The chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee has put forward a new bill aimed at making it easier to fire corrupt or negligent Department of Veterans Affairs workers, boosting support for whistleblowers who have been targeted by the VA.
The bill from Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., is the latest attempt to rein in a broken VA that has defied congressional reform efforts.
In 2014, after the nationwide healthcare scandal revealed the agency was faking wait times to make it appear it was serving veterans on a timely basis, Congress passed legislation to make it easier to fire officials involved. But the VA has mostly refused to use that law, and in June, MilitaryTimes reported that the VA will stop using that law altogether.
Miller said Wednesday that the inability to fire VA officials continues to be the VA’s biggest problem, and said his bill is aimed at fixing that problem for good.
“The biggest obstacle standing in the way of VA reform is the department’s pervasive lack of accountability among employees at all levels,” he said. “Until this problem is fixed once and for all, long-term efforts to reform VA are doomed to fail.”
“For too long, union bosses, administration officials and their enablers have used every trick in the book to help VA bureaucrats who can’t or won’t do their jobs remain firmly entrenched in the agency’s bureaucracy,” he added.
Under his bill, the process of firing or demoting rank-and-file VA employees, plus their appeals process, would be shortened to just 77 days.
The current process can run on for more than a year, Miller’s office said.
It would also completely remove the Merit Systems Protection Board from the process when it comes to senior officials. The MSPB is the last resort for officials who want to appeal firings or demotions, and the board has resisted the law, and has argued openly that it’s unconstitutional.
Miller’s bill would also do more to protect whistleblowers, who have complained that the VA spies on them and fails to address their complaints constructively.
Elsewhere, it would let the VA recoup bonuses and relocation expenses, a reaction to a scandal in which a few senior officials received hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits.
