Nominee to lead VA gets nod from Senate
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Monday confirmed Denis McDonough as President Joe Biden's veterans affairs secretary, choosing a non-veteran but a manager with years of government service to lead the sprawling health and benefits agency.
McDonough, 51, was chief of staff in Barack Obama's second term and held senior roles on the National Security Council and on Capitol Hill before that. He told senators at his confirmation hearing that while he is not a veteran, his long career as a behind-thescenes troubleshooter and policymaker would serve him well at the Department of Veterans Affairs, a massive bureaucracy beset by multiple challenges.
"I can unstick problems inside agencies and across agencies, especially at an agency as large as VA," McDonough told the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee in January.
Before the vote, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called VA's mission to care for veterans "one of organization, institutional know-how, and administrative troubleshooting."
McDonough was confirmed on an 87-to-7 vote.
VA, the second-largest federal agency, includes health care services for 9 million veterans, a vast benefits bureaucracy and dozens of national cemeteries. Management and workforce challenges have long beset leaders in both parties. A scandal over fudged wait-time lists for medical appointments led Obama to fire his first veterans' chief.
McDonough succeeds Robert Wilkie, former president Donald Trump's second VA leader.
Wilkie's tenure closed out with a scathing inspector general's report in December that found he campaigned to discredit a congressional aide who said she was sexually assaulted at VA's medical center in D.C.