WASHINGTON -- In the
38 years that he served in the United States Army, Eric Shinseki
believed in a military culture where truth-telling, no matter how
painful, was not just accepted: Brutal honesty was demanded.
In
Ric Shinseki's army, no one got punished for telling the truth. And
commanders could rely absolutely on their subordinates' word.
Now,
with the facts about systemic dishonesty, cheating and dysfunction
within the VA exploding out into public, it seems clear that within the
largely civilian Department of Veterans Affairs, telling the truth was
not just frowned upon -- it was punished by mid-level managers. Horror
stories about veterans waiting for months to receive care at the
VA Medical Center in Phoenix were just the beginning.
And
Shinseki, a man widely known as deeply honorable and passionate about
serving fellow veterans, has had to resign as VA secretary, in part
because he trusted.
President Barack Obama announced Friday that he had
accepted Shinseki's resignation, something that at least
100 lawmakers on Capitol Hill had called for.
In
a speech Friday morning to the National Coalition for Homeless
Veterans, prior to the president's announcement, Shinseki made no
mention of the growing furor. But as he concluded, he urged the audience
to continue fighting to keep veterans off the streets. "Now is not the
time to let up," he told them. "Let's get on with it. It is the Lord's
work."
"I'm honored to have been in this fight for justice with all of you," he added.
Admirers of Ric Shinseki -- and they are legion -- are sorrowful but not surprised.
"It may be impossible to manage an organization that's so huge, if
people are willing to cheat the system and hold back information and
essentially deceive and lie up the chain and to the secretary, to
protect themselves, to meet performance measures so they can get their
bonuses," said Marsha Four, a decorated Vietnam war combat nurse and
longtime activist in the veterans community.
The bad news inside the VA -- an
acute shortage
of qualified medical and mental health staff; layers of middle
management clogged with aging, overpaid time-servers; a scarcity of
funds to modernize VA facilities; endless waitlists for appointments --
was not something employes have been rewarded for pointing out to VA
headquarters in Washington.
Shinseki's tenure at the VA is a story
of hubris and isolation at the top. He had insisted that any veteran
seeking a medical appointment be seen within 14 days. Scheduling clerks
found it impossible to meet that requirement, given the shortage of
available doctors. But that bad news was systematically
stifled by mid-level VA management.
When the VA proudly reported that
93 percent of veterans
seeking primary care doctor appointments were being seen within 14
days, many people just didn't believe it. Shinseki apparently did.
"I'm
sure his heart is breaking," Four said. "He wants to do the best for
the veterans of his country, the people he served with. My heart goes
out to him because he is a good man. He doesn't deserve this."
Close
friends and former colleagues describe Shinseki as cool under fire --
perhaps too cool. He famously shies away from publicity, rarely gives
interviews and appears visibly uncomfortable at congressional hearings.
Under the intense and public pressure he is experiencing now, some say
he tends to become less effective, less able to make hard decisions.
"He
is a man who is revered," said one person who knows Shinseki well.
"He's a great guy, has enormous values, family-oriented, embodies the
Army to extreme. But when placed under public pressure, he just
basically goes down and down. He emotionally shrinks into himself."
Garry
Augustine, a wounded Vietnam veteran and executive director of the
Disabled American Veterans, suggested that Shinseki has "not been
counseled as well as he should have been.”
U.S.
Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) speaks at an event on
Veterans Affairs at the U.S. Capitol on April 3, 2014, in Washington,
D.C. Though many legislators called for Shinseki's resignation, Boehner
remained one of his unlikely allies. "The question I ask myself is, is
him resigning going to get us to the bottom of the problem?" Boehner
asked Thursday. "Is it going to help us find out what's really going on?
And the answer I keep getting is no."
Others say Shinseki has simply never been up to the job.
