"Drain the swamp." The phrase went from catchy rallying cry to grating cliché in the space of a year. But phrases often become clichés because they signify some important truth. The swamp does, in fact, need draining: Our federal bureaucracy has become so expansive, power-hungry, and unaccountable…
On Sunday, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin told the Disabled American Veterans conference in Arlington, Virginia that he was thinking about lifting restrictions on veterans who wish to receive private medical care.
A non-veteran, senior-level Obama appointee to Veterans Affairs (VA) is President Trump's appointee to be the next VA secretary. If confirmed by Congress, current VA Under Secretary of Health David Shulkin will be the first non-veteran to lead the department since President Reagan elevated VA to…
While Secretary of Veterans Affairs Bob McDonald is under fire for comments minimizing the impact of wait times for veterans seeking care at veterans' health care facilities, over the past eight years the VA has spent upwards of $2 million to building "smoking shelters" at various VA locations…
The VA set out to send a stern disciplinary message to some scammers in the higher levels of its bureaucracy but, well you know, things happen. As Kellie Lunney of Government Executive reports:
In its handling of health care for veterans, the VA’s ineptitude and corruption have been widely exposed and condemned. Though, of late, Hillary Clinton has been saying that it wasn’t as bad as all that. In her view, the real problem is not long wait times covered up by falsified records which, in…
CNN, which has been on the story of malfeasance and incompetence at the VA for a while now, reports:
A former solider who served most of 2003 in Iraq as a cavalry scout and is now suffering from PTSD was turned away from a VA facility in Georgia. When he went to another VA facility to make the same request, he made a record of the encounter on his smartphone. As Patricia Kime of Military…
This, as Lisa Rein of the Washington Post writes, is how Senator Charles Grassley describes the VA. Which, as Emily Wax-Thibodeaux – also of the Washington Post – reports, is performing no better now than it was a year ago with:
The government doesn’t seem to have many good days, these days. If it isn’t a vast hacking of its employees’ personal information by, presumably, the Chinese, then it is the revelation that the people who are supposed to keep air travel safe, the crack agents of the TSA, missed some 95 percent of…
Lisa Rein and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux of the Washington Post report:
A year after news broke of the waiting list scandal at the Veterans Affairs medical facility in Phoenix, Arizona, President Obama finally visited the facility in March. And while they didn't quite roll out the red carpet for the president, they did clean the floors -- and spent $5,000 to do it.
Kellie Lunney at Government Executive writes, in a report on yesterday’s hearings into mismanagement at the Veterans Affairs Department, that:
Concerned Veterans for America has released this video detailing the Veterans Affairs scandal ahead of President Obama's visit to the Phoenix hospital:
The Veterans Affairs secretary lied about serving in the special forces, a report in the Huffington Post alleges.
Meghan Hoyer and Tom Vanden Brook of USA Today report that:
If you work for the government and you don’t stay on the straight and narrow, then you risk being told to go home and take some time off … with pay and benefits. Might be for three months to a year – time enough to catch up on those overdue home improvement project. Could be for one to three…
From Military Times, we learn:
Problems at the VA were largely – but not entirely – in the realm of scheduling. No one argued in favor the current system, which had veterans waiting in line for medical attention for months and even years. Even if the supervisors who cooked the books and paid themselves bonuses were all shown…
A.J. Lagoe and Steve Eckert of Military Times report that:
The VA’s culture of malfeasance and corruption resulted in a new leader, new legislation, and new money. Still, as Jordain Carney of National Journal reports:
The VA has created a small public relations problem for itself. Which, to say the least, is something it did not need.
Dennis Wagner of the Arizona Republic writes that:
The legislative fix has been passed and signed into law, along with a generous appropriation of new money. Also, a new top person has been named and confirmed. So time to move on from the VA and its woes. But before doing so, consider the magnitude of the problems and their duration. As Brad…
With the overwhelmingly bipartisan vote for the Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014, Congress passed the most significant reforms to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in decades. And, right on cue, here come the grumblings from the second-guessers.
The big bill to reform Veterans Affairs will be signed tomorrow. With, no doubt, much ceremony and patting of backs. Washington has done it again. Rescued the rest of us from … Washington.
Agreement has been reached on the particulars of a bill that supporters say will fix the VA’s problem and as Matthew Daly of the AP reports:
The twilight of the scandal-plagued Obama administration is upon us, and voters are faced with a real conundrum. Which of the failures of progressive governance should be confronted first? The Mideast is an even more blood-drenched goat rodeo than pessimists predicted. There are 50,000 illegal…
Bureaucrats at the Veterans Affairs are working hard … to keep stonewalling investigations into the slovenly, corrupt, and criminal performance of it responsibilities. As Mark Flatten of the Washington Examiner reports:
Veterans Affairs, following the iron law of institutional self-interest, has been paying its people well – improperly and, possibly, illegally so – at the expense of it supposed “clients” and its mission. As David Wood of the Huffington Post reports:
The ineptitude and corruption at the VA were examined last night at congressional hearings and the revelations were dismaying but not necessarily shocking. It is no longer news that the VA is broken so the details of how bonuses were paid to senior bureaucrats for covering up the problems and…
A Veterans Affairs whistleblower says he experienced "harassment" after he contacted White House aide Rob Nabors about problems at the VA:
Reporting on the Veterans Affairs, its problems, and what Congress might do to solve them, Craig Harris and Michelle Ye Hee Lee of the Arizona Republic are not terribly encouraging. They write that:
Now that Washington has acknowledged cultural malaise and a broad failure to provide timely access to health care at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Congress and the executive branch are competing frantically to show the public how hard they are working to fix that failure.
