Posted on 06/03/2016 4:22:46 AM PDT by combat_boots
WASHINGTON – The former director of Phoenix veterans hospitals who was at the center of a 2014 wait-time scandal scored a major legal win this week, shooting down sections of a law allowing the Department of Veterans Affairs to quickly fire misbehaving employees.
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Tuesday that the law fast-tracking firings is unconstitutional because VA employees cannot appeal a final decision by an administrative judge.
Lynch and President Barack Obama’s administration have sided with Sharon Helman, who is suing in federal court over her 2014 termination from the VA for accepting a trip to Disneyland and other gifts.
The decision by Lynch is new evidence of the VA’s faltering efforts to fire executives and employees when it deems them guilty of misconduct. It also undercuts a key reform passed by Congress in the months following the nationwide VA scandal, which erupted after a doctor in Phoenix said veterans were dying while waiting for care at the facilities overseen by Helman.
(Excerpt) Read more at stripes.com ...
It can be hard to fire civilians - it takes a lot of dedication to doing the right thing - I managed to get rid of 2 that didn’t belong and the process on the easy one was over 6 months long....
Well yeah because the worker is most important. /s
#BLM is right. There is no justice in this country. Everybody knows it’s “unconstitutional” to fire a worthless government employee.
Kneel! Kneel before your government employee masters, you filthy swine Veterans!
Give them offerings of bonuses and bribes lest they strike you down!
The bureaucrats at the VA are organized crime.
How the heck does Lynch get to make a decision that a law is unconstitutional and decides not to defend it ?
I’ve seen one single case where the organization had hired a guy and they knew from the first two weeks...that he couldn’t make it (he was a GS-13).
They probably wasted at least six months discussing this and trying to find ways of doing extra paperwork, and finally the HR guy said why bother...the guy was on first-year probation and could be let go at any point. So a month later...they had everything lined up and told him he was finished. They escorted him around to wrap up out-processing and it worked exactly like it should.
When I was in DC, I knew of a case where the organization had a GS-14 who regularly insulted women and had a sip or two at lunch each day. He was two years away from the retirement point but some review by the insulted ladies came up. So, a decision was made not to fire him, but to find a one-man office just to push him in and let him sit out the two years. An absolute waste of manpower and pay. There’s probably forty-thousand such government employees out there like that guy. All sitting and waiting for a pension point. We’d better off to just separate gov’t pensions and force everyone into an IRA situation.
It does not say in the article how much she took in bribes, but it was around $50,000 from an health care lobbyist. Including a car, she stated she did not think she did anything wrong. And now she can not be fired?
I’ve seen/worked with a lot of fine folks - the ones I helped “ease out” were GS-09/11 types who were among those that make the rest look bad. At my level/area we weren’t as political and we pretty much de-fanged the local union efforts to protect the bad ones. It was still an uphill battle, but we valued our own reputations.
Maybe she wanted to find out if Disneyland keeps track of how long you stand in line?
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