Running for the White House, candidate Obama promised action. Soon after he took over the VA, Shinseki did take action, ordering that henceforth veterans would not have to wait more than 14 days for a medical appointment.
How is Obama handling the VA scandal?
Rep. Miller on holding the VA accountable
But the bureaucracy at the VA, second only to the Pentagon in size, is notoriously sluggish. In 2010 – four years ago! – the deputy undersecretary of the VA wrote a nine-page memo saying that in order to cover up their continued delays, various parts of the VA system were engaged in “gaming strategies” – in effect, lying.
The General Accounting Office and VA inspector generals wrote reports saying the practice was widespread. One would have thought that would have set off alarm bells at both the VA and the White House. Where was the anger then? There were some internal investigations, but they never went anywhere and there was little apparent sense of urgency.
Six months ago, CNN turned loose its own investigative reporters and aired stories about excessive waits in several facilities across the country. Again, the VA and the White House had little to say.
It looks like they were well aware of the problems and chose not to treat it as a priority until the media furor started.
I agree with your take on GWB. Note that I never said the government wasn’t dysfunctional under Bush. His incompetence is well established. And the upshot of him not dodging responsibility(but instead whistling and pretending there was nothing wrong) is that he got the full measure of blame he was entitled to.
President Obama should be applying his better intelligence to actually addressing the fact that the government is broken. After all, if the government is seen to be dysfunctional, he can never succeed in moving American public opinion permanently to the left. His “coalition of the ascendant” wasn’t a movement, it was just a cult of personality.
I have some respect for some of you, but I have to wonder why you spend time arguing with adaher. I’m pretty sure he’s disabled, you know, not physically? The other way you can be handicapped?
If you’re against the Democratic Party, you’re for the Republic Party, which means you’re a fascist who wants to crush all opposition and install a dictator.
Hey, that’s fun!
Of course, now that I realize you’re a brutal fascist, I’m not sure I can respect your political positions (to whatever extent I respected them previously).
Yep. Still having trouble understanding the definition of the word “lie”. You keep working on that, adaher. I doubt you’ll ever understand it, but at least it’ll keep you busy and out of the way.
Make that modifier “ginormous” and you’ve got it. Expecting him to know what is happening in a few hospitals in a few states would be like expecting the CEO of a large company to know about mail room malfeasance. I doubt that Shinseki had any idea, either. He is, of course, responsible in the larger picture, as are all who are in charge, but the man has to deal with constant crisis mode on global issues. Like all who manage, he relies on his subordinates to take care of day-to-day issues and to be on top of problems such as this.
As much as I dislike Obama’s politics, he’s not to blame for any shortcoming in the VA.
The simple fact is that the federal gov’t has grown so huge that no one person, no one president can effectively oversee every aspect of it. The best they can do is appoint good cabinet members to ride herd over vast swaths of bureaucracy.
And there’s just to much there for even good cabinet members to do even this. At best, they can try to set a"tone," a leadership style, to encourage responsibility and accountability at the sub-political/carreer bureaucrat level, and hope that they choose good regional subordinates to run things appropriately.
So it comes as no surprise to me that, after years of growing bureaucracy and decades of empire-building/ass-covering at the sub-political level, that these little scandals pop out of the woodwork.
Obama comes in for the blame just 'cause he’s the guy sitting in The Big Chair when it happens, but other than that, I don’t hold him personally accountable.
Start a discretionary war.
Fail to plan for ramping up VA facilities and hiring more staff, or to budget for same.
Hold facilities to the same standards of care before item one occurred.
Bake for ten years.
When the souffle falls, blame the current resident in the White House.
This is a problem then. It means that the federal bureaucracy cannot be held accountable by the voters. It is above democracy. Actually, it means we have no democracy. Elected leaders change, but the bureaucracy is where the real power is, and we have no power over it.
And if they fail, there are these people called “whistleblowers” and “the media” who can go around the chain of command. The President was actually informed in 2010 that this was going on and did nothing. He was informed again in 2013 by a Congressman and again, did nothing. Finally, CNN got hold of it, and again, he did nothing until the story blew up.
In other words, this wasn’t important until it became a political problem. And THAT’s why despite the size of the government, we can actually hold elected officials responsible for bureaucratic corruption. The other reason is that if a President asks for MORE bureaucracy, it should be assumed its because he’s got a pretty good grasp of the bureaucracy he’s already managing. Obama didn’t have to come in and ask for more, but he did. WHich made the government even more unmanageable for him than it was before. That was his choice, not some accident of fate.
