Two years ago, Veterans’ Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki left office in disgrace after it was discovered that more than 100 agency facilities were keeping secret lists to cover up how long veterans were kept waiting for medical care.
The deception, detailed by an agency official in an email he didn’t expect to be made public, hid a huge backlog of appointments. The subterfuge allowed bureaucrats to be paid performance bonuses that they had spectacularly failed to earn. Officials were betraying the men and women they were employed to serve, but the gravy train kept rolling.
Additionally, the VA was riven with failures involving corruption, cover-ups of infectious outbreaks at VA facilities, and retaliation against whistleblowers who tried to bring malfeasance to light.
To restore confidence, President Obama replaced Shinseki, a career military man, with a businessman, Robert McDonald, the former chairman and CEO of Procter and Gamble. He was supposed to inject order and business-like accountability.
“The seriousness of the moment demands urgent action,” McDonald told the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee at his July 2014 confirmation hearing. “The VA is in crisis. The veterans are in need. There is a lot of work to do to transform the department and it will not be easy, but it is essential and can be achieved.”
But that was then, and this is now.
Instead of mending the agency, McDonald has adopted the cavalier disregard of veterans that he was hired to end. He has become the lead excuse-maker for an uncaring and self-serving bureaucracy.
On Monday, at a breakfast discussion hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, McDonald tried to downplay the significance of wait-times. Disney doesn’t measure success based on how long you wait in line at their theme parks, he argued, and so likewise the VA should not be judged based on how long veterans have to wait for doctors appointments.
As first reported by the Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood, he said: “When you go to Disney [World], do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or [do they measure] what’s important? What’s important is, what’s your satisfaction with the experience? And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind of measure.”
McDonald was, of course, flat wrong even in suggesting that Disney isn’t concerned about wait times. But that’s hardly the point. Imagine asking Bernie Madoff’s victims whether they felt satisfied he’d done a good job — you know, aside from all that money they lost.
To do a good job at the Veterans Administration means actually to provide an empirically-measured and appropriate level of services owed to the country’s war-fighters. There is no alternative “measure” of satisfaction by which to gauge the experience of veterans who die while waiting in line.
And veterans, who put their lives on the line for their country and in many cases received grievous wounds, are not remotely comparable to pleasure-seeking holidaymakers. The comparison itself is further evidence of McDonald’s unsuitability for the job. So is the “clarifying” follow-up statement from the VA, treating the original scandal as if it was a mere “unintended consequence” of the agency putting too much weight on wait-times. No, it was a conscious choice by malingering VA bureaucrats to serve themselves rather than those who served. It was an agency culture that McDonald was supposedly hired to fix.
After nearly two years, McDonald has evidently concluded that the best way to deal with the problem he was hired to fix is to downplay its importance. And veterans are still waiting months for medical appointments.
VA employees spent years cheating and lying about wait-times. For the man brought in to deal with that issue, there is no alternative measure of success. He has failed and President Obama should fire him.
