VA Corruption, Cronyism, and Incompetence

This administration continues failing to abide by the basic responsibilities inherent in our Constitution to honor the contract between our citizen soldiers and our Federal Government.

My blog today points fingers at the specific people at VA responsible for VA’s crisis, and it offers some quick steps VCS supporters can take to fix these problems.

The problems at VA are rooted in failures at the top.  The healthcare providers and claims processors are doing their best under the worst form of partisan leadership.

Bonuses are a legitimate way of recognizing accomplishments and improving morale, especially among the rank-and-file at VA who truly earned it by helping veterans.  However, the bonus system for political appointees must be overhauled.

Nearly all VA employees are struggling to assist veterans.  They need full funding.  They need competent, ethical, and professional managers.  They earned bonuses to improve morale. 

However, the failure of top VA political appointees over the past five years to assist America’s veterans now verges on the catastrophic:

  * Hundreds of thousands of homeless veterans struggle to survive on our streets every night, yet top VA political appointees lack both the ability and the political will to care for them all.

  * Hundreds of thousands of eligible veterans remain shut out of VA medical care because this administration and the prior Congress failed to fully fund VA hospitals, an unconscionable act during wartime.

  * hundreds of thousands of our wounded, injured, and ill veterans wait six months or longer hacking through a red tape jungle for disability benefits so they can pay their bills.

  * the future doesn’t look brighter as hundreds of thousands more troops are sent to fight in the surge, resulting in hundreds of thousands of more Iraq War-related disability compensation claims.

Sure, it is easy to point fingers: The current administration planned and started their Iraq War without developing a plan to provide medical care, disability benefits, and transition services for our veterans.  They wanted to fight their war on the cheap and hide the human cost of the war from a public now growing increasingly restless and angry about rising casualties.

When the time came for VA leaders to step up to the plate, they choked.  This administration placed unqualified people in key positions at VA and they did not ask for enough money to care for our wounded, injured, and ill.  The resulting mismanagement of the political appointees borders on cataclysmic.

The alarm is sounding about rampant corruption and wasteful spending by VA leaders.

A review of several Government Accountability reports confirms that VA spent hundreds of millions of our tax dollars on computer systems like CoreFLS and VETSNET that still don’t deliver all that was promised.

There is the worst form of cronyism in Jim Nicholson.  Bush appointed him even though he had no experience in VA healthcare or benefits.  Nicholson’s stellar credentials? He led the Republican Party and raised millions of dollars for Bush.

And there is incompetence. Mike Kussman, the number two man responsible for VA medical hospitals, knew about the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal in 2004 and did nothing.  There is financial malfeasance because Kussman knew about the $3 billion VA budget shortfall in 2005 and remained silent.
 
The outrage doesn’t stop there.  Bush wants to do more damage to VA’s excellent reputation of providing high-quality medical care.  Bush nominated Kussman for a promotion to become the number one VA political appointee overseeing 1,400 VA facilities and 200,000 employees treating more than five million veterans each year.

There is additional incompetence.  Political appointee Ronald Aument, the number two man responsible for all VA disability payments, got a highly questionable $33,000 cash performance bonus approved by Nicholson.   Under Aument, the number of veterans waiting longer for disability payments skyrocketed.

While complaining about VA bureaucracy to the Washington Post, Aument has done nothing to shorten the 23-page VA claim form or cut red tape.  Aument’s failures force veterans to wait and wait and wait while he steals a bonus from taxpayers worth more money than a 100 percent disabled veteran receives in a year.

VA needs to escape from years of underfunding and partisan hacks who hurt VA’s reputation and harm veterans.

Congress has the opportunity and the responsibility to do something about VA’s crisis now - before hundreds of thousands of additional veterans and their families are harmed by the current administration driving VA into the ground.

Congress works for us.  Please call them today and demand an end to partisan corruption, cronyism, and incompetence at VA.  Demand that they expand their legislative oversight of an administration that drove VA into the ground - Grover Norquist wants. 

Congress should be presented with four ways to start fixing VA’s crisis:

1. Michael Kussman must not be promoted to become Under Secretary for Health.

2. Ronald Aument must return his ill-gotten cash bonus so the rank-and-file receive the bonuses they earned.

3. VA leaders must work with DoD and automatically share military records enroll all war veterans into VA’s healthcare system as well as process their VA disability claims before they are discharged. 

4. VA leaders must implement policies to reduce suicides like Iraq War Marine Jonathan Shulze, and VA must reduce the wait time to 30 days to process disability claims for those who file claims after they are discharged.

There is no reason why the current administration and Congress can’t meet these simple steps before Nicholson, Kussman, and Aument all go to the unemployment line on January 20, 2009.  Otherwise, they are abdicating their responsibility to the next administration and the next Congress.

We know what the problems are.  The time for action is now.  Call Congress, demand funding, oversight, and accountability today.  We are all in this together until the wars are over.

Thanks, Paul.