There’s one more(legitimate) reason we often don’t hold Presidents accountable: unlike in the military, the chain of command in the federal government doesn’t usually function. It’s designed not to function, because a functioning chain of command would mean accountability, and civilian government officials avoid that like the plague. But elected officials should be forced, by voters, to bring the bureaucracy to heel by creating clear lines of authority rather than the jumbled mess the federal government is now.
Seriously, you guys expect the government to manage corporations and keep them in line and yet you don’t even expect the government to manage ITSELF. You expect failure, and then wonder why the public doesn’t support the party of government more.
I think the choice is either that Bush knew about Katrina, Plame, and waterboarding before the general public and failed to act, or that he found out about those things the same time we all did. I’ll be generous and say that he didn’t know. But that means that no, the lines of communication have not seriously broken down under Obama. They were at least as bad during the previous administration.
Katrina- fast moving situation, Bush learned about problems the same time we all did, and it’s his fault because he selected an unqualified person to run FEMA. Not coincidentally, Katrina was the tipping point in his Presidency, when the general public realized he was incompetent.
Plame- since the media basically made the scandal by Novak outing her, it’s natural that the media reports would be the first time anyone in the administration other than the leaker would know about it.
Waterboarding- Was approved by administration principles. Congressional Democrats were informed and had no objections. I don’t recall Bush trying to avoid responsibility for this. Rather, I remember him defending what he called “enhanced interrogation”, and insisting it wasn’t torture. Which is another way of avoiding responsibility, akin to administration officials saying that veterans probably didn’t die due to wait times. but I didn’t pit the President for that, because we don’t know if it’s true or not.
As for your claim that these there scandals represented the lines of communication breaking down, none of these three involved that problem. They worked exactly as they should. Bush just chose to be an asshole and wave away concerns.
And I don’t really believe the lines of communication are broken at the White House. I actually think they just don’t tell the President anything that they don’t think he should know. We saw this in practice with the IRS scandal, where the President honestly hadn’t heard about it until Lerner announced it publicly, but his staff did know about it and chose not to inform him.
Yeah, yeah they have their excuse for why they didn’t bring it to his attention, but you’d think they’d tell Lerner to not reveal what they knew publicly before the President was informed and before the report was final. It sounds more like they were protecting the President and it wouldn’t surprise me if all the reports that went to the White House about VA corruption also were kept from the President.
The VA funding for 2009, when Obama took office, was 97 billion. He increased it to 127 billion the next year. It’s currently 154 billion, and will be 164 billion next year. This, during a period when the Pubs fought any budget increases tooth and nail.
In February of this year, a VA funding bill that would have built 27 new clinics was filibustered by the Pubs. It failed 56-41, since the Pubs now require 60 votes to pass anything. Every Dem voted for it, but only two Pubs.
Obama appointed General Shinseki to head the VA. Shinseki is most famous for not being afraid to speak truth to power. He was ridiculed and fired for being the only person in Washington who didn’t go along with the rosy scenario for our occupation of Iraq. That indicates that Obama wanted someone who wouldn’t bullshit him about the VA.
Obama did all you could reasonably expect a President to do at the time. He can’t micromanage every federal agency, and he can’t give personal attention to every letter sent to him. If the people running the hospitals are deliberately hiding the truth, then he’s fucked. You rail about Obama’s incompetence, but you expect him to know everything that happens, everywhere in the world. Now it’s a big scandal, so now he will give it his personal attention, and hopefully, the administrators who covered this up will go to jail, and the Pubs will put our money where their mouth is.
And just by the way, if the Pubs didn’t think affordable health care was a pestilence straight from the pit of hell, we could have a single payer system in this country, and we wouldn’t need any VA hospitals.
Throwing money at problems is insufficient and often not even the source of the problem.
The President was told about corruption in the VA, and not just from the letter. He decided he had other priorities which were more important.
Also, let’s get real. No one’s going to jail, and probably no one is getting fired. The House passed a bill to make it easier to fire people, but the Democrats will always back the unions over government effectiveness, since the government isn’t supposed to be effective. It’s supposed to be patronage, and it does that job well.
Ah, you mean a system with waiting lists where people die waiting for health care?