Las Vegas
AFL-CIO Executive Council statement
Last month, The Washington Post revealed that wounded soldiers, many returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, faced substandard medical care, decrepit living conditions and bureaucratic nightmares at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. (“Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration at Army’s Top Medical Facility,” Feb. 18, 2007).
Given all we ask of our soldiers, who were injured doing their jobs, it is a national disgrace and an outrage that they cannot get decent medical care and financial support when they return from war wounded. Unfortunately, the fiasco at Walter Reed is not an isolated instance of neglect or oversight, but the result of flawed national policy. Veterans around the country have faced similar challenges in obtaining appropriate medical care because of staffing shortages and funding shortfalls.
There is mounting evidence that many of the problems encountered at Walter Reed were exacerbated by a botched, ill-designed and ideologically motivated privatization initiative. At a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing yesterday, Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) questioned whether “an ideological push for privatization put the care of our wounded heroes at risk.” Tierney noted further that the Walter Reed episode highlighted “problems systemic through the military health care system.”
Starting in 2000, and accelerating after 2002, there has been a systematic effort to outsource the jobs of skilled and experienced federal workers at Walter Reed. As a direct result of this initiative, according to an internal Army memorandum, Walter Reed faced “the critical issues of retaining skilled clinical personnel for the hospital and diverse professionals.” Without additional resources, the memo concluded, Walter Reed “Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.”
According to a March 2, 2007, letter to Major General Weightman from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. John Tierney, a company called IAP Worldwide Services was awarded a five-year, cost-plus, $120 million contract in January 2006 to provide base operations services at Walter Reed. IAP was led by Al Neffgen, a former senior official at Halliburton—a company found to have charged exorbitant fees for fuel delivery and troop support in Iraq. IAP was also one of the companies that had trouble delivering ice in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
IAP was awarded the Walter Reed contract although the original Army cost calculations showed that the in-house federal workforce could in fact provide the same services at a lower cost than the IAP bid. Only after an IAP protest did the Army adjust its own cost calculations upward by $7 million. Employees’ protests were not considered, under rules that deny federal employees standing to object to A-76 determinations.
After IAP was awarded the contract, the number of federal employees at Walter Reed fell precipitously—from 300 in early 2006 to only 60 on Feb. 3, 2007, when IAP commenced its operations. IAP further reduced the number of employees to 50. This decline in the level of staffing at Walter Reed coincided with an exponential growth in the workload because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our government has a solemn responsibility to give our soldiers who risk their lives to serve our country the treatment and care they deserve when they return home from battle. Neither ideology, nor budget cuts, nor incompetence can be tolerated as excuses for failure on this important front.
We demand that our government immediately address the funding and staffing shortfalls in the Veterans Administration system, and act expeditiously to ensure that our returning veterans receive world-class medical care and adequate financial support when they come home.