House bill would ban VA bonuses
The House Veterans Affairs Committee passed a bill today that would grant in-state tuition rates to all veterans attending public universities as well as ban all VA executive bonuses for five years.
Senior executives at the Department of Veterans Affairs would be banned from receiving any bonuses for five years under legislation approved by a congressional committee Wednesday.
The move comes after two weeks of criticism over how the department awards bonuses, and reports of several five-figure awards for VA officials despite questionable performances.
“Questionable performances” is inaccurate – piss-poor performance is better.
Representative Jeff Miller, R-Fla., the head of the committee issued a statement on the bill.
“The fact that so many VA executives collected huge performance bonuses year after year while continually failing at their jobs calls into question whether department leaders even know the meaning of the word ‘accountability,’” he said in a statement.
“Until we have complete confidence that VA is holding executives accountable – rather than rewarding them – for their mistakes, no one should get a performance bonus.”
The VA suspended bonuses for fiscal year 2012 last month, but lawmakers, including Miller, complained that the VA decision didn’t go far enough.
Additionally, the bill calls for an increase in the amount of disability compensation equal to increases in Social Security increases.
The bill will have to pass the full House and the Senate before it becomes law.
The full text of the bill can be found here.
Cross posted from After the Army.
Category: Veterans Issues, Veterans' Affairs Department
*Stands…..starts it…….”clap, clap, Clap, Clap, CLAP, CLAP, CLAPCLAPCLAPCLAPCLAP.
They shouldn’t ever receive any sort of bonus.
IT’S ABOUT TIME!!! I just hope it passes!!
Ho-LEE shit! Congress got something right. Then again, a broken clock is right twice a day.
Yay. No bonuses. That should clear out the deadwood at the middle management level.
My friend (USAF Aerial Porter) posted this comment when I linked this on my Facebook…
” Can we make them use Tricare too?”
/Hells yeah!!!
DaveO: Senior Executives at the VA are hardly “middle management”. They’re very senior. You’re generally talking VAMC directors, regional health care directors, and and a bunch of very high-level staffers in DC.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2012/pdf/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2012.pdf
Figures from a different source 2010 show a total of 301 at the VA received performance evals that year.
DaveO and Hondo,
Yeah there is a difference, and I can’t check the bill text at the moment, but I believe it is very specific.
Gents,
I’m rather very familiar with SES. The good ones try to make a mark, and the bad ones are there as a reward. Generally senior management settles into an existence of occupying space and time because they face institutional inertia generated at the middle level. The VA, like most businesses, even the military, is run at the middle level: GS-13 to GS-15. Get rid of the deadwood there, and the VA can move forward. Getting rid of the bonuses is just pissing on the ashes of an already burned-down house.
Rob Strain: The applicable text regarding bonuses in the bill is found in Section 13:
“For each of fiscal years 2014 through 2018, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs may not pay any performance awards under section 5384 of title 5, United States Code.”
5 USC 5384 governs bonuses to members of the Senior Executive Service. This bill proposes a ban on high-level executive bonuses (e.g., SES bonuses) only. It does not propose an across-the-board ban on any performance bonuses to all VA employees.
DaveO: if you were being sarcastic initially, that was not at all obvious.
Assuming you weren’t being sarcastic: creating 300 or so SES vacancies at the VA would hardly “clear out the deadwood” in the VA’s GS13 to GS15 middle management. If anything, that would likely make the VA’s middle management problem substantially worse by removing the best performers as they are promoted to SES.
A civilian senior executive has the tools and time to make an impact if he/she wishes to do so. They can also change or remove non-performers in their middle management if they’re willing to create the requisite paper trail scrupulously. Unfortunately, often that happens via reassignment – which merely moves the problem.
If you’re going to clear out the “deadwood” in the GS13 to GS15 middle management at the VA, a completely different strategy and approach will be required. IMO you’ll also have to remove far more than about 300 folks nationwide.
I agree that this bill seems more political theater than effective policy. What’s needed IMO is the replacement of some key individuals in both senior leadership as well as some number of the VA’s current middle management. Whether that will happen or not is a good question. I’d guess not any time soon, but I’ve gotten somewhat cynical as I’ve gotten older. People jealously guard their little “empires”.
As long as it does not propose across the board bans on bonuses, I am fine with it. There are GS-7s and GS-9s doing excellent grants writing and research in the area of prosthetics that will improve the lives of Veterans. They deserve recognition and/or compensation for that work.
Hondo – don’t disagree with you about clearing the deadwood will require a different strategy. Removing hiring decisions from the VA is a step in the right direction. So would changing employment status to “At Will” and “Exempt.”
In the meantime, how are you going to recruit capable, experienced senior executives with these K-Mart pay rates ($119, 554 – 179,700)? For these folks, pay starts quite a bit higher, and with Obamacare, they stand to make shit-tons more money by staying out of government?
The really sad part is that there needs to be legislation on this at all. Most private companies have a simple formula, if your department meets the targets you get the bonus. Usually the targets involve performance well above minimum, and with the sorry 4ss performance by the VA departments in question it’s hard to see where the bonus justification fits in.
DaveO: one can indeed make a good argument that senior Federal executives – civilian and military – are hugely underpaid. Same argument can also be made for Congress, by the way – and for Federal judges, and to a lesser extent for most white-collar Federal workers. (Federal workers in professional occupations do generally make less than their private-sector counterparts when seniority with a given employer is taken into account.) On the flip side, the benefits (and particularly pensions) are generally better than in private industry. Can’t say I agree with you as to the solution. Giving a manager a job and not letting him choose who he or she hires doesn’t work all that well in civilian occupations. And I also have to point out that we had “at will” employment in the Federal civil service at one time. It was called the “spoils system”. Gross abuses under the spoils system is precisely what led to today’s somewhat bureaucratic current Federal civilian personnel system. Going back to “at will” employment would IMO return the Federal civil service to the “spoils system” in fairly short order. IMO that particular “cure” would be hugely worse than the current malady. For the VA, IMO what’s needed is good leadership, time, and some fundamental decisions regarding its missions and priorities. Are they first and foremost a medical treatment system? Are they primarily dispenser of money, graded by how much they dole out? Are they a student grant program? Do they give a damn about preventing fraud? If so, are they willing to take some political heat for doing due diligence in order to limit fraud (and the resulting inevitable delays associated with doing so)? The VA IMO currently seems confused regarding its core missions and functions. They’re trying to be everything to everybody. That’s impossible. This mission confusion seriously hurts the VA today. The VA could be a first-class medical system; they’re hurt by overcrowding, some (or perhaps much) of which is due to fraud. Fraud and claim inflation overcrowds the system and saps resources, which in turn forces cuts in services and slows… Read more »