Shinseki resigns amid VA scandal over veterans’ health care
Shinseki resigns amid VA scandal over veterans’ health care
(about 7 hours later)
Eric K. Shinseki resigned Friday as secretary of veterans affairs, taking responsibility for a scandal in the VA health-care system over excessive waiting times and coverups of what he called “systemic” problems.
Eric K. Shinseki resigned as secretary of veterans affairs Friday, apologizing for a scandal in which employees throughout the VA’s massive hospital system conspired to hide months-long wait times that veterans faced when seeking care.
President Obama announced that he accepted Shinseki’s resignation after agreeing with his embattled VA secretary that he had become a “distraction” as the department struggles to deal with a huge increase of veterans in need of care after more than a decade of war overseas.
The size and scope of the coverups in an agency that he had presided over for more than five years left Shinseki dumbfounded and President Obama searching for a replacement for one of his longest serving and most trusted Cabinet officials. Obama said Sloan D. Gibson, the deputy secretary of veterans affairs, will take over the VA until a new secretary is named.
Obama made the announcement shortly after Shinseki apologized publicly Friday for what he called an “indefensible” lack of integrity among some senior leaders of the VA health-care system and announced several remedial steps, including a process to remove top officials at the troubled VA medical center in Phoenix.
In announcing Shinseki’s resignation, Obama went out of his way to describe the former Army general as a person of integrity who presided over a bureaucracy that was overwhelmed by two long wars and an aging veteran population, and which ultimately succumbed to widespread cheating to hide its shortcomings.
[Read about how the VA developed its culture of coverups.]
“I want to reiterate, he is a very good man,” the president said at the White House. “I don’t just mean that he’s an accomplished man. I don’t just mean that he’s been an outstanding soldier. He’s a good person, who’s done exemplary work on our behalf.”
Speaking after a meeting with Shinseki at the White House, Obama said Shinseki had offered him his resignation.
Obama, however, concluded that the growing calls for Shinseki’s firing had become too much of a distraction from the complicated work of fixing the troubled department.
“With considerable regret, I accepted,” Obama said. “We don’t have time for distractions,” he added. “We need to fix the problem.”
The problems surrounding long wait times for care — and VA employees’ attempts to cover them up — have been around for years, detailed in more than 18 watchdog reports dating back to 2000. The latest, and most damning, review was released earlier this week by the VA inspector general and immediately spurred the wave of bipartisan calls for Shinseki’s ouster. Shinseki himself seemed stunned by the report’s conclusion that he had, for the last five years, been presiding over a deeply flawed and dishonest bureaucracy.
He said Sloan D. Gibson, the deputy secretary of veterans affairs, is taking over as acting secretary until a permanent replacement for Shinseki is found and confirmed by the Senate.
“I can’t explain the lack of integrity among some of the leaders of our healthcare facilities,” Shinseki said shortly before he quit his post. “This is something I rarely encountered during my 38 years in uniform. I cannot defend it because it is indefensible. But I can take responsibility for it, and I do.”
Obama paid tribute to Shinseki, telling reporters that he arrived at his decision to accept the VA chief’s resignation because of Shinseki’s “belief that he would be a distraction from the task at hand, which is to make sure that what’s broken gets fixed so that his fellow veterans are getting the services that they need.”
Shinseki’s fall at the VA was triggered by a confluence of problems including poor leadership at VA hospitals, woefully dated technology and a health-care system that couldn’t handle the strain caused by almost 13 years of war and Vietnam veterans who were using the system in greater numbers, according to his former top aides. Shinseki’s forced resignation amid dwindling political support raises a difficult question for the Obama administration: Can anyone reform an agency that, as the president acknowledged Friday, had been dogged by management and funding problems for a “very long” time?
“He is a very good man,” Obama said. “He’s a good person who’s done exemplary work on our behalf.” He said Shinseki concluded that “he could not carry out the next stages of reform without being a distraction himself.”
Soon after he took over the VA in 2009, Shinseki tried to improve the leadership culture in the VA by meeting quarterly with every hospital director in the agency’s giant network, sometimes for hours. “It was months and months and months . . . every single day getting a personal read,” said Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) who worked for Shinseki at the VA. “No other secretary had ever done that.”
“I think he is deeply disappointed in the fact that bad news did not get to him and that the structures weren’t in place for him to identify this problem quickly and fix it,” Obama said. “His priority now is to make sure that happens, and he felt like new leadership . . . would serve our veterans best, and I agree with him.”
