Jim Nicholson’s resignation as Secretary of the Veterans Administration gives President Bush a golden opportunity to harness the growing bipartisan determination to improve the care given to America’s veterans.
With less than 18 months to go before he leaves office, the president should resist the urge to appoint a place-holder to head the VA, which, with 235,000 employees, is the federal government’s second-largest agency. Instead, Bush should replace Nicholson with someone like Jesse Brown, the disabled Vietnam veteran who revitalized the VA during the Clinton administration, spurring it to provide more veterans greater access to a broader range of health care services.
Nicholson, a longtime Coloradan and a Vietnam veteran, served creditably during his two years at the VA’s helm. He pushed to add mental health services at more than 100 VA medical centers, hired more suicide- prevention coordinators and hosted state mental health conferences to help coordinate veterans services.
Nicholson took over the VA in 2005 just as it was coming in for sharp criticism after its budget came up $1.3 billion short of meeting the needs of a surge of injured veterans from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the blame for that budget, and other VA failures, rests upon senior Bush administration officials, including the president himself, who grossly underestimated the duration and intensity of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. As just one example, some veterans of the two conflicts have suffered severe brain injuries from improvised explosive devices and other unorthodox weapons that require years of expensive care.
The VA’s reputation also suffered in the wake of problems at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Walter Reed is run by the Pentagon, not the VA. But publicity about the Army’s dysfunctional system also highlighted poor coordination between Department of Defense facilities that care for active-duty servicemembers and the VA’s network of 1,400 hospitals and clinics, which serve 5.8 million veterans, including more than 260,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.
No fair accounting of the last two years would blame the VA’s problems on Nicholson. But Nicholson will turn 70 in February and his partisan background as Republican national chairman from 1997 through the 2000 elections makes him poorly suited to rebuild the agency’s ties to a Congress now controlled by Democrats. That’s why it’s important for Congress and the administration alike to forget the blame game and do what it takes to ensure that the men and women who have served this country in uniform receive the best possible care.
A presidential commission chaired by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., and Donna Shalala, who was Health and Human Services Secretary under Clinton, is now pressing for sweeping reforms in the VA’s network. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi endorsed those efforts Wednesday while criticizing shortcomings at the agency, including a backlog of more than 400,000 veterans-benefit claims waiting to be processed by the VA.
The momentum is thus building for far-reaching reforms to aid American veterans.
We urge President Bush to seize the moment and appoint a dynamic new leader at the VA.
