Improving the efficiency of the Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the few points on which both Democrats and Republicans agree. No one wants to see long waits or poor service for veterans. And Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin was one of those rare things in the Trump cabinet—someone who appears to be well-qualified for his role and who was approved by a broad bipartisan vote.
Born on an Army base with his father an Army doctor, Shulkin is a Yale grad with a background in healthcare management and a previous role as the president of Beth Israel Medical Center. His choice to head the VA received across the board support from inside and outside the organization, and his actions over the last year have made Shulkin the most popular member of Trump’s team on both sides of the aisle.
“What motivates me and what motivates Dr. Shulkin is the same, to provide the best care to veterans,” said Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee. “I don’t know whether he’s a Republican or Democrat, and I could care less.”
With all that going for him, it shouldn’t be surprising that Trump’s White House is now working to not just get rid of Shulkin, but find a way to harass and embarrass him until he’s forced to quit.
An email sent in December by Jake Leinenkugel, the White House senior adviser on veterans affairs, expressed frustration with Dr. Shulkin and listed ways to topple the leadership of his department once key legislation was passed. … Mr. Leinenkugel, who has an office in the department, proposed “solutions” in the email, including using a continuing investigation of the secretary’s travel to remove Dr. Shulkin’s chief of staff, Vivieca Wright Simpson; replacing the deputy secretary, Thomas G. Bowman, with Mr. Leinenkugel; and replacing Dr. Shulkin with a “strong political candidate.”
That last line from the New York Times’ article is the critical one. Shulkin has to go, not for anything he’s done as head of the VA, but because he’s refusing to play politics with the agency.
The report mentioned in Leinenkugel’s “solutions” memo appeared last week. In it, Shulkin was on the receiving end of a stinging rebuke from the VA inspector general concerning a trip to Europe during which Shulkin and his wife “played tourist” for several days, and even accepted tickets to Wimbledon. It was a report that Shulkin calls “biased and inaccurate,” but it made Shulkin an easy target for criticism in the media and drained some of the good will that had previously surrounded his appointment.
Considering other trips made during the last year, like Scott Pruitt’s four-day Moroccan romp in which he took at least a dozen members of his team to promote natural gas—a job that the EPA doesn’t do—or Trump’s own multi-million dollar trips to Mar-a-Lago, the Wimbledon story made it easy to target Shulkin as another high-flying Trump cabinet official dining out on the taxpayer’s dime. And considering the well-publicized issues with the VA, it was easy to paint Shulkin’s trip as especially egregious.
But both the contents and tone of the inspector general’s report appear to be part of a coordinated campaign to press Shulkin out of his role. And the reason for that, while Shulkin’s actions at the VA have earned high praise from veterans groups and legislators, he has two enormous marks against him. First, Shulkin was actually appointed to the VA by Barack Obama, and represents the only holdout among high-ranking officials in the Trump administration. Second, he’s not following the political script.
Some conservatives, including some advisers to the White House, favor gradually dismantling that system and allowing veterans to choose to receive taxpayer-subsidized care from private doctors instead.
Veterans’ groups have overwhelmingly opposed that idea.
Shulkin is seen as trying to clean up the existing VA and make it work for veterans as designed, rather than working to tear it apart and hand out contracts to private facilities. Pair that with his Obama connection, and Shulkin has a big, bright target on his head. Which means that while Trump gives Shulkin public reassurances ...
At a bill signing in June, he said the secretary did not have to worry about hearing Mr. Trump’s old reality-show catchphrase, “You’re fired.”
Behind the scenes, his successor is already waiting in the wings.
Mr. Leinenkugel’s suggested replacement for Dr. Shulkin would be likely to spark controversy: Michael J. Kussman, a former under secretary who has been associated with Concerned Veterans of America, a group funded largely by the billionaire conservative activists Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch that advocates shifting spending on veterans’ health care to the private sector.
Kussman retired as undersecretary in 2009 under a cloud after blowing $167 million on a scheduling system that utterly failed and was directly connected to the long waits and disasters that nearly wrecked the VA. But he has one big thing going for him—he will do as he’s told. And Shulkin continues to not listen to Trump’s calls to turn the VA into a profit center for his friends.
“He has shown total disdain for the White House,” said one White House official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter. “This isn’t ideological; it is just what the president wants. He wants veterans to have choice.”
“This isn’t ideological; it is just what the president wants.” is a sentence worth remembering, because people on the Trump team, really don’t see the problem with that statement.
And they want veterans to have choices … so long as one of those choices isn’t the VA.