Robert Wilkie, former President Donald Trump’s secretary of Veterans Affairs, counts among his achievements cleaning house at the department as he blames controversies under his watch on a Democratic “hit.”
The former Trump administration official also described President Joe Biden’s team as weak on China during a Monday interview with the Washington Examiner.
Wilkie was one of Trump’s longest-serving Cabinet members, in office from March 2018 until January 2021 and implementing widespread organizational changes that lifted the department’s approval ratings as the then-secretary excused employees who were performing poorly. Still, Wilkie’s tenure was peppered with controversies, including an accusation that he squashed a sexual assault investigation and left female veterans feeling unwelcome at VA hospitals.
“We had relieved almost 9,000 people of their duty,” Wilkie said of his success overcoming workers unions to fire underperforming VA employees. “That’s unprecedented in the federal government.” He was named this week to be a visiting fellow at the Heritage Center for National Defense.
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Wilkie argued that the moves revived morale and motivated those employees who had been picking up the slack, ultimately helping to lift the VA’s approval rating among veterans.
“We inherited a VA from the Obama and Biden administration that had a 37% approval rating, and we left it with 90% for healthcare,” he said. Wilkie said he helped “change the trajectory of the institution, meaning not to protect the institution but to ensure that veterans had the maximum amount of choice.”
Wilkie boasted about traveling widely to get out of the “Washington bubble,” away from Congress and veterans organization leadership. In contrast, Biden’s VA secretary, Denis McDonough, who worked for former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle and as former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, immediately sat down virtually with leaders of half a dozen veterans organizations.
He reserved judgment on McDonough, saying he was on active duty in the Air Force Reserve for the past three months and “away from that world.”
“I’ve known Denis for a while. … He’s a smart guy,” he said. “I would hope, though, that they would not go back to groups like the unions having a veto over what comes out of the central office.”
In his final months in office, Wilkie was accused of smearing and refusing to investigate a claim of sexual harassment by White House staffer and veteran Andrea Goldstein. A December VA investigation by Democratic-named Inspector General Michael Missal found the agency failed to improve a hostile environment for women.
“We have an 86% approval rating among women veterans. That is an unprecedented level of satisfaction,” he said, noting he added sexual trauma coordinators in every VA hospital.
“The culture of the military is changing,” he said, adding that just 10% of veterans are women. “One of the things we had to do was overcome attitudes, particularly older veterans, and make our VA hospitals as welcoming as possible. I think we did that.”
At Heritage, Wilkie’s experience as assistant secretary of defense under both Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates from 2005 to 2009 will be put to use. At the time, Wilkie was the youngest senior leader in the department and the United States was deeply engaged in the war on terror.
Now, Wilkie warns that China’s military IT advantage is a threat to the U.S., and he fears the Biden administration is far off course nurturing the Pacific relationships to counter China’s influence.
“Certainly, this administration will not do a very good job of cultivating those neighbors who have thousand-year memories of Chinese imperialism,” he said, naming Vietnam, India, the Philippines, and others.
The former Pentagon policymaker warned that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army fields two divisions of IT specialists. Wilkie said his recent reserve work gave him the idea that the Department of Defense needs to do more to recruit IT specialists from Silicon Valley.
“We need to be more aggressive, and I think the reserve component is a place for those folks to do that,” he said.
Wilkie indicated that the congressionally approved $6.9 billion Pacific Deterrence Initiative to enhance military infrastructure for Pacific partners and two visits to the Indo-Pacific by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin do not show enough commitment by the Biden administration.
“The trips are fine, but when your first budget out of the box is a cut in American capability, I think that balances off the feel-good message,” he said.
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The Biden administration climate change agenda also concerns Wilkie, who sees it as a self-imposed restriction on the American economy that will not hold China to the same standards.
“We ratchet down the American economic miracle for the sake of some theory and the feel-good factor for some folks in the administration and the Ivy League corridor,” he said. “You have the secretary of state, who just said that China will take this seriously. Well, that’s certainly a long way from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trust, but verify.’”
