friday filed a lawsuit to end the state’s practice of awarding tax credits to businesses for retaining jobs.

The Illinois Policy Institute is closely aligned with Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner, who will be sworn in Monday. Rauner, a Republican has criticized the state’s economic development program and has said it needs to be reformed. He has not offered specific recommendations for changes.

The suit, filed in state court in Sangamon County, said businesses should only receive tax credits for creating new jobs in the state. The state Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity has awarded tax credits for retained jobs, the lawsuit says.

Governor-Elect Bruce Rauner today announced a first wave of his administration team that will aid his agenda to bring back the state and serve the people of Illinois in the Governor’s Office.

Marking a new chapter in Illinois government, Bruce Rauner will be sworn in Monday, an untested business executive with little time to enjoy a traditional political honeymoon in a state with immediate and severe financial problems.

Rauner is the first Republican governor since 2003, and he faces overwhelming Democratic control of the General Assembly, requiring that the executive and legislative branches work together.

“Transformation’s coming,” Rauner said Friday during a two-day tour of rural Illinois at a stop in Chillicothe, north of Peoria. “The special interest groups are going to get challenged. We’re going to change the culture in Springfield and, starting Monday, there’s going to be a big turnaround.”

As Bruce Rauner swept out the Democratic governor of this Democratic-leaning state, he made one absolute pledge: He would shake up Illinois. Mr. Rauner, a multimillionaire who has never held elective office, said the state needed, at long last, to put its finances in order. He has said the state ought to lower income taxes, reduce regulations on businesses and devote more money to education.

Yet as Mr. Rauner prepares to take office on Monday as the first Republican to govern the state in a dozen years, Illinois’s unstable fiscal health has grown shakier still. Weeks after Mr. Rauner’s election in November, a judge rejected a 2013 overhaul of the state’s vastly underfunded pension systems. Then an income tax increase that Democrats approved nearly four years ago was permitted to partly expire on Jan. 1, leaving the state, which already struggles to pay its bills, with about $2 billion less in revenue for this fiscal year.

So Mr. Rauner takes over a state that Moody’s Investor Services has downgraded five times in as many years and given the lowest credit rating among the 50 states. He has offered few details of how he plans to pull the state out of its financial mess, and some here said they worried that his promises could be impossible to keep.

Gov. Pat Quinn Saturday made permanent new election rules that were first tested in the race he lost two months ago. They allowed people to register to vote on Election Day.

And he OK’d a special election in 2016 for Illinois comptroller, shortening the term of Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner’s first big appointee, Leslie Munger of Lincolnshire, to two years, pending possible legal action.

Governor-elect Bruce Rauner announced a number of appointments for cabinet positions and agency heads on Saturday, including naming former State Senator Rev. James Meeks to be the chairman of the State Board of Education.

Meeks is currently the pastor of Salem Baptist Church and served as an Illinois state senator until 2013. A release from Governor-elect Bruce Rauner’s office announcing the appointments says that Meeks, “worked hard to increase school funding and improve the quality of education for all students.”

Rauner also announced the appointment of Randy Blankenhorn as the director of the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT). Currently, Blankenhorn is the executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

Other appointments by Rauner include: Jeff Mays as director of the Illinois Department of EmploymentSecurity, John Maki as executive director of the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, Edward McMillan as a member of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees and Candice Jones as the director of the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice.

Over the past decade, smartphones have radically changed many aspects of our everyday lives, from banking to shopping to entertainment. Medicine is next. With innovative digital technologies, cloud computing and machine learning, the medicalized smartphone is going to upend every aspect of health care. And the end result will be that you, the patient, are about to take center stage for the first time.

With the smartphone revolution, an increasingly powerful new set of tools—from attachments that can diagnose an ear infection or track heart rhythms to an app that can monitor mental health—can reduce our use of doctors, cut costs, speed up the pace of care and give more power to patients. Digital avatars won’t replace physicians: You will still be seeing doctors, but the relationship will ultimately be radically altered. (I consult for several companies on many of the issues discussed here.)

All of this raises serious issues about hacking and personal privacy that haven’t yet been addressed—and the accuracy of all of these tools needs to be tested. People are also right to worry that the patient-doctor relationship could be eroded, diminishing the human touch in medicine. But the transformation is already under way.

A former gang member with a long arrest record who has been fired twice from state jobs over lewd emails and “inconsistencies” in his job applications has been reinstated to a six-figure post with the Illinois state prison system.

Xadrian R. McCraven, 45, was returned to his $111,432-a-year job as a senior policy adviser with the Illinois Department of Corrections on Dec. 22. That was after an independent arbitrator ruled that outgoing Gov. Pat Quinn’s administration wrongly fired him early last year.

The department — which will be under the control of Republican Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner after he is sworn in Monday to succeed Quinn — is appealing the arbitrator’s ruling, agency spokesman Tom Shaer said.