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The Atlanta-Journal Constitution has played an important role in covering the failings of the VA in Atlanta and across the country. The AJC was the first news organization to shed light on the VA’s backlog of 800,000 applications for health care access overseen by the agency’s national enrollment office in Atlanta. Read previous coverage at myAJC.com.
New Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald spends considerable time these days talking about restoring trust and changing the culture in the scandal-plagued agency.
It’s a message the former Procter & Gamble CEO has been repeating to Congress and on a blitz of more than 40 VA facilities across the country, including a two-day visit to Atlanta last month.
The tour is an effort to get a handle on the challenges facing a vast federal agency with more 150 VA hospitals and over 300,000 employees serving 22 million veterans. That system crushed his predecessor, Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was forced out after a scandal involving a cover-up of the long waits thousands of veterans endured when they sought VA services.
On Monday, McDonald announced a reorganization that he says will improve customer service and make it easier for veterans to get benefits. But as the country recognizes Veterans Day today, a review of McDonald’s brief tenure also reveals concern about whether he can be the tough-minded reformer that some of his supporters hoped when the Senate confirmed his appointment in late July.
In recent weeks, he’s faced criticism from members of Congress and others who say he is not moving fast enough to hold wrongdoers accountable. New emails released Oct. 31 revealed how top officials tried to influence the agency’s inspector general’s report that detailed delays and patient deaths at the Phoenix VA where the wait time scandal erupted earlier this year.
McDonald said during his Atlanta visit said he’s moving quickly to hold anyone who violated the VA’s values accountable. He said federal law requires him to follow a process and he has no incentive to protect bad managers. He has ordered VA hospitals to hold quarterly town hall meetings with veterans.
“Across the nation we’ve had significant problems with access, transparency, accountability, and integrity,” McDonald said during his Atlanta trip. “I’ve made clear to every single employee in the VA that if our values are violated we will take aggressive and expeditious disciplinary action and hold people accountable.”
As of last week, only one senior executive has been fired under new rules that give the secretary more authority, although others have been placed on administrative leave. On Sunday, McDonald told CBS 60 Minutes that he has a disciplinary report with more than 1,000 names of people who face possible dismissal. A separate report he has delivered to Congress has 35 officials who face possible dismissal.
To many who have met him, the West Point graduate and former Army paratrooper comes across as a sincere and no-nonsense leader.
Veterans Service Organizations say McDonald is engaging them and seeking their input. McDonald, according to Garry Augustine, executive director of Disabled American Veterans, wants to hear what’s not working.
McDonald, who asks people to call him Bob, even gave out his cell phone and has been fielding calls and texts from veterans.
“It’s a new philosophy and a new era in the VA,” said Augustine. “We think they are making significant steps in the right direction.”
But some veterans haven’t been pleased with the pace of change.
“What McDonald had when he came in was the opportunity to come in a rip the scab off and say, ‘Hey we know secret wait lists and manipulated times and bonuses for executives is a real problem. We’re going to address that to restore trust,’” said Pete Hegseth, CEO with Concerned Veterans for America, a right-leaning advocacy group. “Instead, it feels like he came in to be a bit more of a company man.”
During McDonald's visit to Atlanta Oct. 27 and 28, he gave a full endorsement of Atlanta VA hospital director Leslie Wiggins just hours after meeting with veterans who have been critical of her style and leadership.
After they called him to complain, he returned the call to say he had heard the concerns. And with Bob Teets, one of the veterans he met with in Atlanta, that approach seemed to work.
“I was kind of amazed he called,” Teets said. “As long as he keeps an active dialogue with veterans through himself and his upper staff I think we’re going to see some real changes.”
And McDonald's Atlanta visit also raised questions about whether he's doing enough to fix a backlog of more than 800,000 health care applications that the VA's national Health Eligibility Center (HEC) in Atlanta is charged with overseeing.
After his meeting with the center's leaders in Atlanta, McDonald repeated parts of the misleading information they put out to veterans groups and the public that downplayed the backlog. When pressed, the secretary would not directly answer whether he trusted what the leadership at the center was reporting to him.
“I talked to the leadership,” McDonald said. “I’m reporting to you my understanding of the situation…The point is we’ve got to go back and we’ve got to go application by application and take care of veterans. This is about veterans.”
While here, McDonald discussed a plan to reduce the backlog. It involves contacting all veterans on the list, but he said no date for completing that plan was discussed in his meeting with HEC leaders.
If he had met with staff members, he would have received a different story.
Whistleblower Scott Davis, who testified before Congress about the problems in July, said employees at the center could have presented him with a report from August that revealed at least 90 percent of veterans in one category of pending enrollment had applied for health care. Management at the facility has claimed that around 75 percent of the veterans in the backlog were not actually applying for health care.
“It was an opportunity to show some leadership on this issue instead of continuing VA’s policy of delay, deny and deflect,” Davis said. “You’re asking the people responsible for the deception to give you the true information.”
The agency, which has a longstanding practice of punishing whistleblowers, has almost 100 cases before the federal Office of Special Counsel, which is charged with investigating whistleblower complaints. McDonald said encouraging employees to speak out is an important part of the cultural transformation.
The reorganization he announced Monday, dubbed “MyVA”, will streamline all VA’s services to veterans under one customer-centered organization. McDonald said the reorganization will cut costs and provide “top-level customer service” to vets.
“New plans, initiatives and organizational structures are all well and good, but they will not produce their intended results until VA rids itself of the employees who have shaken veterans’ trust in the system,” said Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. “So far VA hasn’t done that.”
Despite criticism from some members of Congress, McDonald in his first few months appears to have cultivated an important ally in Georgia, Sen. Johnny Isakson. With Republicans about to take control of the Senate, Isakson is the leading candidate to be the new chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs when the new Congress is seated in January.
Isakson called McDonald a “good man” who’s off to a “good start.” He said some of the executives who failed former Secretary Shinseki have left and others probably will go in time.
“Bob McDonald is the type of guy that is very open to advice and open to communication both from those who are under him as well as the Congress,” Isakson said. “I think he’ll assess the problems correctly and do everything he can to implement the right solution.”
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