The current scandal in the Department of Veterans Affairs is a failure of the VA’s leadership to run the agency in the veterans’ best interest and a failure of Congress to provide needed resources.
As is generally known, VA managers, especially at the Phoenix hospital, manipulated waiting lists and kept secret records to enhance their own performance metrics and conceal extraordinarily long waiting times for patient appointments. But that might not have happened if the agency had the leadership to make such actions unacceptable and the funds to hire medical staff to meet the needs of the influx of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the aging population of Vietnam-era veterans.