The former Army general, who lost half of his right foot to a mine in Vietnam, also pushed for more education and training, similar to the kind the Army had instituted in the 1970s when it wrestled with widespread discipline problems, mistrust and dissent in its own ranks. Neither of those efforts was enough to ensure that managers — seeking performance bonuses and promotions — were willing to acknowledge the problems inside VA’s healthcare system, which grew worse over the last five years as more than 2 million patients were added to the rolls.
Earlier Friday, Shinseki gave no indication that he intended to resign, despite growing calls for him to step down because of the scandal.
“As Ric Shinseki himself indicated, there is a need for a change in culture within the [Veterans Health Administration] and perhaps the VA as a whole to make sure that bad news gets surfaced quickly so things can be fixed,” Obama said.
At the end of a speech to an annual conference of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans in Washington, Shinseki addressed a new interim report on the VA health-care system’s problems. He said he now knows that the problems are “systemic,” rather than isolated as he thought in the past.
John Gingrich, Shinseki’s chief of staff until 2012, summed up the problem in even starker terms: “When people don’t have integrity, it is hard to transform them.”
“That breach of integrity is irresponsible,” he told the largely supportive audience. “It is indefensible and unacceptable to me.” He said he was “too trusting” of some top officials and “accepted as accurate reports that I now know to have been misleading with regard to patient wait times.”
Shinseki also struggled to update the VA’s electronic scheduling systems, some of which had been in place since the 1980s. The aging system made it difficult for low-level employees to track patients and made it almost impossible for top VA officials in Washington to get reliable data on how long veterans were waiting for care. The president on Friday described these technology problems as “eminently fixable.”
Obama summoned Shinseki to a meeting at the White House at 10:15 a.m. Friday to discuss the problems in the VA health-care system. The meeting ended at about 11 a.m., and Obama headed to the White House briefing room.
Plans to build a new scheduling system, however, have been on the books for more than 14 years and have languished because of a lack of funding and the need to address more pressing needs within the overburdened VA system. “It’s a simple question of bandwidth and priorities,” said Peter Levin, a former senior technology adviser to Shinseki at the VA.
Obama said the VA’s initial review showed that “the misconduct has not been limited to a few VA facilities, but many across the country.” He said that was “totally unacceptable,” adding: “Last week I said that if we found misconduct, it would be punished, and I meant it.”
As the strain on the system and mid-level VA managers mounted, a culture of cheating and lying took hold within the department, former officials said. “It is like the Army at the end of the Vietnam War,” said a top VA official, who requested anonymity in order to speak frankly about the VA’s problems. “You can only press so hard before even people with the highest values start to succumb to the lowest common denominator.”
In response to a question, Obama said he would leave it to the Justice Department to determine “whether there’s been criminal wrongdoing” within the VA system.
Until recently, Shinseki was best known in Washington as the four-star Army general who had drawn the ire of the George W. Bush administration by predicting that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq in the wake of a U.S. invasion. “He has never been afraid to speak truth to power,” the president said Friday.
Reacting to the resignation, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters that Shinseki’s departure does not absolve Obama of blame and vowed that congressional Republicans would hold the president accountable for fixing the problems. He urged Obama to order the VA to cooperate with a House investigation and to “outline his vision” for getting to the bottom of the problems.
Shinseki’s reputation as a straight shooter who had fought for his countrywon him widespread admiration in Washington. One of those admirers was Duckworth, a first-term lawmaker who lost both her legs after a helicopter accident in Iraq in 2004. She became an outspoken critic of the war as she recovered and befriended then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who backed her unsuccessful 2006 congressional bid. Later, she joined the Obama administration as a VA assistant secretary for public affairs — the public face of the department — and reported to Shinseki.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement: “It is now time to restore veterans’ trust in the reliability of the care they are receiving from the VA.” He pledged to do “everything I can to ensure that the Congress works to address the root causes” of the problems.
“I’d mop floors for Ric Shinseki,” she said in a 2009 interview with The Washington Post shortly after she took the job. She reaffirmed those sentiments in an interview last week. “He cares about veterans as deeply as anyone,” Duckworth said. “His entire life has been spent taking care of soldiers. ”
House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) vowed Friday to intensify his panel’s probe of an alleged coverup of the agency’s delays in getting basic health-care meetings for veterans.
