Embattled VA punishes hundreds

23 of the affected employees based in network servicing Ga.

As part of a push for increased transparency, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has released a list of nearly 700 employees who have been fired, suspended or demoted since January, including nearly two dozen from the VA region that includes Georgia.

Most of the firings are of lower-level workers, including nursing assistants, medical clerks and housekeeping aides. Two physicians and a police officer were also fired. The VA didn’t publish the names of the fired workers, the reason for their discipline or the facility where they worked.

Twenty-three workers who were either removed or suspended since February were based in the VA’s 7th Service Network, which includes Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina.

The list is an initiative from the newly created VA Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection, created by an executive order that President Donald Trump issued in April and made permanent in recently adopted legislation. The VA Accountability

and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017, signed last month and co-authored by U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, makes it easier to fire employees, lowering the threshold of evidence needed for disciplinary action.

“Under this administration, VA is committed to becoming the most transparent organization in government,” VA Secretary David Shulkin said in announcing what he said would be a weekly listing of disciplined employees. “This additional step will continue to shine a light on the actions we’re taking to reform the culture at VA.”

Conservative lawmakers and advocacy groups have called for greater ease in firing and disciplining VA employees since the scandals over manipulated data on how long veterans had to wait for VA care erupted in 2014.

Unions representing VA workers have bitterly criticized the new legislation, which they say is an attempt to undercut the civil service system and unfairly targets rank-and-file employees rather than high-ranking executives.

In testimony before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs in May, J. David Cox, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, called the new legislation a “cynical effort to ride the wave of public outrage over some legitimate problems ... to destroy yet another union and the civil service.”

In a statement, Cox called the public listing of disciplined employees an intimidation tactic. “One-third of all VA employees are veterans themselves, and yet the administration is busy patting themselves on the back while so many veterans are being told they no longer have a job,” Cox said. “Window-dressing reforms like this do nothing to address the underlying issue at the VA, which is the shortage of doctors, nurses and intake staff at hospitals and clinics across the country.”

Last year, the VA’s Office of Inspector General found scheduling clerks regularly masked the true nature of wait times at hospitals and clinics by inputting false appointment data.

But even though many clerks told investigators they had been instructed to manipulate the data and feared retribution if they didn’t take part in the scheme, the Office of Inspector General concluded that VA executives didn’t order the data manipulation.

In the report’s aftermath, politicians such as former U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida, who was chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs at the time the report came out, held up the lack of discipline for employees and supervisors as evidence of dysfunction within the VA. “In classic VA fashion,” Miller said, “not a single person has been held accountable for any of this wrongdoing.”