House GOP pushes bill to make it easier to fire VA workers
By MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press
Jul 29, 2015 3:54 PM CDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican-controlled House is moving forward with a bill making it easier to fire or demote hundreds of thousands of employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"We have seen how the presence of poor performers and misconduct ranging from unethical practices to outright criminal behavior can spread like a cancer through a workforce," Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said as the House began debate on the bill Wednesday.

Miller, chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, sponsored the bill, saying it was needed to speed up the slow pace of change at the beleaguered agency. The VA has been rocked by a scandal over long waits for veterans seeking medical care and falsified records by VA employees to cover up the delays.

The White House has threatened to veto the measure, saying it would remove important due process rights and create a two-tier system in which VA employees would be treated differently than other federal workers.

But Miller said deep-seated problems at the VA warrant special treatment.

"There are some rotten people that work in the department that need to be fired, not protected," he said.

Miller's bill builds on a law adopted last year that made it easier to fire senior VA executives. The provision was a key element of a VA overhaul approved in response to the wait-time scandal. The law also made it easier for veterans to get government-paid care from local doctors and added billions of dollars to the agency's budget to hire thousands of doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals.

Miller, who pushed for the earlier overhaul, said more needs to be done to fix the VA, noting that federal civil service rules make it difficult to fire poor-performing employees.

A recent study by the Government Accountability Office found it can take at least six months to more than a year to fire a government employee for cause, a time period Miller said "defies common sense."

Miller's bill would give employees seven days to appeal their removal or demotion, with a 45-day appeal period. If the appeal is not completed within 45 days, the decision on removal or demotion would be final.

"As we have seen time and time again across the country it is nearly impossible to remove that cancer in a reasonable amount of time due to current civil service rules," he said, citing slow action by the VA to address problems in Phoenix, Denver, central Alabama, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and his home state of Florida.

Democrats complained that the bill targets low-ranking employees as scapegoats for problems they did not create.

Democratic Rep. Donna Edwards, whose suburban Maryland district includes thousands of federal workers, denounced the bill as "a last-minute attempt" by Republicans to "terminate, demoralize and unfairly blame federal employees and shrink the federal government until it can't do anything for the American people."

While Republicans talk of accountability, the GOP bill "is nothing more than union busting," Edwards said. "Let's just call it what it is."

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