Change: Heads finally begin rolling at Veterans Administration?

Hotair ^ | 01/26/2017 | Ed Morrissey

[SeekAndFind]

Has accountability finally arrived at the Veterans Administration? According to the Daily Caller’s Luke Rosiak, a new approach to personnel management at the beleaguered bureaucracy has begun, and it coincidentally arrived on Inauguration Day. Or perhaps not so coincidentally:

Days into Donald Trump’s administration, heads are finally beginning to roll at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Two notoriously corrupt employees in Puerto Rico were fired this week, indicating that more may be on the way.

One is the hospital’s CEO, DeWayne Hamlin, who offered an employee $305,000 to quit after she played a role in exposing his drug arrest.

“Mr. DeWayne Hamlin was removed from federal service effective January 20, 2017”–inauguration day–the VA said.

The other termination removed an even more notorious employee from the Puerto Rico VA, Elizabeth Rivera Rivera. Readers will recall that she was originally terminated after allegedly taking part in an armed robbery — and then reinstated with back pay. At the time, then-Undersecretary David Shulkin explained to Congress that federal law constrained the VA from firing Rivera:

“I have clarified my statement, and will be formally responding to the committee,” Shulkin said, “but it is equally important to me that I provide the facts and set the record straight for our veterans, employees and the general public who entrust us with the care of the nation’s veterans and who expect us to be open and honest with them.”…

“In accordance with federal law, criminal prosecution or conviction for off-duty misconduct does not automatically disqualify an individual from federal employment,” Shulkin said. “As is true in private-sector employment, a federal employee generally cannot be terminated for off-duty misconduct unless there is a clear connection between the misconduct and the individual’s employment.”

Now, of course, Secretary Robert McDonald has left the VA, and Trump has appointed his replacement … David Shulkin. Presumably, Shulkin’s temporarily running the show until his formal confirmation. So why the change now? For one thing, as Rosiak notes, the VA took a closer look at Rivera and found out that she hadn’t disclosed other arrests at the time of her hiring. Perhaps that and Hamlin’s termination are just happy coincidences, or perhaps Shulkin just feels a lot less constrained by federal law than he did last year. Hmmmm.

If the new administration’s in a firing mood, then perhaps they should also look to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the pet project of Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama that got implemented in Dodd-Frank. The Daily Caller’s Justin Caruso reports that its chief Richard Cordray has apparently taken a page from Hillary Clinton and kept his official text messages off of official government devices — and away from the legitimate oversight of Congress and the courts:

Richard Cordray, head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), used a private device for government communications, and didn’t create appropriate records of those messages with the bureau, according to documents obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller. …

A source told TheDC that he submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in August 2016 for more than a year’s worth of text messages on official devices to and from various CFPB staffers.

The bureau responded that there were no records on any “CFPB issued or CFPB reimbursed devices” for any text messages sent or received associated with Cordray.

So … maybe Cordray never sent any text messages? Actually, the data shows that other CFPB officials did conduct text conversations with Cordray, but on a private device, and Cordray never submitted them for the record as required by federal law. The CFPB acknowledged as much in a response to a FOIA request:

Well, that’s certainly curious. The CFPB tried passing this off as an occasional use of a private device under unusual circumstances, which is allowed — but then the official is required to submit those records to be archived under the Federal Records Act. When the Daily Caller pointed out to CFPB that their records contained no entries for Cordray’s text messages, indicating that he’s never used his official government-supplied device for texting, they quit responding to the DC’s queries.

The fix for this is pretty simple, from Cordray’s end — submit the records and start using his assigned phone. If Cordray’s not willing to do that, and explain why he’s not using the proper platform for his communications, then there’s reason to impose accountability by termination.

[GonzoII]

This is how it’s done!

[ptsal]

Lyi’n Lizzy will be on the warpath.

[blam]

Clean the anti-American Communists out of the government, NOW!

Joseph McCarthy was correct....way back when, Read Venona

"Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. So sensitive was the project in its early years that even President Truman was not informed of its existence. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages—documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early Cold War years."

Robert Oppenheimer may even have been a Soviet informer himself by way of his UK buddy, Klaus Fuchs

"Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (29 December 1911 – 28 January 1988) was a German theoretical physicist and atomic spy who, in 1950, was convicted of supplying information from the American, British, and Canadian Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after the Second World War. While at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first nuclear weapons, and later, early models of the hydrogen bomb."

[The Great RJ]

I could never understand why there weren’t criminal indictments of VA officials who falsified patient waiting list records to get big bonuses. That would be criminal in my book.

[TonyM]

Abount 100,000 more firings to go and the VA may start to be cleaned up.

[Enterprise]

"I could never understand why there weren’t criminal indictments of VA officials who falsified patient waiting list records to get big bonuses."

Because Obama. Understand now?

[GOPJ]

This is good... but the incentives still need to be switched so our vets are in the position of ‘valued customer’ rather than ‘charity case’.

When the financial incentives are switched the problems will solve themselves.

[nobamanomore]

It’s going to be a scary time for govt employees, running a country like it’s the private sector, having to produce, be accountable is stressful.

[sarge83]

The firings need to go down into the lower ranks and in each state, this will get the 4th branch of governments attention fairly quickly.

[FourtySeven]

“In accordance with federal law, criminal prosecution or conviction for off-duty misconduct does not automatically disqualify an individual from federal employment,” Shulkin said. “As is true in private-sector employment, a federal employee generally cannot be terminated for off-duty misconduct unless there is a clear connection between the misconduct and the individual’s employment.”

Oh really? So if I go out, get drunk and kill someone while driving intoxicated, then get convicted of that crime, I won’t lose my job in the private sector?

You really think that Mr. Shulkin? If so, this is just further evidence of how deep the delusion reaches into those in charge at the VA and indeed all government employees.

I don’t know what Trump was thinking appointing this guy. Hopefully he knows something more than we do (like how to effectively “convince” him to do Trump’s bidding). Because he doesn’t seem like an effective ally in the battle to drain the swamp to me.