Tag Archives: defense policy

The VA and the IG

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I’ve disparaged Inspectors General as not being truly independent—they work directly for the boss of the organization they’re presumably inspecting and on which they’re engaging in oversight. I’ve also said that the Secretary of the Veterans Administration should be terminated for cause. Here’s an example of the particularly incestuous relationship between Veterans Administration MFWICs and their IGs and the damage that relationship can do.

A top government watchdog on Thursday accused the central agency tasked with holding Veterans Affairs accountable of dropping the ball—by failing to properly investigate whistleblower claims of secret wait lists at Shreveport, LA, and Chicago hospitals where thousands of veterans languished up to 15 months without care.

Further, Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner said the VA’s Office of Inspector General even tried to “discredit the whistleblowers” who brought the allegations by focusing on a narrow aspect of the case.

And

[T]he focus and tone of the OIG investigations appear to be intended to discredit the whistleblowers by focusing on the word “secret,” rather than reviewing the access to care issues identified by the whistleblowers and in the OSC referrals.

The OSC’s letter and reports can be seen here. (Note: osc.gov is handing out a taking too long to respond error as I schedule this yesterday.  Make of that what you will.)

Veteranos administratio delende est.

A USN Admiral Smeared the PRC?

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Really?

In Vice Admiral Harry Harris Jr’s (Commander, United States Pacific Command) testimony before Congress regarding needed Navy funding, he said among other things that the PRC’s terraforming islands in the Spratly and Paracel island groups and their building runways and radar installations on them followed by deploying fighter aircraft to them amounted to militarization of a region that’s key to ship-borne trade.

That got the PRC’s knickers twisted. Ministry of National Defense spokesperson Colonel Wu Qian fretted

I have noted that according to media reports, Adm. Harris made his remarks while seeking additional defense budget funds from Congress.

We don’t interfere in your seeking defense budget funds, but you can’t carelessly smear China while asking for more money.

What smear? The truth is never a smear.

Deliberate?

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…China has deployed fighter jets to a contested island in the South China Sea, the same island where China deployed surface-to-air missiles last week, two US officials tell Fox News.

The dramatic escalation came as Secretary of State John Kerry hosted his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, at the State Department.

Was this deployment, timed as it was to coincide with our ineffectual Secretary of State’s hosting of Wang, a deliberate provocation, aimed at embarrassing him and our country? Or was it merely aimed at demonstrating to the nations around the South China Sea our present impotence?

Just to be sure the PRC’s message was clear, Wang added that

he hoped that “close up” military flights and patrols by US Navy ships over the contested islands would end.

“We don’t hope to see any more close-up military reconnaissance or the dispatch of missile destroyers or strategic bombers to the South China Sea.”

Hmm….

More Foolishness

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The motorboat skipper who sits in our Secretary of State’s chair and his Russian counterpart, and some carefully selected “opposition and rebel groups,” have agreed to a cease-fire in Syria that is alleged to be effective Saturday next.

However.

The truce will not cover IS, the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, and any other militias designated as terrorist organizations by the UN Security Council. But where in Syria the fighting must stop and where counterterrorism operations can continue must still be addressed. And the five-page plan released by the US State Department leaves open how breaches of the cease-fire will be identified or punished.

In other words, there is no cease-fire. Only pretty words for the last months of a lame duck year in a lamed duck administration.

A Problem with Veterans Administration Management

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Leo Shane described one aspect of this in his piece in the Military Times. Shane centered his article on Democratic Party Presidential candidate and Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) role in making it nearly impossible to fire non-performing Veterans Administration executives.

Sanders—the independent Vermont senator who at the time was chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee—insisted on preserving the protection board’s appeals role, and held up reform legislation in his chamber until it was included.

That protection board is the Merit Systems Protection Board, an allegedly independent facility with a degree of judicial authority that supposedly ensures that nobody gets fired without due process. In the realization this Board, which Sanders was so desperate to protect, is a union facility that ensures that nobody gets fired.

The larger problem, though, is less Sanders’ union’s interference with the VA leadership’s inability to get rid of the trash and other non-performers in the VA leadership, than it is that inability to throw out the trash.

In recent weeks, the VA has seen a host of job actions against senior employees overturned by the Merit Systems Protection Board [see, for example, here]…. They include the demotion of two VA executives accused of gaming the department’s hiring system for personal benefit, and the dismissal of a New York VA director over patient safety concerns.

And

The appeals fight has grown into an escalating intra-administration showdown between VA leaders, who call the decisions off-base, and protection board officials, who blame bad legislative changes for the unsatisfactory rulings.

These union hacks even are trying to turn the problem back onto Congress:

They also accused lawmakers of overhyping problems within the department, saying lawmakers are conflating malice and malfeasance with mistakes made by under-trained supervisors.

Under-trained? The union hacks agree, then, that these supervisors are unfit for their positions, yet they insist these unfits must be retained, anyway. No trash out, not under-performers out, nobody out.

After all, our veterans are used to the idea of becoming casualties on a war’s battlefield. They and everyone else should just shut up, and our veterans should accept being casualties on an artificial VA battlefield, too.

Veteranos administratio delende est.