Luke Rosiak reports for the Daily Caller on a proposal to solve problems at the federal Department of Veterans Affairs by throwing more money at it.
Department of Veterans Affairs officials want to double the pay of top administrators and move them into the same employment classification as medical doctors. They say the new, lucrative employment classification, Title 38, would help retain talent and make it easier to fire poor performers.
There is little evidence that either of these statements is true.
Private hospital administrators make more than the $180,000 most VA directors earn. But private sector hospitals are unlikely ever to hire from among career VA bureaucrats, most of whom have unremarkable qualifications, rose to management through tenure rather than talent, and benefitted from a closed pipeline that rarely hires from the outside.
Many have backgrounds in soft, unrelated disciplines, like social workers, who would be making an average of $54,000 outside of the VA. The Martinsburg, West Virginia, VA director has a background in facilities management. …
… The clearest evidence that VA hospital directors have no other job options is TheDCNF data analysis showing the lengths to which they will go to protect their $180,000 salaries, including uprooting their families and moving across the country four, five or more times in a span of a few years.
In the rare occasions when VA executives are fired, they typically fight it out, using appeal after appeal and launching lawsuits that divert agency officials to litigation when they could be focusing on making sure veterans are getting proper health care.
VA leaders will attempt Tuesday to convince senators to move its Senior Executive Service managers into the Title 38 system for medical doctors, which allows the government to pay significantly higher compensation. Agency officials say they are all but unable to fire bad SESers because of excessively complicated civil service rules and appeals to the Merit Systems Protection Board. Reclassifying VA’s SESers to Title 38 would fix that, according to officials.
Yet only weeks ago, the VA said it would take at least 270 days to fire a Title 38 employee who was drunk in the operating room, a length of time comparable to those involved in disciplining top SESers.