Veterans Affairs Secretary Shulkin out in latest White House shake-up
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday fired David Shulkin, the embattled head of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the latest high-profile ouster to roil the White House.
In a Twitter message, the president named Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, the chief White House physician, as the next VA secretary. Until Jackson can be confirmed, the acting head will be Robert Wilkie, the undersecretary for personnel at the Defense Department, Trump said.
Shulkin has been besieged by allegations of ethical lapses coupled with a determined campaign against him by conservatives who favor greater privatization of the huge VA health care system.
In a White House statement Wednesday, Trump said Shulkin “has been a great supporter of veterans across the country and I am grateful for his service.”
Jackson, who also served as White House physician for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, is a rear admiral in the Navy. In 2005, he served with the Marines as an emergency doctor in Iraq.
“Admiral Jackson is highly trained and qualified, and as a service member himself, he has seen firsthand the tremendous sacrifice our veterans make and has a deep appreciation for the debt our great country owes them,” Trump said in the statement.
Jackson has no apparent experience managing massive bureaucracies such as the VA. He is best known to the public for his exhaustive news briefing in January, detailing the results of Trump’s recent physical.
“Dr. Jackson is a good and honorable person, fine doctor and career military, but you do get the sense that this has as much to do with his boffo press conference on the president’s physical as anything else,” said former Obama adviser David Axelrod in a Twitter message.
One veterans group voiced concern about Jackson’s lack of management experience.
“We are disappointed and already quite concerned about this nominee,” said Joe Chenelly, national executive director of AMVETS. “The administration needs to be ready to prove that he’s qualified to run such a massive agency, a $200 billion bureaucracy.”
At the news briefing where he praised Trump’s health, Jackson also offered a clue to why Trump may have chosen him for the Cabinet job.
“I’ve seen him every day. I see him one, two, sometimes three times a day, because of the location of my office,” Jackson said. “We have conversations about many things, most if not — most don’t revolve around medical issues at all. But I’ve got to know him pretty well.”
In his other recent highlevel personnel moves — replacing Rex Tillerson with Mike Pompeo as secretary of State, for example — Trump has seemed to put a premium on finding people with whom he is personally comfortable — a trait he also followed as a businessman.