I usually meet with Colonel Maximilian Sucer-Lesang Leech (US Army Ret.) to discuss information technology portfolio, enterprise architecture and capital planning policy at the US Department of Veterans Affairs. But during our regularly scheduled consultation Thursday morning, instead of that, he immediately launched into a tirade about Congress.
“Those idiots on Capitol Hill,” he huffed, “don’t have the common sense God gave a picnic ant!”
“What makes you say that?” I inquired as calmly as possible.
“Well,” he sighed with a roll of his eyes, “I suppose you know that yesterday, the House passed a bill to allow the Secretary to… fire... members of the Senior Executive Service – and the language! It’s outrageous!”
“Oh, really?” I responded. “What’s it say?”
“It says,” he grumbled, looking down at a document displayed on his tablet, ‘Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary may remove any individual from the Senior Executive Service if the Secretary determines the performance of the individual warrants such removal.’ I’m sure you can see what that does, don’t you? Why it turns the SES into a bunch of… of… employees at will!”
“As opposed to an elite corps of administrators and management specialists protected by the same Byzantine employment protections as the US Civil Service, but not restricted by the GS federal pay schedule,” I observed.
“There’s nothing Byzantine about our employment protections!” Leech objected. “And they were instituted – over a hundred years ago, I might add – for very good reasons, too! In order to avoid constant applications of political patronage resulting in the replacement of incumbent federal government management officials with a series of hacks every election cycle!”
“Meaning that,” I reminded him, “instead of a rotation of incompetent ward heelers, fixers, back-room cronies, strong-arm thugs and political machine bag men from the provinces riding to Washington DC on the coat tails of their elected representatives to run federal agencies like the VA, the American public are blessed with another rotation, consisting of former members of those agencies’ client and / or regulated communities and / or their private contractors, engaged in what has become so fondly known as the ‘revolving door.’ One rotation or another, it seems the taxpayers always have something upon which the federal government requires them to sit and spin.”
“Then they should relax and enjoy it,” Leech opined. “Because there aren’t any other alternatives.”
“Until yesterday,” I noted.
“Turning the members of the SES into employees-at-will,” Leech complained, “is a gross impropriety of the first water!”
“From your perspective, perhaps,” I needled.
“It’s nothing but a knee-jerk reaction reaction to a bad situation, painted with a very broad brush, and undermining a system that can work, has worked, and has the mechanism to work,” he wailed. “It opens the door to a slippery slope of undoing the careful civil service protections that have been in place for decades, with regard to protections that have been put in place for decades, intended to ensure that politically appointed managers cannot fire nonpolitical senior executives in federal service without proper cause! It’s a fake solution and provides no real fix to the fundamental problems at the VA. Its stated purpose is to hold senior level employees accountable by giving the VA Secretary the authority to terminate them at-will, and that’s all, and that’s no solution to the fundamental problem!”
“Okay,” I allowed, “in that case, what is the fundamental problem?”
“Simple,” Leech asserted, “it’s the same problem that’s always been there since the founding of the Senior Executive Service – we don’t get paid anywhere near enough money!”
“The only limit placed on your annual compensation, however,” I rebutted, “is that the aggregate total of your annual salary plus bonuses and awards cannot exceed the annual income dispensed by the federal government to the Vice President of the United States. Most people would agree that’s a reasonably princely sum.”
“Most people,” he groused, “don’t have a mortgage on a seven thousand square foot residence on Old Dominion Drive in McLean, Virginia, or need to pay for their children’s tuition and expenses at Georgetown Preparatory, the Citadel and Wellesley College, all at the same [expletive] time!”
“And no doubt,” I assured him, “those folks who aren’t encumbered by such terrible burdens can readily understand why $230,700 a year might not be enough to make ends meet.”
“Very funny,” he grunted. “Frankly, Tom, [expletive] them, okay? Let them kiss [expletive] to get into West Point for twelve of the first eighteen years of their lives! Let them keep kissing [expletive] all the way up the chain of command at the [expletive] Pentagon for twenty [expletive] years, and then spend fifteen more working for Dyncorp, CACI and Lockheed Martin as a [expletive] shill for those bastards’ military contracts business, kissing even more two, three and four-star brass [expletive], then let them tell me I don’t deserve a nice, cushy job with the Senior Executive Service at the Department of Veterans Affairs!”
