"I know that the maintenance replaced government employees last year and there wasn't enough time for Walter Reed to go from a pristine state to the state it is in today."
Not according to the article I just posted.
They were only scheduled to begin to replace government maintenance people with contractors at the start of this year. And then, as I said, only 200 out of 1,100 when they were finally done.
"Walter Reed Army Medical Center plans to cut at least 200 jobs early next year in its drawn-out, bitterly contested effort to outsource more work to a private contractor."
And that is from November 2006.
Base on your article it looks like the entire 1100 person staff was being looked at for replacement, but they only outsourced the maintenance.
The problem here is not a political one, it is a bureaucratic one. DoD puts a facility on the BRAC list, which means it is cut off from most capital funding, and then expects it gets tasked with it's highest loading since Vietnam. What do they expect to happen.
The same thing happened with the USS John F. Kennedy. It had a couple major yard periods cancelled and then, what do you know, they failed a major inspection and couldn't deploy on time. In its wake that ship left a couple fired Captains and various other major department heads who were given a turd and told to spit polish it.
That doesn't relieve the commanding officer from his responsibility to try to fix his situation, but he has to have the documentation to protect himself when they come looking for a head to lop off.