Trump signs bill making it easier to fire awful VA employees

It's good to know that horrible VA employees who treat veterans like garbage might actually get fired for it, unlike in the past when proving their worthlessness was so difficult the government rarely bothered to try. The AP writer who wrote this story has an interesting idea of how firings work. They're not criminal trials. In the real world, if your employer doesn't want you around anymore, you're gone. In the public sector and other union-infested shops, it's such a hassle to prove someone deserves to be fired, it's usually the path of least resistance to just put up with their nonsense. That's what happens when unions fund the politicians who make the rules. Still, today we have a small step toward accountability for federal employees, although only a very small step:

The measure was prompted by a 2014 scandal at the Phoenix VA medical center, where some veterans died as they waited months for care. The VA is the second-largest department in the U.S. government, with more than 350,000 employees, and it is charged with providing health care and other services to military veterans. Federal employee unions opposed the measure. VA Secretary David Shulkin, an Obama administration holdover, stood alongside Trump as the president jokingly suggested he’d have to invoke his reality TV catchphrase “You’re fired” if the reforms were not implemented. The legislation, which many veterans’ groups supported, cleared the House last week by an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote of 368-55, replacing an earlier version that Democrats had criticized as overly unfair to employees. The Senate passed the bill by voice vote a week earlier. The bill was backed by Shulkin, who had called the department’s employee accountability process “clearly broken.” The new law will lower the burden of proof to fire employees, allowing for dismissal even if most evidence is in a worker’s favor.

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Question: How sacrosanct must veterans be if you could even get more than 100 Democrats to vote for the bill, over the objections of their union overlords no less? There's clearly a bipartisan consensus that it's completely unacceptable for federal employees to mistreat veterans, so we've carved out a special exception to the hiring/firing rules that govern the rest of the federal workforce so that these employees, and only these employees, can be fired if they demonstrate malevolence, incompetence or both. Wonderful. But if it's OK to reduce "worker's rights" protections for VA employees, how about the federal employees that everyone else gets stuck dealing with? Why not change the rules in the same way so they're equally accountable for poor performance? If you want the politics-of-it answer, it's that Republicans would probably be game but Democrats are only willing to defy their union masters when they feel they absolutely have no other choice. It's a tough spot for Democrats politically, I guess: Defend federal employees who mistreat the most sypathetic of American citizens, or piss off the people who pay for your campaigns. Veterans really are that highly honored, in a way that mostly defies partisanship. But with all due respect to veterans, other Americans don't deserve to be treated like garbage by federal bureaucrats either. There's absolutely no reason to fix these awful personnel policies for one agency and one agency only, while keeping them in place for everyone else. If this is a measure of how powerful public employee unions are - and it is - then more people need to know just how much power these people have to keep our government from being responsive to us.