“But let’s face the facts here,” I prodded, “the motivation for that vote was the fact that American military veterans, and not just aging ones from World War II, Korea and Vietnam, but even young ones, returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, were placed on waiting lists for medical care at VA hospitals, sometimes for years. And at best, the SES executives at those hospitals looked the other way while their subordinates engaged in organized conspiracies to conceal those facts and falsely report that those veterans were being treated at those VA hospitals in a timely manner. Don’t you think, for the kind of money you get paid, the US taxpayers and military veterans deserve something better than that from the SES?”
“Oh, come on, Tom!” Leech protested. “We get a lousy one hundred seventy, one hundred eighty grand base salary working for the SES! That’s [expletive] peanuts – [expletive] chump change! The real money is in the bonuses and awards! And Lord [expletive] a duck, you don’t get them if your worker ants report that your VA hospital is screwing the [expletive] pooch, letting the [expletive] grunts drop [expletive] dead while they’re waiting for the [expletive] sawbones to fix their [expletive] Agent Orange palsy, Gulf War syndrome, [expletive] explosive concussion brain trauma, post-traumatic [expletive] stress disorder, [expletive] drug addiction, [expletive] cancer, [expletive] diabetes, [expletive] heart disease, [expletive] stroke or [expletive] cirrhosis of the [expletive] liver or [expletive] whatever else those [expletive] losers drag their [expletive] [expletive] in the door with besides missing arms, legs, hands, feet, fingers, toes, eyes, ears, noses, faces and [expletives]!”
“Well,” I observed, “from your comments, it’s obvious that the compassion of the VA Senior Executive Service for American military veterans is exceeded only by your concern for their welfare.”
“Right!” Leech emphatically declared. “So how come nobody [expletive] appreciates us, huh? That’s what I want to [expletive] know!”
“Beats me,” I said as I viewed the results of several Internet searches which I had stored on tabs in my Firefox browser while Leech had been ranting. “Could it be due to the fact that the Center for Investigative Reporting reported that, in the last decade, the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs has paid out more than $200 million in wrongful death actions to families of veterans? It seems that there were claims of over one thousand preventable veteran deaths.”
“If they were afraid to die,” Leech shrugged, “why the [expletive] did they join the military in the first place?”
“How about when over two thousand five hundred veterans were exposed to hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV at VA hospitals because of reused unsterilized needles?” I continued.
“Look,” he shot back with an exasperated tone, “the VA has to get the money to pay those SES bonuses from somewhere, doesn’t it? Sterilized needles cost a lot of [expletive] cash, you know!”
“It says here,” I pointed out, “that the average waiting time for patients at a VA hospital could be as great as ten months, while the federal requirement is fourteen days.”
“Thirty days!” Leech objected. “See how the media misrepresent the truth?”
“What do you make of this incident here,” I wondered, “where malfunctioning equipment at a VA hospital accidentally drained all the blood out of a patient during an operation?”
“What the [expletive],” Leech sneered, “[expletive] happens! Sometimes, I think they should make that the Marine Corps motto, you know? ‘[Expletive] Happens.’ Yeah, or maybe that ought to be the Army motto or the Air Force motto; either [expletive] one, actually. Maybe the whole [expletive] Defense Department.”
“Or the VA,” I suggested.
“Yeah, yeah,” he chuckled, “definitely the [expletive] VA. That’s it. ‘The Department of Veterans Affairs – “[Expletive] Happens” is our Motto.’ Yeah. Definitely.”
“So,” I gently prodded, “we’ve established that recent developments have left you and your colleagues in the Senior Executive Service somewhat… disgruntled. What can I do about it?”
“Tell me,” he beseeched, “how this bill can be defeated in the Senate!”
“Got any dirt on Shinseki?” I sought to ascertain.
“Dirt… on… Shinseki?” Leech slowly echoed while staring up at the ceiling. “Oh, [expletive], he’s such a [expletive] straight arrow – always has been. Total Dudley Do-Right, that guy. He makes John Glenn look like Nick Nolte. Nothing there; not a [expletive] thing.”
“In that case, you and your buddies will have to cozy up to the Democrats,” I concluded.
“Oh, [expletive],” he groaned. “How come?”
“Because thirty three of them voted against the House bill,” I informed him.
“[Expletive],” he spat, “I was worried we might have to do that. Makes me want to puke, but I guess we gotta man up and [expletive] bite the [expletive] bullet. So we tell our lobbyists to get the best booze, blow and hookers down to those jackass Democrats in the Senate pronto, huh?”
“I’ll leave the specific… methodology and… implementation up to you and our esteemed SES colleagues,” I tactfully replied.
“Sure,” he winked knowingly. “And I’ll get started on that while you charge the rest of this ninety-minute consultation to the VA, right?”
“Sir,” I reminded him as he rose and shot out the door, “it’s your consultation and your time.”