Driven out by whistleblowers, Acting Inspector General of the Veterans Administration Richard Griffin finally resigned last week. Good riddance. Griffin had whitewashed and concealed information about inadequate care and phony waiting lists and tried to retaliate against truth-tellers.
But don’t expect real improvement at the VA. Griffin’s successor is another bureaucratic lifer, Lin Halliday. She’s been collecting a paycheck from the VA Inspector General’s office since 1992, while the deadly problems festered. President Obama seems to like that approach.
On July 2, as Obama descended from Air Force One at a Wisconsin stop, whistleblower Ryan Honl, a Gulf War Veteran, seized a moment on the tarmac to urge the president to appoint an independent Inspector General. “If they just pick someone new from inside the agency, it will be business as usual and the problems will continue,” Honl warned. But the President brushed Honl off, saying VA Secretary Robert McDonald “had it covered.”
Sorry. That’s not true.
Only the president can appoint an Inspector General. Federal law requires that the Veterans Administration, and other departments, have outside Inspectors General to guard against corruption and mismanagement. Obama simply refuses to appoint them, allowing the vacant offices to be filled instead by “acting” IGs like Griffin and Halliday. These are lapdogs instead of watchdogs, compliant temporary placeholders from inside the system.
No comments:
Post a Comment