Shea Wilkes, a Department of Veterans Affairs clinical worker in Louisiana, confirmed to the Washington Examiner that the VA is rife with nepotism and cronyism, a claim other disgruntled VA workers have made over the last year.
Wilkes said all he ever wanted to do was serve in the U.S. Armed Forces, and help veterans. But he said soon after he started working at the VA in 2007, he noticed the agency’s corrupt hiring practices.
“I started noticing the hiring practices were kind of … I was like, I don’t think they did this right,” he said.
“It was just a shame,” he said. “Weren’t giving veterans preference, they know how to manipulate those masterfully.”
“That’s why there’s such a big thing of cronyism, which is basically one of the major problems in the VA,” he added. “You have poor leadership from top to bottom, and those leaders have taught those under them the wrong way to do things.”
He said his local VA office is filled with connected “good ol’ boys.”
“To be honest, they’re incompetent,” he said. “A lot of the reasons there’s problems is they’re incompetent.”
In the same interview, VA employee Brandon Coleman recounted several acts of retaliation against him for blowing the whistle on poor treatment of suicidal veterans.
