The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Trump ousts VA secretary Shulkin
President nominates his personal physician to replace the official.
WASHINGTON — After weeks of uncertainty atop the Department of Veterans Affairs, President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he plans to replace its secretary, David J. Shulkin, with the president’s personal physician, Adm. Ronny L. Jackson.
The announcement punctuated what has been a sharp fall from favor for Shulkin, a politically moderate former hospital executive, who delivered Trump a string of bipartisan legislative victories at a time when he was struggling to find them. And it adds to a significant shakeup of Trump’s senior staff, which has already included the secretary of state, director of the CIA and
the president’s national security adviser.
Trump called Jackson “highly respected” and thanked Shulkin for “service to our country and to our great veterans.”
As secretary, Shulkin helped guide into law measures meant to improve services for the more than 20 million veterans in the United States. Those included an expansion of the GI Bill for post-9/11 veterans, legislation that makes it easier for the department to remove bad employees and a law that streamlines the appeals process for veterans seeking disability benefits.
Trump, who made veterans issues and overhauling the scandal-ridden department a focal point of his campaign, showered Shulkin with praise. At a bill-signing ceremony in June, Trump teased that the secretary need never worry about hearing his “Apprentice”-era catchphrase, “You’re fired.”
“We’ll never have to use those words on our David,” the president said. “We will never use those words on you, that’s for sure.”
In recent months, a group of conservative Trump administration appointees at the White House and the department began to break with the secretary and plot his ouster.
At issue was how far and how fast to privatize health care under the department’s health system, a long-sought goal for conservatives.
The officials — who included Shulkin’s press secretary and assistant secretary for communications, along with a top White House domestic policy aide — came to consider Shulkin, who had run the health program under President Barack Obama, and his top deputy as obstacles to one of the administration’s policy goals.
The secretary’s troubles only grew when what had been an internal power struggle burst into the open in February, after the department’s inspector general issued a scathing report describing “serious derelictions” related to a trip Shulkin took last year to Britain and Denmark.
Critics of the secretary seized on the report to try to hasten his removal. Shulkin, fearing a coup, went public with a warning about officials “trying to undermine the department from within” and cut off those he saw as disloyal.
At the White House, senior officials came to believe that Shulkin had misled them about the contents of the report.
And the secretary’s public declarations only further aggravated top officials, who felt Shulkin had gone too far in commenting on internal politics with news outlets and had opened the administration to sharp criticism over his trip to Europe, which the report said cost more than $122,000.
As recently as early March, after meetings with John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, Shulkin publicly claimed victory, signaling that he had the White House’s support to remove officials opposing him.
But the victory seemed short-lived. In short order, Shulkin began markedly curtailing his public profile, cutting off communications with reporters and isolating himself from top deputies he viewed to be disloyal. People who have spoken with the secretary in recent days said he was determined to keep his post, even as it became increasingly clear his time was up.
Shulkin remained overwhelmingly popular on Capitol Hill, where the Senate unanimously confirmed him last year, and among the veterans groups that have traditionally held outsize influence in Washington.
But Trump had had enough. He began to discuss successors in recent weeks, even considering Energy Secretary Rick Perry as a possibility.
He told friends recently that he would fire Shulkin, it was just a question of when.