This portrait of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ leadership crisis is based on interviews with 16 administration officials and other observers. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid views.
It is an extraordinary state of affairs at the massive federal agency – only the Defense Department is bigger – whose mission is etched outside its headquarters a block from the White House: “To care for him who shall have borne the battle.” Some of the secretary’s aides, many of whom spent decades following orders in the military, have for weeks openly defied their VA chain of command.
[...] Shulkin’s critics deny they are plotting a coup. Rather, they say they are airing differences over a controversial policy priority for the president – that veterans have greater ability to choose private doctors at VA’s expense.
Though popular in the White House, the effort is viewed skeptically by the American Legion and other veterans groups that fear it will lead to VA’s downsizing. Shulkin and his deputy, Thomas Bowman, have backed a bipartisan compromise in the Senate that would remove some restrictions on private care but keep VA in charge of deciding whether veterans can choose private doctors.
Their stance has been a disappointment to the White House, Shulkin’s critics say.
“The president said he believes veterans have the right to choose,” said Pete Hegseth, a former chief executive of Concerned Veterans for America, a conservative advocacy group backed by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. An Iraq War veteran, Hegseth is now co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
“Shulkin has talked a good game on Choice,” Hegseth said, referring to an existing program that allows veterans to see private doctors, but with restrictions. “But he’s sided with the permanent bureaucracy, the traditional veterans groups and the unions. This is a litmus test of whether he is truly a reformer who will drain the swamp at VA.”
VA employs 360,000 people and accounts for $186 billion annually. Its sprawling health-care and benefits system, which Trump blasted on the campaign trail as a wasteful, inefficient failure, churns away. But the dysfunction, observers say, has jeopardized legislation to extend the Choice program and a separate initiative to overhaul VA’s aging electronic health-records system.
[italics added] I recall the term showing up at times in published law cases, "officious intermeddler." Aside from that, it appears there is a putsch to privatize, which is not necessarily sound intent. The nation, by a substantial polling margin, wants universal coverage, i.e., what the veterans now solely enjoy, for everybody; including veterans before service, cradle to grave coverage run and financed by the federal government. And most believing that to be best policy also understand it is lobbyist/health-industrial-complex pressure [and politician buying] that so far has stood in the way of the public's majority wish. Something that should be ended ASAP.