"We
do not doubt the Secretary's sincerity in wanting to fix the problem,"
said Derek Bennett of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, one
of several veterans' organizations that met with Shinseki Thursday to
discuss how to fix the VA's issues. "But we still have serious questions
about whether the Secretary has the tools, resources, and the
confidence of VA staff and veterans to create real reform.”
The VA's problems were not exactly unknown. More than a half century ago, a
presidential commission
on the VA, chaired by Omar Bradley, aimed to fix the department's
"backward-looking" management style and urged "more positive leadership"
on the VA's part. In 1993, a Blue Ribbon Panel
acknowledged
that wait times were "unacceptable" and the backlog "has created
additional and unacceptable delays" for veterans. And in 2007, a panel
headed by former Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kan.) and Donna Shalala, former
secretary of health and human services,
concluded
that the department's problems ran so deep that "merely patching the
system, as has been done in the past," wasn't enough. Instead, they
called for "fundamental changes."
Despite its rhetoric praising
veterans, the VA bureaucracy has often simply failed veterans on a grand
scale. The rising demand among new combat vets for mental health
services has been evident to the public for at least a decade, but the
VA currently has
1,465 unfilled mental health job openings on its career site.
One
indicator of how the VA serves mentally troubled veterans: Of the
estimated 22 veterans who die by suicide every day, 17 have not sought
care at the VA, according to Tom Tarantino of the Iraq and Afghanistan
Veterans of America. Post-traumatic stress disorder was officially
recognized by the mental health profession in 1980, but it took another
eight years for the VA to agree to compensate veterans with PTSD. The
department fought against compensating veterans for exposure to the
Vietnam herbicide Agent Orange for decades, as it did with
Gulf War Syndrome.
Army
veteran Julio Bernal from Takoma Park, Maryland, works with others from
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) to place 1,892 flags
representing veteran and service members who have died by suicide to
date in 2014 on the National Mall in Washington, on March 27, 2014.
So when President Obama selected Shinseki in 2009 to run the VA, the
newly appointed secretary set out to reform the institution with tough
new standards that he expected folks to meet. Among them: anyone coming
in to see a doctor had to be seen within 14 days. He even set up
software -- the Veterans Health Information System and Technology
Architecture -- to run checks verifying that electronic waiting lists
were being kept up to date.
Shinseki and the handful of
ex-military men he gathered around him at the top of the VA went after
the department's stodgy and resistant bureaucracy with a vengeance. They
held management seminars and inaugurated a leadership training program.
They shook up senior staffs and proselytized a new, streamlined culture
of management.
Shinseki dictated performance standards and posted
the reported results publicly, including the 14-day requirement. But
with the shortage of doctors and staff at many VA medical centers, that
standard simply couldn't be met. Scheduling clerks dealt with it by
fudging the numbers, according to the
VA inspector general's report on the Phoenix VA Medical Center released this week.
Precisely
why middle managers were reluctant to report to Washington that they
were unable to meet the 14-day performance standard and other
requirements will be determined by the IG's continuing investigation.
But one reason may have been a simple unwillingness to rock the boat.
According to the
VA's 2014-2020 Strategic Plan,
its workforce, swollen with mid-level managers and administrators, is
rapidly aging. A third of its 332,000 employees are eligible for
retirement, including roughly 50 percent of the department's senior
executives.
Whatever the reason, many of the VA clinical workers
-- those on the front lines of health care -- say they are simply afraid
to speak up, despite the federal No Fear Act, which is designed to
protected federal government whistleblowers.
"There is no such
thing as 'No Fear' at the VA," a VA psychiatric nurse told The
Huffington Post. "They make us take all the training so they can let the
people in D.C. know they've done the training. But I've been retaliated
on lots of times. People try to send in a complaint, and the next
thing, they are fired."
In his frequent travels to meet with VA
employees around the country, Shinseki often pleaded with them to be
honest about any problems they were having meeting the standards he had
set -- "planting a flag," as he put it.
