"Fringe" no more. A Koch-backed veterans group that appears to have almost no membership base is now wielding a heck of a lot of influence over Donald Trump's direction at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump relied on the group, Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), to inform much of his campaign platform for overhauling the V.A. to, among other things, privatize care and make it easier to fire people. The Washington Post writes:
The leading candidates to run the sprawling Department of Veterans Affairs, the second-largest federal agency, have close ties to the group. A senior CVA adviser and a former adviser to the groop serve on the transition team. And as the Trump campaign crafted its blueprint for VA, it drew heavily from the group’s vision of a health-care system with a drastically smaller government footprint and a fast route to firing poor performers.
Traditional veterans advocates are alarmed by CVA’s rising profile in Trump’s orbit and in Congress. They reject its highest-profile proposal, to allow veterans to see doctors of their choosing outside VA medical system — an idea Trump embraced on the campaign trail. They’ve assailed this model as a first step toward turning the system over to the private sector, a change they say would lead to its collapse. [...]
Trump met this week with Pete Hegseth, a Fox News contributor, Iraq War veteran and former president and chief executive of CVA. The group also has worked closely with retiring House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), who Trump has said he is also considering for secretary.
Of course, perennial favorite Sarah Palin has also been mentioned as a consideration to head the agency, as has former Sen. Scott Brown. But since the transition team includes two CVA alums, prepare yourselves for a V.A. heavily influenced by a group in which almost the entirety of the membership base is the Koch brothers.