By Friday morning — after reading the VA inspector general report, speaking with fellow veterans and hearing from constituents — Duckworth delivered a significant psychological and political blow to Obama, her political patron, and Shinseki, her former boss.
“There will be no honeymoon period,” Miller told reporters after Shinseki’s announcement.
“Our first priority should be the veterans, and at this point whether Secretary Shinseki will stay or go is too much of a distraction,” she told The Washington Post shortly before Shinseki submitted his resignation. “I think he has to go.”
Miller said he has a good working relationship with Gibson and expects to speak with the acting VA secretary later Friday. But he said his committee will continue to dig into the scandal.
Many of Shinseki’s closest aides and his backers on Capitol Hill pointed to his achievements during his time running the VA, especially his effort to reduce veteran homelessness by 25 percent during his tenure. An hour before he submitted his resignation, Shinseki received a sustained standing ovation from the crowd at the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans’ annual conference in Washington. “Now is not the time to let up or get complacent,” he said. “We all need to work harder. This coalition can end veteran homelessness by next year. So let’s get on with it.”
Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), who called for Shinseki’s resignation Friday morning shortly before Obama’s announcement, reiterated her previous suggestion that an outside executive might be the best long-term leader for the department. Such a leader might “provide a fresh look,” she said.
Shinseki cut waiting times for GI bill benefits from months to less than one week and changed the rules on disability benefits so that hundreds of thousands of veterans who were battling diseases related to Agent Orange could get help.
Duckworth told The Washington Post that Shinseki reached a tipping point once the debate centered on his political standing. Replacing him would return the focus to caring for veterans, she said. Duckworth lost both her legs while serving in Iraq as an Army helicopter pilot and later worked under Shinseki at the VA before winning a House seat from a suburban Chicago district in 2012.
Some lawmakers said that Shinseki’s lack of political and media savvy had made it harder for him to survive a steady stream of scandals and problems that had hit the VA as the number of veterans seeking healthcare and disability swelled.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), who also served in Iraq as a member of the Hawaii National Guard, said in a statement that the VA “has lost sight of its mission.” She added: “Our loyalty, anger and hurt must be focused on taking action to ensure that not another day passes where a veteran in need remains waiting in the dark. We are facing a crisis, with veterans waiting months and sometimes years on official or secret waiting lists, while others are lost in the bureaucracy. This is unacceptable, and dishonors these great Americans who sacrificed so much.”
“He is not what you call a modern media guy,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). “He’s not the kind of guy who can get out and give a five-second sound bite. He does that very poorly, he just doesn’t like to do that. That’s just the way he is.”
Calling for “a systemic overhaul,” Gabbard said she is drafting legislation to “ensure that veterans are immediately able to access care from a doctor, whether in the VA system or not.“
In a statement, Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said he was saddened by Shinseki’s resignation, calling him “an American hero who courageously served his country in war, rose to be the Army chief of staff and has dedicated his distinguished career to helping his fellow soldiers and veterans.”
Sanders said: “The new leadership must transform the culture of the VA, establish accountability and punish those responsible for the reprehensible manipulation of wait times.”
A veterans’ group, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said in a statement that its members were “outraged” by the scandal and “ready for new management, new oversight, and new energy.”
The group called on Obama to “demonstrate his own leadership and bring under control a deep systemic element of incompetence and corruption that clearly exists in the VA.” It urged him to “look for an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran who will lead an aggressive turnaround of the VA” as the new permanent secretary.
The American Legion, the first major veterans’ group to call for Shinseki’s resignation, called his departure “a beginning.” It said the solution to the VA’s problems “is to weed out the incompetence and corruption” within the Veterans Health Administration and the Veterans Benefits Administration.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said in a Twitter message: “Simply replacing Sec. Shinseki — while necessary — is in no way sufficient to begin to eliminate the rot that has plagued veterans’ healthcare.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House minority leader, said Shinseki’s departure “will not solve the systemic challenges within the VA and its medical facilities. It is up to all of us — in Congress and in the administration — to review the facts, fix the problems, and improve our efforts to ensure veterans receive the care they need, when they need it.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said: “Secretary Shinseki’s resignation is just the first step in addressing the institutional neglect of veterans at the VA, but that alone won’t solve the problem. The systemic mismanagement will continue unless we bring reform to the VA and hold all those who are responsible accountable.”
Rubio urged the Senate to pass a bill he has sponsored that would give the new VA secretary authority to fire those responsible for “neglecting, mistreating, or mismanaging care for our veterans.”