"You plant a flag, make a
commitment. If it isn't perfect, tell us what we can do," Shinseki told a
gathering of VA workers at a meeting in Huntington, West Virginia, last
May. He was responding to a clerk who had risen to talk about overwork,
stress and her fear of not being able to meet his requirements.
In
an interview at that time, Shinseki told The Huffington Post of the
clerk: "It's about high standards and expectations. I was trying to
reassure her that we need her to do the best she can," and if she
cannot, to send that signal up the chain. "I want her best work and [for
her] not be afraid to make the call," Shinseki said.
The clerical worker, who cannot be identified under VA rules, went away unconvinced.
Ironically,
on a personal level, Shinseki is a man driven by a hunger to know how
well veterans are being served. Vincent Kane, who runs the VA's highly
successful homeless programs, met with Shinseki many times in designing
groundbreaking initiatives to get veterans into stable housing.
"He
wanted to know on an individual level what we were doing that works and
how that made a difference in people's lives," Kane said in an
interview. "He wanted to know, every veteran we touch, are they still
housed? How are they connected? He wanted pictures of the veterans. He
talked about them as if he were their children. He held himself
accountable for them."
In an interview in autumn 2012, Shinseki
suggested that after three years on the job, he was beginning to sense
the enormity of trying to transform the VA to better serve the veterans
whom he deeply reveres.
When he took the job, he said, "I had no idea what I was getting into."
His determination to keep hammering at the problem was rooted in what he considers an honor debt he owes to veterans.
At
the VA, he said in the 2012 interview, "I get to take care of the kids I
fought with in Vietnam and the kids I sent off to war" in Iraq and
Afghanistan, when he was Army chief of staff.
"This is a chance to take care of them when they come home," he said. "I wasn't just going to walk away from them."
But the contrast between Shinseki's military days and the VA today couldn't be sharper.
It
was the Army's failure in Vietnam that led to a renewed emphasis on
truth-telling and powered its adoption of group self-criticism from
Mao Zedong's
Cultural Revolution. In After Action Reviews (AARs) that Army
companies, battalions and brigades routinely held after combat exercises
in the 1980s and 1990s -- the period when Shinseki was rising through
the ranks -- every action would be scrutinized to find out what went
wrong, what went right and what needed fixing. Junior officers, and even
junior enlisted soldiers, stood to tell Shinseki and other senior
leaders to their faces that their plans were flawed, or that their
logistics guys didn't deliver fuel on time, or that they hadn't allowed
enough time to move to the objective.
In the kind of mission
planning that Shinseki led as a battalion and brigade commander, it was
expected that each member of the unit speak up if he couldn't do the
task he was assigned. Feedback like "Sir, my squad's beat, we can't walk
another 10 kilometers" might cause a hard-pressed leader frustration,
perhaps even anger. But a subordinate's honesty would never be met with
recrimination.
Unlike the VA, said Robert H. Scales, a retired
Army major general and West Point classmate of Shinseki, in the military
"if you screw up you have dead soldiers, and you can't hide them."
Within
the military culture he lived in, Shinseki was able to effect a major
transformation of the Army, rebuilding its combat brigades into smaller,
lighter and more agile fighting units, and introducing the
Stryker-wheeled combat vehicle that would be used to great effect years
later in Iraq.
"If you are going to make a change," he told The
Huffington Post last year, "make it big and bold. Walk up to the biggest
guy on the block, stand in his face and get it started. Then go around,
brigade by brigade, making it make sense. It's one thing to pitch it in
Washington. It's another to stand in the room and let people bitch at
you."
In that interview, Shinseki was clearly hopeful that the
same techniques of setting high expectations and listening carefully to
feedback would work at the VA. "You gotta just fight through it," he
said then, referring to problems at the VA and the growing chorus of
complaints from veterans and politicians. "I'm not leaving."
Credit: Huffingtonpost
WASHINGTON
— Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, is leaving his post as
the public face of the administration, stepping down after shifting from
two decades of reporting to politics at the highest levels, President
Obama said on Friday.
