VA watchdog failure, report contends

The president heralded the office as a tool to clean up the troubled agency.

One of President Donald Trump’s signature initiatives to turn around a culture of retaliation against whistleblowers at the Department of Veterans Affairs is an office in disarray that instead has punished them — and held almost no wrongdoers accountable.

Those are the conclusions of a scathing report released Thursday by the agency’s inspector general, which found that the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection created early in Trump’s term in 2017 has failed in its core mission.

The president heralded the office as a tool to clean up the troubled agency. More than two years later it resembles a kangaroo court, the inspector general found, running inferior investigations that VA attorneys cannot trust and “floundering” in its duty to protect employees who report wrongdoing.

Just one senior manager has been removed by an office created to discipline senior-level managers involved in misconduct, Inspector General Michael Missal found.

The office has shown “significant deficiencies,” including poor leadership, skimpy training of investigators, a misunderstanding of its mission and a failure to discipline senior leaders, according to the 100-page report.

“Notably, in its first two years of operation, the [office] acted in ways that were inconsistent with its statutory authority while it simultaneously floundered in its mission to protect whistleblowers,” the report says.

The department “created an office culture that was sometimes alienating to the very individuals it was meant to protect.”

In response, VA spokeswoman Christina Mandreucci said in a statement that the report “largely focuses on [the office’s] operations under previous leaders who no longer work at VA.” She said its new leadership has independently identified many of the issues the inspector general highlights, and is moving to make changes, ensuring greater oversight of investigations and halting retaliation against whistleblowers.

Mandreucci also touted the VA’s overall success at firing problem employees, citing the law passed by Congress that established the accountability office and gave the agency new tools to improve performance.

“In fact, since June 23, 2017, when the Act became law, VA has fired more than 8,630 people,” she wrote.

The office, which Trump established in 2017 with an executive order, was designed to improve the agency’s ability to hold employees accountable and enhance protections for whistleblowers who had long faced retaliation. Congress passed legislation two months later that made the office permanent.

The office’s “mission and authority were statutorily established to protect whistleblowers from retaliation and hold senior VA employees and supervisors accountable,” Missal, the VA’s inspector general, said in a statement. “This report demonstrates that under prior executive directors it failed on both counts in important ways — leaving new leaders with significant challenges to overcome.”

Peter O’Rourke, the office’s first executive director, used his position to retaliate against whistleblowers and failed to provide adequate reports to Congress on the office’s day-to-day operations, investigators found.

O’Rourke, forced out of office last year after serving as acting secretary, is now executive director of the Florida Republican Party.

The long-awaited report came as a relief to many whistleblowers, who said they had high hopes for the office when it was created.

“It solidly confirms what VA whistleblowers have been reporting for the past two years: The [office] targeted and silenced whistleblowers to the detriment of Veterans, creating a culture of fear and substantial personal risk for anyone who dared to speak up against wrongdoing and corruption in the federal government,” said Jay DeNofrio, a program analyst for the VA tele-mental health program. He is suing the VA after learning that the office began to investigate him for reporting problems in veterans nursing homes.

Brandon Coleman, a former VA whistleblower who was recruited to serve as the office’s first whistleblower program specialist and to develop mentor, education and outreach programs, said in an email that “under current leadership all of that is gone.”

“As a noted VA whistleblower who supports President Trump I will say it is a scary time to be a whistleblower within the federal government,” Coleman said in a statement. The office “was how we were finally supposed to get it right for VA Whistleblowers and instead we are currently failing them.”