It’s not often that a once highly touted law has so many problems, so quickly that federal officials declare a big chunk of it useless.
That’s the case with section 714 of the Trump-era Veterans Affairs (VA) Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017. It was designed to allow officials to fire feds faster by weakening their civil service protections. But whistleblowers were poorly protected, accountability was shoddy and much of the act was overrun by legal rulings.
That’s not what President Donald Trump projected when he signed the legislation into law six years ago.
“This is one of the largest reforms to the VA in its history,” Trump said during a June 2017 White House East Room signing ceremony. “It’s a reform that I campaigned on, and now I am thrilled to be able to sign that promise into law … This is a big one.”
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Not anymore.
The act “was used to relieve thousands of VA employees” of their jobs during the Trump administration, VA Secretary Denis McDonough told a House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing two weeks ago. But a number of administrative and judicial decisions against the department, he told reporters, meant VA officials spent so much time defending the law that it interfered with other work.
“To be honest,” McDonough said, “Section 714 wasn’t really helping us necessarily manage our workforce as much as it was getting us … before administrative bodies or before federal judges trying to explain this provision.”
They had to explain...
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