Like most presidents before him, President Obama has surrounded himself with a cabinet full of gray non-eminences. With the notable exceptions of Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta and Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s department secretaries have been little known to most Americans. Even so, were there to be an award for the most obscure Obama cabinet secretary, it would undoubtedly go to Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki.

His department is the federal government’s second-biggest bureaucracy — only the Department of Defense has more employees — and it is supposed to care for the noble men and women who served this country in its military. Nobody questions the VA’s reason for existence or begrudges a single tax dollar that goes to insure that America’s veterans get the medical care and other services they earned in uniform. The department functions above and beyond partisanship. But the VA is in a state of crisis and Shinseki is nowhere to be seen.