In Just Over Twenty Minutes, I take down the Department of Veteran Affairs, the VA Accountability Act, OAWP, and More
In this appearance with Tom Roten, I explain why the VA is not functioning and probably has never properly functioned.
Yesterday morning, I appeared with Tom Roten on 800 WVHU; find the podcast here.
Tom and I talked about the Department of Veteran Affairs investigations I’ve done here.
That includes Jim Murtagh, who uncovered how several VA hospitals would manipulate death statistics by sending dying patients to other hospitals; here’s his podcast.
Dr. Shivani Negi is an angel of mercy- or death- from the Alexandria, LA VA Medical Center. She decides that if a patient is too old or too sick they should not get care. Here’s her story and an interview with Floyd Hamilton, the son of a victim.
Then, there is Keenan Reed, a Memphis VA Medical Center cop who faced retaliation after he reported a fellow officer leaving a gun unattended. She was having an affair, Keenan told me, with a high ranking official, which made her protected. Here’s his story and an interview I did with him.
Finally, there is Nicole Mahan, also from the Memphis VA. She discovered that suicidal veterans were being discharged and she’s now on indefinite unpaid leave. Here’s her story.
We not only talked about these stories but examined the Department of Veteran Affairs in a broad view.
“The 2017 law that President Trump passed- the VA Accountability Act- it’s largely failed, but it’s also largely failed as all reforms of the VA have failed.” I told Tom.
I noted that when Warren Harding was President, what was then called the Veterans Bureau, was one of the scandals which defined his presidency. At that time, the VA was still in its infancy, meaning this is a department which has probably never functioned properly.
The 2017 law failed because its centerpiece, the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection (OAWP), has not only failed to help whistleblowers but it has proactively gone after them.
OAWP was an office created inside the VA that was supposed to be the go to place for whistleblowers to go when they are reporting waste, fraud and abuse.
In 2019, writing in The Daily Caller, I documented this. Here is how one whistleblower described working with OAWP.
He said that he provided OAWP with documentation of significant corruption of VA police leadership in his hospital, and rather than investigating his information, it was used to data mine him.
“He came forward to Secretary Shulkin at a town hall in August 2015,” Coleman says in the list, “At the time, he had been reassigned to escorting and reproducing PIV badges while an AIB took place.”
Childs {the whistleblower} said that he spoke to Coleman about the mentorship program; he even interviewed, but said he stopped pursuing it after it was clear OAWP had no intention of investigating his claims.
Childs said his understanding of the program was that the OAWP would manage a dialogue between him and VA police leadership at his hospital; he said that in the end this made no sense since he was accusing the same VA police leadership of causing the problems.
OAWP was eventually the subject of a scathing VA Inspector General report. Find that report here.
The VA Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection (OAWP) was established in 2017 to improve VA’s ability to hold employees accountable and enhance protections for whistleblowers.1 This goal was to be accomplished, in part, by expanding VA’s ability to hold senior executives accountable for specified misconduct; preventing retaliation against whistleblowers and initiating action against supervisors who retaliate; and addressing senior executives’ poor performance.
A year later, in June 2018, the VA Office of Inspector General (OIG) received requests from Senators Tammy Baldwin, Richard Blumenthal, Sherrod Brown, Patty Murray, Jon Tester, and Representative Timothy Walz raising concerns that VA was not properly implementing the Department of Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act (the Act). These requests came as a number of other complaints were being considered by the OIG regarding OAWP operations. In response, the OIG’s Office of Special Reviews conducted an initial review from June 2018 through December 2018. During the review, additional allegations arose, prompting further work through August 2019.
That continues as Jim Murtagh told me when I interviewed him, “I went to the OAWP and said, ‘can you tell me what rules, regulations, laws you enforce.’ They couldn’t tell me.”
He continued, “They {OAWP} had no idea what they were doing, and then, at one point they claim I’m a whistleblower and then at another point, he says, ‘in my gut I don’t think you’re a whistleblower.’ I go, ‘in your gut, what are you talking about? This is a nation of laws not gut. I blew the whistle by definition.”
“This office then left you hanging after you blew the whistle,” I remarked. “The problem is it’s the VA investigating itself.”
Tom Roten agreed regarding the VA Accountability Act, stating, “My audience loves President Trump, but this was another piece of feel good legislation which did nothing.”
The VA suffers from several problems; it’s too big- with nearly two hundred hospitals in its network- and they have a culture of whistleblower retaliation. Both Nicole Mahan’s and Keenan Reed are examples of that retaliation.
“That has run wild for decades, whistleblower retaliation I’m talking about,” I told Tom. “That’s the environment at the VA, until that environment changes there’s no reform.”