Top Republicans on the House and Senate VA committees are leading a bill intended to help the Department of Veterans Affairs fire low-performing employees more quickly.
Congress passed a similar bill in 2017, but its implementation fell short of some lawmakers’ expectations.
Senate VA Committee Chairman Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and House VA Committee Chairman Mike Bost (R-Ill.) reintroduced the Restore VA Accountability Act on Thursday. The bill is co-sponsored by 25 House lawmakers and seven Republican senators.
Lawmakers wrote in a fact sheet that the bill would “ultimately help VA eliminate the small percentage of employees who harm veterans in weeks or months, rather than years.”
The bill did not pass the Senate House during the last session of Congress. But lawmakers are making the expedited layoff bill a legislative priority in a new session of Congress, as the new Trump administration has called for. policy development it’s easier to fire career federal employees.
The VA has furloughed thousands of employees through an expedited removal process created under the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017. But federal judges and the Merit Systems Protection Board have repeatedly blocked many provisions of the legislation from covering most VA employees.
The department reinstated 120 employees — about 3 percent of the 4,000 employees fired under the widely contested law paid about $134 million to other former employees fired by VA. The VA agreed to these actions, as part of an agreement reached with the American Federation of Government Employees in July 2023. No employees fired for serious misconduct have been rehired.
Republican lawmakers said the reintroduced bill would “close court-created loopholes in the 2017 Accountability Act by restoring Congress’s intent to give the VA the authority to quickly revoke, demote, and suspend employees who do not serve the interests of veterans. »
The bill also seeks to hold VA managers accountable by subjecting them to the same disciplinary procedures as members of the Senior Executive Service.
Among their options, agencies can sanction career SES members for alleged misconduct, neglect of duty, or malfeasance by reducing their pay by up to 10 percent or involuntarily relocating them. In both cases, agency officials must give written notice 15 days before the disciplinary measures take effect.
VA leaders under the Biden administration say the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act hasn’t helped them fire low-performing employees, after losing several legal battles over its implementation — and they expect to that it obtains similar results with these latest bills.
Former VA Senate Committee Chairman Jon Tester (D-Mont.) led another proposal to hold VA employees accountable during the last session of Congress.
The Leadership, Engagement, Accountability, and Development (LEAD) Act of 2023 would have directed VA to standardize how it builds a case against employees who face allegations of misconduct or poor performance, and train all VA staff on the ins and outs. of the process.
A March 2023 memo from a top VA human resources official indicated that the department would not propose new adverse actions against VA employees using the 2017 law.
According to the memo, decisions by the Merit Systems Protection Board, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and the Federal Labor Relations Authority led to the legislation being “inapplicable to a large portion of the workforce.” of work”.
McDonough told reporters in March 2023 that the VA’s use of its Section 714 authority under the VA Accountability Act and the Whistleblower Protection Act was not helping the agency effectively manage its staff .
“To be honest…enforcing Section 714 hasn’t really helped us manage our workforce, but it has allowed us to appear before federal judges and administrative agencies,” McDonough said. “So we just want to make sure that we exercise the powers that we have.”
Some VA employees told Federal News Network in 2018 that they worried that relatively minor mistakes could cost them jobs. One employee accepted a demotion to a lower general schedule level and an $11,000 pay reduction, rather than risk termination.
Republican lawmakers wrote in the fact sheet that low-performing employees impact the delivery of veterans’ health care and benefits, but also “drive away motivated and talented people who have chosen not to work at VA due to a negative work culture or environment.”
“The committee has observed cases where years of investigations and thousands of pages of damning evidence are not enough for VA to fire an employee. This is not what taxpayers fund nor what veterans deserve from the VA,” they wrote.
Bost said in a statement that the bill would “hold 1 percent of VA’s bad employees accountable.”
“Over the past two years, we have uncovered scandal after scandal of poor middle management or VA employees committing wrongdoing. But time and time again, we saw these bad VA employees who didn’t have veterans’ best interests at heart, simply moved to another part of the agency. This has a direct impact not only on veterans, but also on the VA mission and the employees who are trying to do their jobs well,” Bost said.
Moran agreed that “although VA employs some of the best men and women, it only takes a few bad employees to disrupt the culture and service at the VA.” »
“Veterans are best served when VA leaders have the ability to act quickly to remove bad employees from the VA workforce,” Moran said.
The Detroit News reported that the VA fired the former director of the VA Medical Center in Detroit in June 2023, after its Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection found that she “failed” to oversee the staff and to guarantee the quality of the hospital’s surgical program.
The VA also reassigned the director and chief of staff of the VA Eastern Colorado Health System to Aurora, Colorado, after a VA inspector general report found leaders “created a culture of fear” which contributed to some senior officials leaving the hospital.
McDonough told reporters at a news conference last month that these two examples were cases “where we, using our existing authorities, acted expeditiously to change and improve our situations where veterans were not receiving the care that they deserved.”
“It is also true that there are additional powers that Congress has enacted and that when VA has attempted to use them over the past five years, we find ourselves in front of federal magistrates and judges more than in one-on-one conversations with our providers and hold them accountable. I would much rather we could just run our building than spend so much time in front of judges,” McDonough said.
“When our providers fail to meet these accountability requirements, we hold them accountable,” he added.
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