WASHINGTON ― Veterans groups are pressuring President-elect Donald Trump to keep President Barack Obama’s secretary of Veterans Affairs, saying there are serious concerns with the names he has put forward as his own choices.
On Friday, six veterans organizations ― the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Disabled American Veterans, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Vietnam Veterans of America and American Veterans, or Amvets ― met with Trump officials and asked them to retain Robert McDonald, the former CEO of Procter and Gamble who took over the troubled VA department in 2014.
“We all want McDonald,” Joe Chenelly, the executive director of Amvets, told The New York Times. “He has a good business mind, he is experienced and we feel we can trust him.”
The Military Times reported that Trump’s team did not reject keeping McDonald, even though during the campaign, Trump was intensely critical of what was happening at the agency under his watch.
Last year, he called the VA “probably the most incompetently run agency in the United States” and said, “I’d fire everybody, I’d get it ― it would be so good. It would be so good. ... We have a bunch of guys that don’t know what they’re doing and tremendous corruption.”
So far, the frontrunners for the VA job seem to be former Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Pete Hegseth, the former head of Concerned Veterans for America. CVA was founded by the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch.
Rick Weidman, executive director for policy and government affairs at Vietnam Veterans of America, told The Washington Post that McDonald needs a “chance to make his mark.”
“None of the other people being mentioned are viable,” he added.
McDonald said he is not sure whether he is seriously being considered to stay on at VA and has not yet met with Trump.
“When I got a call from the (Obama) White House in 2014, my personal purpose in life is to help others, so I jumped at the chance to serve,” he said Friday in an interview with The Military Times. “I have not been approached, and I’m making plans according to that. But service is important.”
McDonald took over at the VA for ret. Army Gen. Eric Shinseki, who came under intense criticism for not doing enough to fix the backlog of claims from veterans waiting for care. During his tenure, there was also a scandal in which employees were found to have been covering up the months-long wait times that veterans faced.
Veterans groups have been concerned that Trump may seek some sort of privatization of the VA. He has proposed allowing veterans to essentially opt-out of the VA system and make greater use of private doctors.
“Bob McDonald would obviously be a good pick to remain the head of the VA, but only if Donald Trump guarantees to veterans that he will not privatize veterans’ health care, or turn it into voucher-care,” said Jon Soltz, the chairman of the progressive group VoteVets, which did not meet with Trump. “The major veterans service organizations need to make that clear. Bob McDonald is great, but re-appointing him to merely oversee the dismantling of veterans’ health care would be pointless, and a non-starter.”
During the campaign, VoteVets spent millions of dollars on running anti-privatization ads and Soltz said it would revive them if Trump tried to do anything along those lines.
Trump shocked many veterans and military officials last summer by going after Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who criticized Trump at the Democratic National Convention. Khan’s son lost his life saving his fellow service members in Iraq. Trump responded by attacking Khan, who is Muslim, and his family, implying that his wife did not speak at the convention because she wasn’t allowed to do so because of her religion.
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