Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki ─ Trying to Do What Is Right against a Tide of Government Inertia

© 2010 Peter Free

 

02 September 2010

 

Honor, despite the attractions of expediency

 

General Eric Shinseki initially came to fame, while he was Army Chief of Staff.  He clashed with then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s too-low estimate of the troops necessary to successfully invade and occupy Iraq.

 

Now serving as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, he just approved three additions to the list of medical conditions presumptively attributable to the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.  These include ischemic heart disease, Parkinson’s, and an expanded definition of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

 

The estimated cost of meeting this expanded list of service-connected disabilities is estimated to be $42 billion.  Hardly a politically popular thing to do.

 

In the disagreement with Secretary Rumsfeld, General Shinseki did what was honorably (rather than kiss-up) right.  In the second, he arguably did what was honorably and perhaps legally owed to a generation of poorly treated veterans.  He did not do what was financially expedient, nor provably and scientifically correct.

 

The Secretary will be criticized for expanding the qualifications for Agent Orange-induced disability to include conditions that are arguably age, rather than service, related. 

 

In his defense, it was the federal government’s long-term mishandling of the Agent Orange controversy that brought the matter to the state it is today.

 

In short, Secretary Shinseki has been trapped by (a) applicable law (38 USC § 1116) and (b) government’s pre-existing inertia into doing something that can be legitimately attacked from either side.

 

Eric Shinseki twice has confronted complacent Washington culture

 

Iraq turned into a mess because (a) we invaded when it was geopolitically against America’s interest to do so, and (b) we attempted an occupation with too few troops to control the mess we had created.

 

Similarly, Agent Orange’s connection to veterans’ illnesses became an issue because the federal government and Congress ignored its ramifications for so long.

 

Consequently, today, the medical science regarding causation and cumulative effects of Agent Orange syndrome is confused.  Scientific data lurking among veterans themselves has not been discovered because necessary studies have not been funded or implemented.

 

I suspect that from Secretary Shinseki’s perspective, it is too late to justly postpone making appropriate remedy to a generation of veterans who have been treated about as badly as one can conceive.

 

There is, however, a strong argument against expanding Agent Orange’s culprit status

 

David Rogers, writing for Politico.com, said the following (selected extracts):

 

Yet for many who saw Vietnam firsthand, a 1-to-4 ratio of service-connected disabilities for Agent Orange strains credibility. And this is especially the case when the top conditions are heart disease and diabetes, two illnesses so linked to diet and lifestyle.

 

In fact, there’s a real disconnect between the outside scientists who advise the VA and the decision makers themselves. Congress can be faulted for the loose standard of proof it set in the 1991 Agent Orange Act to guide the process. But without more science — especially studies of veterans themselves — the integrity of the disability process is vulnerable to attack.

 
The chief outside actor is the Institute of Medicine within the National Academy of Sciences.

 

To hear IOM tell it, the category was never meant to be all decisive but more of a middle niche . . . .

VA officials answer that they are bound by the legal construct of the 1991 Agent Orange Act, which requires the secretary to respond within 60 days to any evidence of a positive association cited by IOM — however tentative.


[W]hat’s most surprising is how little or no effort has been made to track down specific infantry units that operated in the widely sprayed areas of Vietnam.

 

After almost a decade of delay, the VA is preparing to make another run at the long-promised National Vietnam Veterans Longitudinal Study to take a broad view of lasting health problems.

 

© 2010 David Rogers, The bill for Agent Orange comes due, Politico.com

(30 August 2010) (selected extracts)

 

Conclusion ─ singularly honorable and competent leaders are often inescapably burdened by past governments’ still actively influential avoidance

 

If Secretary Shinseki’s performance has been flawed from his detractors’ perspective, it will not have been due to his lack of competence, diligence, dedication, or honor.

 

His options as Secretary will, instead, have been irrecoverably burdened by the pattern of governmental and legislative avoidance and dishonor that preceded his tour of duty.

 

When great people have to rescue a system ─ to do simple justice to its clientele ─ one can safely intuit that there is something wrong with the mechanics and of the system itself.