After promising to “drain the swamp,” President Trump raised eyebrows with some of his early hires.
Goldman Sachs had been a boogeyman for him during the presidential campaign, and yet Trump picked former Goldman CEO Gary Cohn to chair his National Economic Council.
Trump ran against the Bush dynasty and against the entrenched Republican political machine. Yet Trump brought into his Cabinet Elaine Chao, who while clearly qualified, is an alumnus of the Bush era and wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the most entrenched Republican machine politician in Washington.
But David Shulkin, Trump’s secretary of Veterans Affairs, may have been the swampiest pick of all. He was a holdover of the Obama administration, specifically of the most famously dysfunctional agency during the Obama administration. Trump made the VA’s failures a major theme of his campaign, and “treating the veterans better” was a central promise.
Under Obama, the VA lied on official documents to cover up disgraceful wait-times. One VA audit found that more than 120,000 veterans either waited more than three months for care or never got it at all. Yet many of those responsible received performance bonuses from taxpayers rather than be sacked for incompetence or malfeasance.
Despite that, Trump stuck with a holdover whose mismanagement cost the lives of our veterans.
Shulkin in 2017 took an official, taxpayer-funded trip to Europe where he spent half his time sightseeing. Taxpayers also bought his wife’s ticket. When ethics officials investigated these expenses, Shulkin’s staff altered the evidence to cover up his wrongdoing. The inspector general uncovered many deceptions by Shulkin and also found that he inappropriately accepted Wimbledon tickets.
This is the sort of Washington self-dealing that led to Trump’s election victory. The public saw that Beltway insiders were enriching themselves instead of serving the country. Insiders were dividing up the spoils while the veterans suffered.
Immediately upon his firing, Shulkin placed an op-ed in the New York Times in which he lamented, “The department has become entangled in a brutal power struggle, with some political appointees choosing to promote their agendas instead of what’s best for veterans.”
At the heart of debate is the question of whether, or how much, public money for veterans’ care should be allowed to be spent by veterans at private institutions. This is a good debate to have. Shulkin’s odd implication is that only the side which favors letting veterans choose has an “agenda” and the other side is the only one seeking “what’s best for veterans.”
Both sides have agendas.
Like Goldman Sachs and like the GOP establishment, the federal bureaucracy is a vested interest. You can tell when you look how overwhelmingly bureaucrats support big-government politicians. Placing more power and more money in the bureaucracy is good for the bureaucracy.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to career employees at the VA when they argue for maintaining their centralized, top-down system. But it does mean we should judge their arguments with the same skepticism with which we judge the special pleading of subsidy-seeking companies.
“I have fought to stand up for this great department,” Shulkin bragged in his Times op-ed. But a department is supposed to be a means to an end, not an end in itself. It could be that the best way to care for our veterans is through a more distributed, less top-down system, which would mean a diminished role for the agency. The Veterans Affairs of the Obama years demolishes the notion that the agency is inherently effective.
So while Shulkin fought for his department, we hope his replacement fights for the veterans the department is supposed to serve.
