[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9165-9166]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1045
 PASS VETERANS AFFAIRS ACCOUNTABILITY AND WHISTLEBLOWER PROTECTION ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Alabama (Mrs. Roby) for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. ROBY. Mr. Speaker, today we have an opportunity to send to the 
President's desk legislation bringing unprecedented accountability to 
the VA and badly needed protections for whistleblowers who expose 
wrongdoing.
  Mr. Speaker, as someone who has worked with whistleblowers to shed 
light on negligence, abuse, and even criminal activity within the 
Central Alabama VA, I can tell you that this reform legislation is long 
overdue. When it comes to the VA scandal that erupted a few years ago, 
most Americans probably remember Phoenix, Arizona, and the horrendous 
activity that happened there. Phoenix became the epitome of a 
nationwide VA accountability problem, and rightly so.
  However, in many ways, the Central Alabama VA could also be 
considered a poster child for the need of reform of the Department of 
Veterans Affairs from top to bottom. It might not have garnered as many 
headlines as Phoenix, but the nature and extent of the abuse inside the 
Central Alabama VA was every bit as bad, if not worse.
  My staff and I worked with courageous whistleblowers and dedicated 
journalists to pull back the curtain there. Here are just a handful of 
examples of what we found:
  More than 900 X-ray cancer screenings, some showing malignancies, 
were lost and unread for years. When alerted to the problem, top 
administrators tried to cover it up.
  A VA pulmonologist manipulated more than 1,200 patient records, but 
even after being caught twice, was still given a satisfactory review.
  Perhaps the most disturbing is a Central Alabama VA employee took a 
recovering veteran to a crack house and bought him drugs and provided 
him prostitutes in order to extort his VA payments. And even when 
caught, this employee was not fired, not until 1\1/2\ years later, when 
we exposed it in the newspaper.

[[Page 9166]]

  The crack incident stands out in my mind for many reasons. First, it 
still haunts me to my core just how callous and uncaring a person could 
be to do such a thing to a veteran patient. Second, it illustrates just 
how complacent the bureaucracy had become to let that behavior slide. 
And third, it is chilling to think that we would never have even known 
about it if not for a brave VA employee who walked into my Montgomery 
office and handed us a copy of the police report.
  Thankfully, under the 2014 reform law, the director of the Central 
Alabama VA was fired in the wake of these exposures. That law took an 
important step toward speeding up the termination process for top 
officials. But did you know that he remains the only senior official 
fired as a result of the VA scandal?
  Mr. Speaker, we all know that law did not go far enough. For one 
thing, it did not extend the strict accountability standards to rank-
and-file employees. Senior managers aren't the only ones responsible 
for the failures at the VA. There has been a culture of complacency up 
and down the chain of command for a very long time, and the complicated 
process for disciplining or removing problem employees only makes it 
worse.
  That law also didn't go far enough to protect whistleblowers. There 
is no question in my mind that without the courage of those who came 
forward to tell the truth, very little would have changed at the 
Central Alabama VA, if anything at all, yet those whistleblowers were 
the very targets of retaliation from supervisors and other officials.
  Mr. Speaker, today we have the opportunity to take that next step on 
behalf of our veterans and those who are working to serve them. S. 
1094, the Department of Veterans Affairs Accountability and 
Whistleblower Protection Act, grants the VA Secretary the power to 
fire, demote, or suspend any VA employee no matter their rank. The bill 
also increases protections for whistleblowers who put themselves at 
risk to improve the lives and care for veterans.
  Let me say that most VA employees care a great deal about veterans 
and work very hard to provide the best service. It is not fair for the 
hardworking employees of the VA that a few bad actors get to evade 
punishment. The Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Dr. David Shulkin, has 
said he wants greater authority to remove bad employees as he sees fit. 
It is time for Congress to give him that authority and to let him know 
what we expect and that we expect him to use it.
  Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to do the right thing by our 
veterans, to pass this legislation today and send it to the President's 
desk.

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