This appointment is an insult to vets
On Wednesday afternoon, I started getting text messages from people I’d served with at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “Wait,” one read. “His White House doctor? Lolol.”
To anyone who knows anything about VA, that’s the reaction you’d expect given the news. But it really isn’t funny.
Minutes earlier, President Trump had announced by tweet that he had fired the VA Secretary and selected his personal White House doctor, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, to lead the department.
Jackson is, by most accounts, a decent man and well-qualified physician. He served in the Obama White House, and staffers for both Trump and Obama speak highly of him. He has a distinguished military career, which includes leading a forward-deployed Surgical Shock Trauma Platoon in Iraq.
But that’s it. He has no policy experience. He has no political experience. Most importantly, he doesn’t have the management experience to take on VA.
Let’s look at the numbers. VA exists to serve more than 20 million U.S. veterans. Its health care system alone has about 8 million veterans enrolled for care. That same system has more than 1,100 facilities across the country. This doesn’t include the millions more veterans receiving VA disability benefits or attending school on the VA-managed GI Bill. VA also runs America’s 135 national cemeteries.
The department has 370,000 employees and a $187 billion annual budget.
But VA is more than numbers. It’s about people. Veterans commit suicide at a higher rate than civilians. They face greater challenges than their civilian counterparts when searching for jobs in their 20s. And they require specialized medical care from a bureaucracy that can’t typically can’t meet demand.
Within this pressure cooker driven by America’s post-9/11 wars, VA has struggled to free itself from decades of technological neglect.
And while care at VA’s hospitals is generally accepted as equal or better than in the private sector, access to care remains problematic. It even led to last year’s inspector general report that found widespread inaccuracies in scheduling records that dramatically understated how long veterans were waiting for appointments.
These aren’t the types of challenges Jackson has ever faced, let alone solved. He has never managed more than several dozen people. And the President of the United States — elected in no small part by touting his own private-sector management credentials — wants to put him in charge of America’s second-largest federal agency.
This nomination is not only an insult to veterans. It’s also disrespectful to taxpayers. Jackson should know better than to accept it. And ifa he does, the Senate should not vote to confirm him.
I can appreciate the desire for “an outsider.” But we’re talking about a bureaucracy that, in recent years, chewed up a former Army chief of staff and the CEO of Procter & Gamble, a $127 billion company.
Trump is setting Jackson up for failure. And in doing so, he’s setting up America’s veterans for the same.
If the President really wanted to find the right person to lead VA, he’d need someone who understands veterans, who has managed a budget of at least, say, $10 billion and led at least 50,000 employees. And they’d have to be willing to work for less than $200,000 a year.
Few Americans meet those criteria. But if the White House cared even a little about veterans and the stewardship of taxpayer dollars, they’d make the effort to find that right person. But that’s not where the Trump administration is. And veterans are paying for it.
When I spoke to another longtime career official at VA headquarters on Friday, the person told me, “The office of the secretary is not focused on veterans at this time. Everything has come to a standstill.” The person continued: “We’ve had politics in the past, but I've never seen this.”
We’ve grown to expect this insane management style from President Trump, but we shouldn’t accept Jackson’s nomination. There needs to be a serious search for the next Veterans Affairs secretary. Picking your personal doctor because he says nice things about you on TV is no way to run the government.