Bush: How I’ll lift my low poll numbers

One major area he wants to reform is the Department of Veterans Affairs. The agency is in a perpetual state of disarray, with many of the Republican candidates for president bashing the administration for its inattention to the nation’s veterans. Each has pledged to extend greater support to veterans and the military as a whole — a seeming necessity for any Republican hoping to win the White House.

But Bush has articulated a more detailed plan to fix the VA than any of his counterparts, vowing to cut through the bureaucratic mess that too often hampers well-intentioned VA efforts to better its care. Bush has proposed expanding the veterans “choice” program, which allows patients to choose whether they stay within the VA system or head to the private sector. He has also pushed to add more women-centered options to the VA, as a greater number of female veterans return from service in need of care. While the VA rarely makes headlines for anything other than bad behavior, Bush’s quiet but comprehensive plan to reform the VA has drawn one of the most reviled federal agencies into the 2016 conversation.

Examiner: Why do you think outsiders are doing so well in this election cycle so far?

Bush: It’s a long haul. I’ve never worked in Washington. I’m an outsider. I came to Tallahassee when I was governor and disrupted the whole place. And I have a proven record of doing it, so as the campaign gets going, I’ll share that record. We eliminated 11 percent of the government workforce in Tallahassee. I took on the trial lawyers, which still are pretty powerful, and the teachers unions, which are very powerful, and we won. We created tort reform, we pushed back on the unions that were only focused on economic interests — this is their responsibility, I guess — but they didn’t want any accountability on learning, and we won. We won by cutting taxes. We did all this disrupting the old order. We had lobbying reform. We did the things, term limits was part of the way of life in Tallahassee, total transparency about how government operates. I have the skills to disrupt the order in Washington, D.C., as well. I’m probably the only candidate that has a specific agenda on how to do that, rather than just broad generalities.

Examiner: There’s a number of polls that have shown, at the moment, you have relatively high unfavorable ratings. But a lot of people also make the argument that you’re the most electable Republican. So how do you square those two facts?

Bush: Well, because people generally think that I have the leadership skills to be president of the United States, so when I share my record and give them a sense that I’m a reform-minded, serious candidate that has the skills to lead, that’s how I’ll win. We haven’t put a dollar of advertising up yet. People think they know me, but they don’t know the full Florida record. I think people that follow the here-and-now part of politics — it’s all fun, I guess — but I have a long view. I mean, we’re not even to Labor Day. It wasn’t that long ago when the start of the campaign effectively was Labor Day for the primaries and Labor Day for the general. Now, it’s like a perpetual motion machine from four years before, and I just think people start focusing on this in the fall. And we’re in a good place right now.

Examiner: Overall, what do you see as the most wasteful use of taxpayer dollars in the federal government today?

Bush: In terms of priorities, I think the Veterans Administration deserves to be near the front of the line, because these are men and women who served, many of whom in combat. They have post-traumatic stress challenges. There’s been a surge of disability issues related to the wartime service that they’ve had in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I, for one, believe that this should be a very, very high priority, where the challenge and the opportunity is to reform the system so that the dollars appropriated go further. They go on behalf of veterans rather than the system itself. Now we have a challenge of the sequester cutting and gutting the military and there’s going to be a lot more veterans that are going to be forced to leave the military if we continue down this trend. It’ll overwhelm the system. So you have the unique challenge of veterans that are coming back home from Iraq and Afghanistan, you have many more women that are leaving the military because many more women entered the military in the last 15 years, and the VA needs to modernize itself and simultaneously refocus its efforts on the unique challenges that the new veterans are facing. So I for one am not suggesting we cut spending, I’m just saying, allocate it toward the veterans.

Examiner: But are there any specific federal programs or agencies you would eliminate as president?

Bush: First of all, I think if you take Medicaid, Department of Transportation funding, Department of Education funding, and shift it back, create what’s called a ‘defined contribution’ system where, in return for the freedom to be able to operate these programs, you’re delegating that authority to the states, you’re going to be saving enormous sums of money. There’s specific programs that I don’t think need to exist anymore, [such as] the Economic Development Agency, the EDA. A lot of these programs that existed, it might have been effective four years ago, need to be reviewed. And I think if you look at, for example, the Department of Education has scores of programs for early childhood literacy, and so does [Health and Human Services]. Why not block grant all that back to the states? Combine them all together, cut out the bureaucratic overhead, allow states that want to create new strategies for lower cost, higher outcome kind of programs that are literacy-based, let them do it. You’re going to save a ton of money from Washington and equally important, I guess, is that you’re shifting power away from Washington. The founders never envisioned a government this powerful, and its size and scope is what creates a lot of its incompetence and inefficiencies. Then on top of that, you have all the lobbyists, all the lawyers, all the accountants, that create Washington now as the most prosperous region in the United States, and that’s not the way it should be.

Examiner: What do you think is the biggest problem with the VA today?

Bush: It’s not responsive to its clients, to its customers. It’s like most of Washington, D.C.: it’s insular, it’s bureaucratic, it’s organized with a mid-20th century model that has not been challenged. So you have a budget over the last six years that’s grown by 70 percent. You have 330,000 people working in the Veterans Administration but sadly — in terms of wait times and being able to get some kind of disability status, how they build their structures, how they build their building — all of this is just sheer incompetence because it’s too big and too insular and not focused first and foremost on the veterans that they’re serving. So I think it’s a structural problem, it’s not necessarily the people inside the system. Some of them do this really because they have a heart for veterans and they care about them, but the systems need to be modernized.

Examiner: What makes some of the problems with the VA different from problems in other federal agencies?

Bush: I think most of the federal agencies would have a similar kind of critique, and if you gave a similar kind of critique, you’d be correct. It’s just, this is so big, and it has garnered a lot of attention because of the tragic system of where they ended up with senior management getting bonuses for taking people off a waiting list without giving them care, and vets died. And only three people have been fired. That is so tragic, but it’s an indication of a problem that exists throughout the federal government. It’s an indictment on the sheer incompetence of the federal government, not necessarily the VA. I don’t think the VA is any different than any of these other departments. It just has a very vital service.

Examiner: What do you think are some of the top things we can do to fix the VA system?

Bush: First and foremost, we need to expand veterans’ choice. We need to expand the choices that veterans have. If a veteran wants to be able to see his own private doctor, it should be easier to do it. Lessons learned in my experience as governor is, if you give people choice, if you give parents choice for options in education rather than telling them where they have to go, all schools get better. The way life works, and it would work to empower veterans to give them the kind of quality that they deserve, but it would create some tension and pressure for the VA to be able to provide better services. So that would be one thing. Secondly, modernizing the department, bringing best business practices in, it requires changing the civil service laws. There’s some reforms, kind of minor reforms, that took place. I think we could be more dramatic on how you modernize the work force. I don’t think the Veterans Administration, until they can prove themselves capable, should be responsible for building anything. I mean, the scandalous overrun in Aurora and outside of Denver where a hospital started for $300 million-plus went to $800 million, now has an overrun of $1.7 billion — it’s beyond tragic, given the debt levels that we have. The Army Corps should be responsible for the clinics and hospitals that are being refurbished and built. I think their skill sets are better for that. Procurement needs to be reformed. It’s just all the best practices that exist in the private sector, needs to be applied here. So those are some of the things that, in terms of just making the process more effective. Information technology needs to be brought into the 21st century. In very, very few places across the country can a veteran go online and get an appointment, but if you or I went to our private provider or went to a hospital in the private marketplace, generally, most of this stuff is done online. This is not a question of a lack of money, this is a question of just grotesque inefficiencies that, with proper management and leadership, we can get this done. We can fix this.