David Jackson of USA Today reports that President Obama told an audience, yesterday, that Washington is out of touch and obsessed with politics. Or something like that. And that instead of focusing on things that are important to the average citizen, Washington is peddling:
Forty-four years after the legendary May 1970 Life magazine cover story first exposed the disgusting and shameful mistreatment of our nation’s Vietnam-era veterans in government medical facilities, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is once again in desperate need of reform. Courageous…
The people who run the VA are doing great work and they know this because they have been telling themselves so:
The events of the last few weeks have been gut wrenching for many active duty members of the military and veterans. We have watched the Veterans Affairs (VA) health care scandal unfold, the absurdly lopsided trade of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five top-level Taliban commanders, and now…
White House Secretary Jay Carney has said that the president only learned about the secret waiting lists at VA from the news. However, the Daily Caller has unearthed an Inspector General report proving that members of the administration were aware of the problems as far back as 2010:
Veterans Affairs has problems. This, we all know. Among the questions raised since those problems first began making headlines are: how widespread are they? Are we talking outliers? A few rogue operators. Or is the system, itself, dysfunctional. Today’s partial answer to that question is … kind…
Two stories about the problems at the Veterans Affairs. Both come with numbers, if not faces, attached.
The problems at the VA cannot be laid at the feet of the unions that represent its workers. A leader of one of those unions says so. This astonishing news is reported by Charles S. Clark at Government Executive, who writes that:
General Shinseki may be gone but his leaving has not salvaged the reputation of the VA. As Susan Page of USA Today reports:
The Washington Post reports:
A report released this week by the inspector general for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) found that "inappropriate scheduling practices are systemic throughout VHA." But as recently as September 2013, Stephen Warren, the executive in charge for information and technology for the VA, said…
One of the more intriguing aspects of the VA health care scandal is the way the paperwork was creatively done to make it appear that the system was operating as it was meant to. This took serious, sustained effort, as the AP reports:
Steve Hayes, with Mara Liasson and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News:
In October 2013, as the nation was focused on the deeply flawed rollout of the Healthcare.gov Obamacare marketplace, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) awarded $3 million in prizes to three participants in the agency's Medical Appointment Scheduling Contest. The contest was announced in 2012…
The expletives were flying during a ceremony for wounded warriors at the vice president's residence on Memorial Day.
The Department of Veteran's Affairs (VA) posted three notices on fbo.gov in 2013 regarding the agency's intent to purchase appointment scheduling software to correct problems with preparation and delivery of appointment notices to veterans for the VA's compensation and pension clinics. The…
CNN's John King reports that Democrats are privately calling President Obama "detached," "flat footed," and "incompetent."
In his weekly address, President Obama referred to care for veterans as part of a "sacred trust to all who've served." He said our nation has to do "much more … to make sure all our veterans get the care they deserve."
THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with executive editor Fred Barnes on the handling of the VA scandal by the Obama administration.
In a Memorial Day piece for The Hill, Nancy Pelosi writes:
The VA story is still unfolding and the consensus seems to be that it will be with us for a while. Which makes the eagerness of some not-in-office political hacks to wade in all the more unseemly.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer Stephen F. Hayes on the growing scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs and how it will impact the remaining years of the Obama presidency.
The director of the Phoenix VA hospital where 40 veterans died while waiting for care received an $8,500 bonus last month, according to Jeff Miller, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee.
President Obama didn't ask his VA secretary to resign. Instead, after meeting with Secretary Eric Shinseki, Obama addressed the press and praised the embattled cabinet member:
The White House just announced that President Obama will deliver a statement directly after meeting with Veterans Affairs chief Eric Shinseki later this morning. Here's the president's schedule, from the White House:
Earlier this morning on national TV, Bill Kristol pointed out that President Obama is meeting with his VA secretary later this morning, as the White House just announced. The boss asked, will Secretary Shinseki use his morning meeting with his boss to resign?
CBS affiliate KMOX reports:
THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with senior writer John McCormack on the growing scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the White House's response.
I did not get to know Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki when we served together in the Obama administration, but in our limited interactions I liked him. He struck me as polite, smart, earnest and hard-working. Over time he resisted the ego-tripping that many agency heads find…
Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that the Department of Justice doesn't have any plans to investigate allegations that veterans placed on secret waiting lists at VA hospitals died while waiting for care.