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The red tape nightmare of firing those responsible for putting our nation’s heroes on death lists

Bureaucracy Clouds Justice on Veterans Day



In a long-overdue effort, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald announced yesterday that the scandal-plagued agency would undergo the "largest reorganization of the Department of Veterans Affairs since its establishment," as he told CNN.
McDonald took charge of the VA three months ago following the resignation of his predecessor, Eric Shinseki. Shinseki's tenure at the VA lasted over five years, longer than any previous Secretary, and under his watch an enormous backlog of claims reached a peak of 900,000 in March 2013. Even as the backlog lessened, more than 100,000 veterans were left waiting nearly a year to get treatment. The scandal reached its zenith last June, when an oversight report from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) revealed the combination of malpractice and bureaucratic ineptitude was far deadlier than the agency had previously acknowledged. "Over the past decade, more than 1,000 veterans may have died as a result of VA malfeasance, and the VA has paid out nearly $1 billion to veterans and their families for its medical malpractice," the report stated, far surpassing the 23 deaths for which the VA initially took responsibility. The report further noted that the "waiting list cover-ups and uneven care are reflective of a much larger culture within the VA, where administrators manipulate both data and employees to give an appearance that all is well." It is that culture McDonald is finally getting around to addressing--sort of. In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes," McDonald revealed a decidedly underwhelming number of potential terminations at an agency that employs more than 330,000 people, second only to the Defense Department in size. The Secretary told Scott Pelley that "the report we've passed up to the Senate Committee and House Committee" names 35 people who should be fired, and a second report recommends terminating as many as 1000 more employees "who violated our values." Yet even those paltry totals have bureaucratic baggage attached to them. "Bob McDonald can't punish or fire a thousand people right now," he admitted, referring to himself in the third person. "He's discovering how different the Capitol is from capitalism. To fire a government manager he has to put together a case and prove it to an administrative judge....So we propose the action, the judge rules and the individual has a time to appeal. That's why we have a lot of people on administrative leave. We've moved them out because we don't want any harm to our veterans," he added.

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In short, over 1000 dead veterans over the course of a decade, courtesy of that bureaucracy, is not an administrative problem. It's a national disgrace

That would be apparently be paid administrative leave, a reality addressed last May by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). He wanted to know how many employees were on administrative leave due to the scandal, and what the policies were regarding the length of paid administrative leave. Last month the Washington Post revealed the big picture of such abuse, part of which undoubtedly includes the VA. During a three-year period ending last fall, a whopping 57,000 employees were put on administrative leave for at least a month, costing taxpayers more than $775 million, just for their salaries alone. Thus, when McDonald told CNN Monday that the VA has undertaken "disciplinary action" against 5,600 employees in the past year, he is taking about a process that could yield far different numbers of people who are actually terminated, terminations the Post explains that could take "a year or more" to realize in some cases. Adding insult to injury, the paper also reveals that employees who stay home can not only collect paychecks, but build up their pension accruals, vacation and sick days, and continue climbing the federal pay scale ladder. McDonald acknowledged those disturbing realities at a breakfast with reporters in Washington last Thursday. "The law didn't grant any kind of new power that would suddenly give me the ability to walk into a room and simply fire people," he admitted. "Our Constitution provides for due process, and we are following the due process." McDonald's heart seems to be in the right place. After his Senate confirmation in July, he promised to take "immediate action" to reform the VA. Since then, more than 100 investigations of VA facilities have been undertaken, according to the agency. But once again bureaucracy rears its byzantine approach to such investigations, with separate entities, such as the VA Office of the Inspector General, the FBI, the Department of Justice and others, conducting their own efforts. Those efforts are hardly encouraging. As of today only one senior VA leader has been fired: James Talton, who was director of the central Alabama VA. The termination process was undertaken against four other senior leaders, but two of them, Deputy Chief Procurement Officer Susan Taylor, and John Goldman, Director of the Dublin, Georgia VA, retired in the interim--with their pensions intact. The other two are Sharon Helman, the director of the Phoenix VA hospital, where 1,700 patients were put on secret wait lists delaying their treatment for more than 115 days; and Pittsburgh VA director Terry Gerigk Wolf, who is being fired for "conduct unbecoming a senior executive," following a department review of a Legionnaire's disease outbreak that sickened 16 and killed six at that facility. Helman has been on paid administrative leave for more than six months, Wolf for more than five. The restructuring announced by McDonald is occurring a full year after the abuses of America's veterans reached critical mass--and more than five years after the Obama administration was warned by VA officials that VA facilities were playing it fast and loose with waiting times and appointment scheduling. Unsurprisingly that inconvenient reality, discovered via a Freedom of Information Act filed by the Washington Times, didn't stop our president from doing what he seems to do best when faced with a scandal: feign surprise. "If these allegations prove to be true, it is dishonorable, it is disgraceful, and I will not tolerate it, period," he said last May, adding that he needed more time to find out what was going on. Everyone in America knows what's going on: a giant, inept and callous bureaucracy that failed thousands upon thousands of veterans, even as hacks like Sharon Helman were getting bonuses, has been revealed for the fraud it truly is. McDonald has acknowledged as much, insisting that restoring trust is his first priority. Aside from working to terminate the bad actors, he will move to hire as many as 28,000 medical professionals, including 2,500 mental health workers, to join the VA hospitals and clinics nationwide. He will also restructure the VA's "too confusing" Web sites, aimed at giving veterans a single point of contact for getting care. Ultimately he promises to make the VA an organization "centered on the veteran." It remains an uphill battle. Despite moving against 40 senior officials, including 30 case referrals made by the VA's inspector general to the Justice Department, the DOJ has declined to prosecute at least 17 of them. And despite Obama signing the Veterans' Access to Care through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act of 2014 in August, the first batch of "choice cards" allowing veterans to use non-VA healthcare providers to shorten waiting times and get to more conveniently located health facilities, weren't mailed out until this month. And they were mailed only to veterans who live more than 40 miles from a VA facility. Apparently the government still can't fathom the idea that serious health problems don't go into remission waiting for bureaucracy to catch up. And despite McDonald's seemingly good intentions, there is the uneasy sense that more veterans will pay a deadly price for additional delays that are virtually inevitable. For decades, the American left has promoted the idea that ever-increasing bureaucracy, especially one centralized in Washington, D.C., is the ultimate answer to the nation's needs. The VA scandal explodes that myth, revealing such bureaucracy as a labyrinth of calculated unaccountability with layers upon layers of unseemly protection, designed to insulate thousands of freckles bureaucrats from the consequences of their ineptitude at best, and outright malfeasance at worst. In short, over 1000 dead veterans over the course of a decade, courtesy of that bureaucracy, is not an administrative problem. It's a national disgrace. More is not better. It's just more.


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Arnold Ahlert -- Bio and Archives

Arnold Ahlert was an op-ed columist with the NY Post for eight years.


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