Upon his firing, Trump-appointed Veterans Affairs secretary David Shulkin penned a public op-ed stating outright that he believed his removal was part of a plan by Trump's team to privatize VA services. He called out, in specific, "some political appointees" within the department for "choosing to promote their agendas" over the needs of the veterans they are supposed to be serving.
That was a notable poke in Trump's eye, but it doesn't appear to be slowing the rest of the Trump team's efforts to do, well, whatever the hell they think they're doing. As his new nominee for Shulkin's position, Robert Wilkie, prepares for his confirmation hearings, the job of acting secretary has now been handed over to ex-Trump campaign official Peter O'Rourke. Once the head of a Republican PAC, O'Rourke's original position in the agency was to head a new "Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection" that has overseen a widespread purge of low-level agency appointees.
Like the State Department, Interior, the EPA and other top agencies, the VA has been roiled by scandal since the moment Trump's appointees arrived. Shulkin attracted attention for, among other things, travel expenses; O'Rourke only gained his previous VA title after Shulkin's chief of staff herself resigned; a lawsuit currently underway seeks to throw out everything Wilkie has done during his own tour as acting secretary, claiming the administration violated federal law by appointing him over the now-retiring deputy secretary, Thomas Bowman; Trump's initial nominee to replace Shulkin, White House doctor Ronny Jackson, quickly turned from fiasco to farce; and at this point, four out of the six top department jobs are being held by temporary appointees or are simply vacant.
It is all a grand, spectacular mess and there's no expectation that the installation of a Trump campaign hanger-on into the top position will do anything but make it worse.
Whether making it worse is, in fact, a feature of the chaos is not entirely clear: The VA now suffers from more than 33,000 vacant positions agency-wide, and some suspect an unsubtle effort to so incapacitate the agency that privatization can be peddled as all but necessary. It sounds like Shulkin himself suspects the same.