Shulkin: Trump not ‘well served’ by team
Fired VA chief says president needs better support to succeed
WASHINGTON – Recently fired Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin says President Donald Trump is doing a good job by demanding excellence from members of his Cabinet but needs a better team supporting him to be successful.
“I think that he’s not being well served by all the people around him,” Shulkin told USA TODAY. “As big of an organization as he needs to run, you need to have the right people around you with the right team, and, you know, we see with all the turnover and different things going on that are happening in the White House, that he’s still trying to figure that out.”
He said the president has every right to have the people around him whom he trusts and wants to hear from.
“But I think many of the things that we’re seeing and that we’re struggling with have to do with building that team and the staff around him,” he said.
Shulkin spent a little more than a year in Trump’s Cabinet before the president fired him Wednesday in a tweet.
He was the only Cabinet holdover from the Obama administration and the third member to depart since Trump took office. He has also been the most publicly vocal on his way out.
He gave a series of TV on interviews and wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times warning against privatizing the Department of Veterans Affairs. The president suggested Thursday that he let Shulkin go in part because he wasn’t quickly expanding veterans’ options to get VA-funded care in the private sector.
Shulkin said in an interview with USA TODAY that it wasn’t the focus of his discussions with Trump leading up to his selection as secretary in January last year.
“We talked about the essential need to fix the VA – that he felt passionately that veterans weren’t getting the type of services and care that they needed, and I agreed with him,” he said.
Shulkin pitched his experience at the agency – he had served as undersecretary for health since July 2015 – and his belief that he could speed the pace of improvements to the agency. But in the end, it wasn’t fast enough for the president, and Shulkin said he agreed.
“I’m impatient, he’s impatient, the country’s impatient. We all want to do this faster and better,” he said. Still, he said the size of the organization and the fact that issues became engrained over so many years make fixes difficult.
“You can’t quickly turn on a dime and see the type of progress that people want in the time frame that you want always,” he said.