Trump's cronies threw the VA Into Chaos. Millions of Veterans' Lives Are on the Line Again

[Bayard]

Former VA officials warn that another Trump term could irreparably damage the health care system for millions of veterans.

Donald Trump ventured to Fayetteville, North Carolina, earlier this month — a Democratic city in a swing state with a large veteran population, a powerful cross-section of defense contractors, and, right down the road, Fort Liberty, one of the largest military bases in the world. Before an audience dressed almost entirely in red, white, and blue, Trump pledged to revert Fort Liberty back to its original name, Fort Bragg, which honored a slave-owning Confederate general. He also vowed to increase defense spending and scrub the Pentagon of “woke generals.” Then he turned to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Trump offered few true or tangible details on his record at the VA, which operates a robust health and benefits system that serves 9 million veterans — proclaiming, for instance, that his leadership team had purged thousands of “sadists” from the agency and replaced them with thousands more “good, loving people that love our patriotic heroes.” He insisted that the VA “was better before, and I hear it’s sliding,” chalking up this alleged deterioration to President Joe Biden’s VA team, which he derided as a “group of lunatics that don’t give a damn about the military.”

In truth, the people Trump chose to staff the VA and lead on veterans’ policy during his presidency constitute a rogues’ gallery of wild characters that rivaled, and perhaps even surpassed, the dysfunctional, self-serving appointees who ran rampant across various agencies on Trump’s watch. Few of them, however, did as much damage as two-little noted appointees who implemented Trump’s most controversial changes over the VA: Darin Selnick and Peter O’Rourke.

Selnick and O’Rourke were key to implementing the twin pillars of Trump’s veterans affairs legacy: the 2017 VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and the 2018 VA MISSION Act, which together served as a one-two punch to weaken the agency. First, the Accountability Act degraded conditions inside the VA — undermining labor power, gutting workplace protections, and leading to thousands of suspensions, demotions, and firings of front-line staff. From there, MISSION funneled millions of patients to appointments outside the VA, enriching the private sector while weakening the agency’s health care capacity, budget, and reputation.

https://theintercept.com/2024/10/28/trump-veterans-va-darin-selnick-peter-orourke