Obama's VA Failure: Huge Budget Increases and Expanded Staff Didn't Mean Better Service

When President Barack Obama visits the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Medical Center Friday, he'll be walking into the epicenter of a broken down department that has failed to years to get veterans timely medical treatment, even though the VA's budget has soared and thousands of VA staffers have been added.

According to the government's own data, the VA spent $108.2 billion in 2010, the first appropriation under Obama's watch, and will spend $150 billion this year, a 46 percent increase. Those budget increases, highlighted in a new video from the Concerned Veterans for America, allowed VA staffing to rise by about 12 percent over that time period.

But government data shows that endless wait times for veterans in recent years wasn't due to any overwhelming rush of veterans. The number of veterans enrolled for VA benefits grew just 7 percent from 2010 to 2013, and enrollee growth is expected to taper off even more.

The numbers are even more stark when seen from the end of the Bush administration. Since 2007, the VA's budget has doubled, and VA staff has increased 36 percent, while the number of veteran enrollees grew by just 14 percent.

Those numbers appear to indicate that the VA continues to face a management and leadership challenge, not a budget or staffing challenge. And yet, congressional leaders have argued in recent weeks that VA Secretary Robert McDonald is so far failing to provide that leadership, or use the tools Congress gave him last year to clean up the mess.

Budget and staffing increases happened just as reports started becoming public that veterans were facing lengthy delays, and it later was revealed that VA offices around the country were shuffling veterans' names on lists in order to hide the reality of these long wait times. When the scandal exploded in 2014, it forced former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign.

Legislation signed into law in 2014 allows McDonald to fire senior leaders involved in the health care scandal, but so far, none have been fired for that reason, and just a handful of officials have left for other reasons.

The law also lets the VA send veterans to non-VA health clinics, but a recent survey by the Veterans of Foreign Wars showed that about 80 percent of veterans eligible for this program aren't being offered a chance to use it.

House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) said this week that those are the challenges that Obama and McDonald still face.

"To date… the vast majority of this money [from the 2014 legislation] remains unspent and the expanded accountability authority has rarely been used," Miller said. "It's time for the administration to step up and use the tools Congress gave it to reform the department into an organization truly worthy of the veterans it is charged with serving."

One way the government hopes to turn things around at the VA is to create a new commission to focus on the problem. A White House official said the commission would include private sector, non-profit and government leaders. But it's unclear whether this sort of tame step will be able to appease critics.

Miller suggested that Obama start giving McDonald some help from the top to start using the 2014 VA reform law more aggressively. "If Sec. McDonald is to succeed in correcting VA's course, he’s going to need the president's help," he said.