It can’t come as much of a surprise that yet another investigation of yet another Veterans’ Affairs health care facility has uncovered employee improprieties that could be preventing veterans from getting care. This one comes from my home congressional district in northern Indiana:
[A] Peru clinic employee was scheduling appointments for veterans without their knowledge and canceling them on the day of the appointment. The employee allegedly was “padding her schedule with fake appointments to fill her clinic schedule,” the report said.
A review of records from Oct. 1, 2014, through Dec. 21, 2016, uncovered 56 such “placeholder” appointments made by clinic staff, VA said. The practice could have denied veterans the opportunity to receive medical treatment, according to the report.
This is par for the course in an agency plagued by an endemic lack of accountability. Malingering is really the least of the VA’s problems. Far more malicious employee behavior, including theft of taxpayer funds, retaliation against whistleblowers, and wrongful stockpiling of veterans’ benefit applications, and system-gaming in pursuit of undeserved performance bonuses seems to go unpunished again and again.
In 2014, the first of several massive scandals was reported, with the Phoenix VA as ground zero for a systemic scheme to manipulate veterans’ health care appointments in order to give the appearance that they were getting timely appointments, when in fact they were waiting months at a time. Public outrage over this led to Congress passing a reform law that was supposed to make it easier for the Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs to fire bad managers at the VA, so that some semblance of accountability could be created.
Unfortunately, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has just gutted that law, ruling on Tuesday in favor of the Phoenix VA chief under whose watch the original scheduling scandal had occurred. The court ruled that the new, expedited process for firing bad senior employees violates the U.S. Constitution. Thus, the VA cannot use it to fire former Phoenix VA Health Care director Sharon Helman.
The reformed firing process, Chief Judge Sharon Prost wrote in her ruling, violates the Appointments Clause of the Constitution because it vests mere administrative judges, who are not considered “officers of the United States,” with the power to make unreviewable decisions. (When the case was originally argued, the Obama administration had failed even to contest this point in court.)
Helman will now be entitled to a hearing before the full Merit Systems Protection Board, which has been known (for example) to reinstate senior employees who even steal money from the agency. It is worth noting that the MSPB administrative judge who first heard Helman’s case would not allow the agency to fire her based on her lack of oversight that led to the scandal itself. She might never have been fired at all, had she not also accepted $50,000 in undisclosed gifts, a crime for which she was also convicted of a federal felony. Now you start to appreciate the accountability problem from which the VA is suffering. It’s much easier and quicker to convict a federal employee in criminal court than it is to fire him or her.
Veterans have suffered quite enough at the VA’s hands in recent years. It’s evident that Congress is going to have to go back to the drawing board and find another way to fix the problem that will stand up in court.