Shinseki, 71, a retired Army general who was wounded in Vietnam as a young officer, addressed the issue in his first public speech since the release Wednesday of a blistering interim report by the Veterans Affairs inspector general.
That independent review found that VA officials throughout the medical system had falsified records to hide the amount of time veterans had to wait for medical appointments. The allegations that VA officials were using elaborate schemes to hide long waiting times date back as far as 2010. The preliminary report’s findings, however, triggered a new flurry of calls for Shinseki’s resignation on Capitol Hill and fed widespread speculation that Obama would be forced to replace him.
In his speech Friday morning, Shinseki touted his department’s successes in reducing homelessness among veterans, which he said has declined 24 percent from 2010 to 2014 despite a tough economy. He received a warm welcome from the Coalition for Homeless Veterans, and the conferees gave him a standing ovation at the end of his speech on the main topic.
Then Shinseki addressed what he called “the elephant in the room” and apologized to veterans, members of Congress and the American people for the health-care scandal. “All of them deserve better from their VA,” he said.
“I can’t explain the lack of integrity among some of the leaders of our health-care facilities,” he said. “And so I will not defend it, because it is indefensible. But I can take responsibility for it, and I do.”
He added: “So given the facts I now know, I apologize as the senior leader of the Department of Veterans Affairs. . . . But I also know this: that leadership and integrity problems can and must be fixed — and now.”
In addition to initiating a process to remove senior leaders of the Phoenix VA medical center, Shinseki said he issued directives that no senior VA executive will receive any performance award this year and that patient wait times be deleted from officials’ performance reviews as a measure of their success. He said the department is also contacting 1,700 veterans in Phoenix, who had been put on unofficial waiting lists, to ensure that they receive immediate care.
Shinseki asked Congress for “greater authority to remove senior leaders” and requested congressional support to fill existing VA leadership positions that are still vacant.
“This situation can be fixed,” he said. “We can do this in the days ahead, just as we have done for the past five years with veterans’ homelessness.”
The audience welcomed Shinseki warmly as he entered the room in tribute to what officials of the Coalition for Homeless Veterans said was his commitment to their cause
John Driscoll, president and chief executive of the coalition, expressed confidence that Shinseki would address the VA health-care issues effectively. “I do believe that, armed with the findings of that report, his response is going to be swift and deliberate and well-reasoned,” he said in an interview.
Shinseki has proven to be a strong ally of the coalition, making the goal of ending veteran homelessness by 2015 one of his department’s top priorities.
“He has changed the world in which we operate,” Driscoll said. “He brought the coordination, he brought the leadership, he made a very firm plan on how to approach the issue of veteran homelessness — the focus on housing, the focus on employment and the focus on access to health services.”
On Thursday, Shinseki made an impassioned case to Democratic lawmakers and veterans groups that he can repair the Department of Veterans Affairs, even as calls for his resignation mounted and support from the White House appeared to wane.
The White House skirted questions Thursday about whether Obama still has confidence in Shinseki’s ability to lead the department, and a spokesman said the president is withholding judgment about who is responsible for the department’s failings until he reviews pending investigations of what went wrong.
By late Thursday, one-fifth of the Senate Democratic caucus had called for Shinseki’s ouster, and at least two dozen House Democrats, most of them locked in difficult reelection fights, were demanding that he be replaced.
Rep. Michael H. Michaud (Maine), the top Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said late Thursday that Shinseki should step down. The committee’s chairman, Rep. Jeff Miller, has also called on Shinseki to leave office.
With his political support rapidly dwindling, Shinseki worked to retain the support of major veterans groups, which have backed him during the crisis, with the exception of the American Legion.
“He did not give any indication that he’s planning on stepping down,” Roscoe Butler, a deputy director with the American Legion, said Thursday.
In an hour-long meeting with veterans groups Thursday, Shinseki outlined plans to hold accountable VA employees who falsified waiting-list records.
Shinseki acknowledged that he had been too trusting of the information he received from VA hospital employees, and he said that during his 38-year military career he always thought he could trust reports from the field. Internal VA audits of 216 health-care centers have largely confirmed the inspector general’s findings of “systemic” efforts by VA employees to cover up long waits for medical care, according to the veterans groups that met with the secretary.
Greg Jaffe, Ed O’Keefe, Josh Hicks and David Nakamura contributed to this report.
