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DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS

Brooks D. Tucker

MISSION STATEMENT

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the primary provider of health care, benefits, and memorial affairs for America’s veterans and their families. The VA has the noble responsibility to render exceptional and timely support and services with respect, compassion, and competence. The veteran is at the forefront of every VA process and interaction. The VA must continually strive to be recognized as a

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“best in class,” “Veteran-centric”! system with an organizational ethos inspired by and accountable to the needs and problems of veterans, not subservient to the

parochial preferences of a bureaucracy.

OVERVIEW

At the end of the Obama Administration, the VA was held in low esteem both by the veterans it served and by the employees who served these former warriors. Eroding morale caused by the downstream effects of a health care access crisis in 2014 led to the resignation of Secretary Eric Shinseki and extensive oversight investigations by Congress from 2015-2016.

By 2020, however, the VA had become one of the most respected U.S. agencies. This significant progress was due in part to the leadership of Secretary Robert Wilkie (2018-2021) and his team of political appointees and career senior executives, many of them veterans, who led the effort to ensure that the VA became “Veteran-centric” in its governance decisions and fostered a more positive work environment.

This mindset translated into a department that was better attuned to employees’ and veterans’ needs and experiences in the daily operations of health care, benefits,

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and memorial affairs. During that period, the VA received the largest number of watershed congressional authorizations to reform its health care and benefits that it had received since the post-Vietnam War years along with historic increases in annual appropriations, which have tripled since the last full year of the George W. Bush Administration.

The current VA leadership team of Biden appointees has adopted some of their predecessors’ governance processes. However, they have not sustained the previous Administration’s commitment to a genuine “Veteran-centric” philosophy, most notably with respect to the delivery of health care, and harbor a bias toward expanding the unionized federal employee workforce that has not always been aligned with a focus on “Veteran-centric” care. There also is growing concern in Congress and the veteran community that the VA is poorly managing and in some cases disregarding provisions of the VA MISSION [Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks] Act of 2018? that codify broad access for veterans to non-VA health care providers. Efforts to expand disability benefits to large populations without adequate planning have caused an erosion of veterans’ trust in the VA enterprise.

Additionally, the current VA leadership is focusing very publicly on “social equity and inclusion” within departmental policy discussions toward ends that will affect only a small minority of the veterans who use the VA. For the first time, the VA is allowing access to abortion services, a medical procedure unrelated to military service that the VA lacks the legal authority and clinical proficiency to perform. In addition to continuing the grotesque culture of violence against the child in the womb, these sociopolitical initiatives and ideological indoctrinations distract from the department’s core missions.

DEPARTMENTAL HISTORY

Following the Civil War, state veterans homes were established to provide medical and hospital treatment for all injuries and diseases. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, “Congress established a new system of Veterans benefits, including programs for disability compensation, insurance for service personnel and Veterans, and vocational rehabilitation for the disabled”? that was overseen by three different federal programs: the Veterans Bureau, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Pensions, and the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. In 1921, Congress combined those programs into the Veterans Bureau. Following World War II, a national VA hospital system, much of which remains operational today, was established to care for millions of returning veterans.

Following the Vietnam War, the VA’s federally owned and operated hospital network expanded again to meet the needs of the volunteer and draftee population. In the past two decades, the VA has purposely transitioned to leasing medical properties rather than building expensive new facilities that can take years to complete and often experience budget overruns. As the nature of health care has evolved