EDITORIAL: The vacuous VA

Despite the ongoing climate of corruption and dysfunction at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the agency still has many defenders — including both Democratic candidates for president — who feel the agency is too often and unfairly targeted. It is simply too hard not to criticize the VA, however, when the agency not only accepts failure, but also remedies it with even greater failure.

As Jazz Shaw at HotAir.com reminded us last week, VA employees have run their departments into the ground and been rewarded with promotions, been fired — and then rehired — after their staff members repeatedly stole medications from veterans, and kept their full pay and benefits after creating phony waiting lists to hide excessive wait times — wait times that were so long that veterans died without ever seeing a doctor.

Now there comes a case that might top them all.

According to a report by Luke Rosiak of The Daily Caller, Elizabeth Rivera, a VA hospital employee in Puerto Rico, was fired after being arrested for being part of an armed robbery. She was in fact charged with armed robbery, but pleaded guilty to lesser charges. However, she was quickly reinstated after her union cited the fact that the management-side labor relations specialist, who’s tasked with handling union and employee discipline, is a convicted sex offender, and that the hospital’s director was once arrested and found with painkilling drugs.

Despite the fact that the labor relations specialist, Tito Santiago Martinez, had reportedly disclosed his conviction to the hospital, the VA hired him anyway.

“There’s no children in [the hospital],” Martinez said, “so they figure I could not harm anyone here.”

The union is essentially arguing that since one employee committed a crime and got away with it by remaining employed, another one should be able to, as well. And, as Mr. Rosiak points out, since that argument was upheld by the highest civil service arbiters, the case “has created a vicious Catch-22 where the department’s prior indefensible inaction against bad employees has handcuffed it from taking action now against other scofflaws.”

Rivera missed work while she was in jail, but she reportedly received back pay upon her reinstatement.

There’s only one segment of the entire American workforce where these outcomes are deemed this acceptable: the federal government. If this had happened in the private sector, the workers would be packing their personal belongings in a box and exiting the building immediately, unceremoniously dumped — as should be the case. Not only should Rivera have been terminated, but prior to her dalliance with armed robbery, the labor relations negotiator and hospital director should have been pink-slipped, as well.

This is just one in a long line of examples of the need for massive civil service reform — in this case, privatizing the VA. The private sector can do this job better, more efficiently and, most importantly, with far more accountability.