When Donald Trump nominated David Shulklin to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, veterans’ groups were shocked and disappointed. The current VA undersecretary, who served under the business-as-usual tenure of former Secretary Robert McDonald, did not seem like the guy who was going to come in and clean out the Augean stables of an agency and bureaucracy gone horribly wrong.
But even now, before his confirmation (which is all but assured), there are already signs that the culture at the VA is changing. Within a week of McDonald’s departure, two Puerto Rico employees who had been poster children for VA corruption have already been fired, Luke Rosiak writes:
One is the hospital’s CEO, DeWayne Hamlin, who offered an employee $305,000 [in taxpayer money] to quit after she played a role in exposing his drug arrest….
The other person (Elizabeth Rivera) fired recently is a woman who took part in an armed robbery, then kept her job while she was in jail, and continued to work in the hospital’s security office while wearing an ankle bracelet.
McDonald and his staff had shielded these two employees, telling them they could not be fired and denying that Hamlin’s efforts to force out his deputy for reporting his own misconduct did not constitute “retaliation.” Although he was brought in to clean up after the agency’s major scandals, he pretty much covered for all those responsible, firing almost no one despite gross instances of misconduct at veterans’ expense. Our editorial board called him “the lead excuse-maker for an uncaring and self-serving bureaucracy.”
Shulkin has not yet taken his office, but the firing of these two employees (Hamlin was actually fired on Trump’s inauguration day; Rivera on Tuesday) might hint that he actually means business.
Of course, these two employees represent only the tip of the iceberg. As with all matters related to the federal bureaucracy, the danger exists that the highest-profile cases will be dealt with swiftly, and then everyone will go back to lying, cheating, and hurting veterans. As Rosiak notes, many VA medical facilities have hired felons and even offenders, and many of those who abetted the recent scandals or retaliated against whistleblowers are still employed at the VA.
Trump talked a lot about the VA scandals on the campaign trail, and he made big promises to veterans. Perhaps he is in the first stages of keeping those promises.
