Allah:
Via Breitbart, who better to fix the government’s most notorious bureaucracy than the man who ran for president as an expert turnaround artist? Just one problem: Not in a million years, I’d bet, would Romney accept a task as thanklessly Sisyphean as managing the VA. No one — no one — is going to turn the agency around and he surely knows it. So does Obama, I expect, which is why he’d happily offer a Republican like Romney the job if he thought he’d take it. It would make the next two years of VA failures thoroughly bipartisan, with zero risk that the new manager would embarrass O by succeeding where his Democratic administration had failed.
The reason Romney would turn this down cold isn’t because he doesn’t care or because the agency’s underfunded (on the contrary, funding’s ballooned over the last 15 years), it’s because there’s realistically no way to cut a path through the jungle of regulation and bureaucracy that’s grown up around a national system of socialized medicine. As always, as always, government accepts reform only by addition, never by subtraction.
This is the sort of turnaround that a lot of corporate chief executive officers promise: We’ll handle more customers, but faster! Most of them fail, too. And corporate CEOs have a weapon that the president doesn’t: They can fire most of the staff. When looking at corporate turnarounds for my book on failure, I came across a lot of stories of successful turnarounds, and a lot of them started with just that step…
[W]hen you put reforms in place, you can’t just rip out the stuff that’s not working and do something different. What you’re actually reforming is the process, and because many of the current elements of the process are functionally mandated by other government rules, or court rulings, or bits of legislation that your reform effort didn’t amend, you have to layer your reform on top of the system you wanted to reform, rather than in place of it. Many of your reforms simply stack another layer of bureaucracy on top of the bureaucracy that was already causing problems. This is a problem that CEOs don’t face, unless they’re in some heavily regulated business such as banking or oil refining.
Why would a man who once famously said, for entirely sensible reasons, that he likes being able to fire people take a job where he can’t fire people? And bureaucracy isn’t the only problem: Yuval Levin makes a shrewd point here about potential resistance from powerful veterans’ groups if anyone tried to take a scalpel to the VA. That’s counterintuitive because veterans, when polled, are widely skeptical of the VA; fully 72 percent say that vets returning from combat get worse care there than they do outside the system.
The best choice for a replacement would be Wesley Clark. May as well replace one former failed general with another former failed general just to keep things consistent.
I think Ricardo Sanchez would also be a good candidate for the VA job. He at least didn’t make everyone wear silly hats!
@Randy: Come on. Those silly hats were to symbolize the new highly mobile Army that Shinseki said he turned us into. You know the Army who (other than SF) had to let the Marines send in the first combat brigades to Afghanistan, a land locked country, because we couldn’t get there fast enough. The same highly mobile Army that was the last branch of service to be ready for Iraq and who couldn’t get a major combat unit (4th ID) there fast enough for the invasion. Of course, Turkey did screw us over by not letting them come in from the north which would have cut off the northward retreating Iraqi forces before they were able to blend into the civilian populace and help form the insurgency which prolonged the war effort. SF, the 173rd, and the Kurds did a great job but having a mechanized division up there would have helped immensely and would have probably disproved the notion that we didn’t have enough troops.
The likelihood of Mitt Romney, or someone like him, is probably close to zero. The VA has a layered bureaucracy, largely by design, with additions along the way via legislation and court decisions. Yuval Levin’s point of “potential resistance from powerful veterans’ group” is a very astute observation many would not make or acknowledge. They have a strong voice in deciding which programs and services are offered, how a beneficiary should receive a program/service, etc. In basic terms, that’s quite heady stuff when outside groups can exercise tremendous influence.