OPINION:
Taking the top job at a scandal-ridden agency such as the Department of Veterans Affairs may be a fool’s errand, or at least a job for a foolish optimist. How can one man make a difference in a bloated organization of more than 300,000 employees? Robert A. McDonald, who took the job in July, revealed his grand rescue plan Monday. There’s what looks like hope for change.
He began his trapeze act (with no net) in a way rarely if ever done before in Washington. He sacked career employees for incompetence. He has sent the congressional authorizing committees a list of the first 35 people to get the pink slip. “We’re simplistically talking about people who violate our values,” Mr. McDonald told “60 Minutes” on Sunday. What are those values? “It’s integrity, it’s advocacy, it’s respect, it’s excellence. These are the things we try to do for our veterans.”
That sounds like he’s focused on what’s best for veterans, not what’s best for government employees. That’s an attitude imported from a customer-focused business. After his service in the U.S. Army, he spent three decades running Procter and Gamble, an $84 billion company, one of the few companies in America that operates on a scale comparable to the VA, which has a $78 billion budget.
Impatient Republican senators complained last month that Mr. McDonald has been tardy with reforms. In a statement, John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona and Richard Burr of North Carolina said they wanted the worst VA employees gone yesterday, and it appears that Mr. McDonald has been accumulating the evidence he needed to sack 1,000 deadweight employees. “We’ve got to make it stick,” he says.
The public-sector unions have built a protective bubble around bungling employees, making it so that the worst of the worst are rewarded with a publicly funded vacation — called “administrative leave” — while they file endless appeals. Most Cabinet officials are content to get these troublemakers out of the way, but we hope Mr. McDonald has the stomach and persistence needed to stay with the appeals process and throw out the poisoned apples for good. The laziness, heartlessness and incompetence at the Veterans Administration has cost actual human lives.
Under the old ways, a VA hospital could produce paperwork showing that it had improved its “wait times” and administrators could pocket millions of dollars in bonuses. Instead of making actual improvements, a number of officials falsified documents to make it appear that veterans weren’t kept waiting for care. At the VA hospital in Phoenix, for example, the delay for treatment was so long that 18 veterans died waiting to see a doctor. The paperwork was neat, tidy and faked. Mr. McDonald has canceled the executive bonuses.
Like most federal bureaucracies, the VA divides itself into several distinct fiefdoms. There’s the Veterans Benefits Administration, the Veterans Health Administration, the Office of Survivors Assistance, the National Cemetery Administration, and other offices and divisions. “They don’t know where to go,” says Mr. McDonald. “And if they do find somebody to go to, that person may be an expert in benefits, but not an expert in health care.”
Instead of leaving it up to veterans to figure out which telephone number to call, Mr. McDonald wants to reorder things so that the customer — the soldier who had put his life on the line for his country — is the point of the Veterans Administration. “We want to create a customer-service representative that person can go to.”
Many have tried to wrestle the bureaucracy into submission, and most have failed. Mr. McDonald has demonstrated that he’s a serious man. We hope so. This is a job that must be done right.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.