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 irresistible in Washington.

Secretary Shinseki, however, has not been an agent of change. As his May 15 Senate testimony made clear, the management style which he brought with him—the only style he knows—is ill-suited for an agency that has serious management and integrity issues. Delegating and deferring to a broken bureaucracy that will not be candid about its failures has been a recipe for greater failures—failures that have caused the death of veterans—and now it is surely only a matter of time before President Obama sends Secretary Shinseki the word that he must resign.