Trump’s Cronies Threw the VA Into Chaos. Millions of Veterans’ Lives Are on the Line Again.

Donald Trump ventured to Fayetteville, North Carolina, earlier this month — a Democratic city in a swing state with a large veteran population, a powerful cross-section of defense contractors, and, right down the road, Fort Liberty, one of the largest military bases in the world.

Before an audience dressed almost entirely in red, white, and blue, Trump pledged to revert Fort Liberty back to its original name, Fort Bragg, which honored a slave-owning Confederate general. He also vowed to increase defense spending and scrub the Pentagon of “woke generals.” Then he turned to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Trump offered few true or tangible details on his record at the VA, which operates a robust health and benefits system that serves 9 million veterans — proclaiming, for instance, that his leadership team had purged thousands of “sadists” from the agency and replaced them with thousands more “good, loving people that love our patriotic heroes.” He insisted that the VA “was better before, and I hear it’s sliding,” chalking up this alleged deterioration to President Joe Biden’s VA team, which he derided as a “group of lunatics that don’t give a damn about the military.”

In truth, the people Trump chose to staff the VA and lead on veterans’ policy during his presidency constitute a rogues’ gallery of wild characters that rivaled, and perhaps even surpassed, the dysfunctional, self-serving appointees who ran rampant across various agencies on Trump’s watch. Few of them, however, did as much damage as two-little noted appointees who implemented Trump’s most controversial changes over the VA: Darin Selnick and Peter O’Rourke.

Selnick and O’Rourke were key to implementing the twin pillars of Trump’s veterans affairs legacy: the 2017 VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and the 2018 VA MISSION Act, which together served as a one-two punch to weaken the agency. First, the Accountability Act degraded conditions inside the VA — undermining labor power, gutting workplace protections, and leading to thousands of suspensions, demotions, and firings of front-line staff. From there, MISSION funneled millions of patients to appointments outside the VA, enriching the private sector while weakening the agency’s health care capacity, budget, and reputation.

That the pair managed to avoid infamy may owe only to the buffoonish crew that operated Trump’s single-term VA. This cadre includes a beer mogul who promoted snake oil PTSD treatments; a slick-haired “Fox & Friends” host who sought GI Bill money for predatory for-profit colleges; a longtime Marvel Entertainment executive who, along with two fellow Mar-a-Lago members, pushed a shoddy electronic health records system that’s been tied to the deaths of at least four veterans; a White House doctor accused of handing out prescriptions “like candy” and whose nomination to be VA secretary was derailed after he was credibly accused of drinking on the job; and a Lost Cause sympathizer alleged to have attempted to dig up dirt on a congressional staffer and Navy veteran after she reported being sexually assaulted at the VA hospital in Washington.

These characters and their chaos emerged from an election that Trump won on the backs of veteran voters. While the decorated Vietnam War veteran, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., won the veteran vote by 10 percentage points during his 2008 presidential bid, Trump, who viciously insulted McCain on the trail, took veterans by a whopping 27-point margin. According to a political science analysis of 2016 voting data, Trump also received exceptionally high support in American communities with the highest combat casualty rates, which was key to his victories in three swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump racked up similar margins in 2020 and appears poised to again dominate among those who served in the military come November 5.

Trump has generally talked a lot less about veterans’ policy during this campaign than his first two. Few tangible policy VA proposals have emerged from Trump or the Republican platform. There are, however, some clues in Project 2025’s detailed section on veterans policy, which, according to a former senior VA official, is eerily reminiscent of the VA road map drafted during Trump’s first transition. This slate of radical proposals includes further privatization of core agency services, as well as major restrictions to VA’s disability rating system, which determines the compensation amounts that veterans receive for their service-related disabilities.

If Trump’s presidential term proved anything, it’s that personnel is policy. The figures who staffed his first term can help illuminate how a second one may play out. Many would surely return to the VA under what Trump has promised will be a government flushed of career officials and then stocked exclusively with the type of loyal ideologues who dominated the VA during his administration.

“Government is serious business for serious people,” said Kayla Williams, an Iraq War veteran who served as a senior VA official during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. “And that’s what I feel like is missing from these Trump people’s core understanding of the world. Government matters, people’s lives are at stake, and putting in charge figures who think government is a game or a joke or a way to enrich their buddies, or a way to score political points, is dangerous and misguided and deeply tragic.”

Selnick, an Air Force veteran brought into politics by the Koch network, helped write MISSION and oversaw its implementation. O’Rourke, an Air Force and Navy veteran with a background running a Republican political action committee, became the founding director of the VA’s Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection. (The MISSION and Accountability acts were top priorities for the Koch network, which has, since the Obama years, cynically cast the VA as a failing bureaucracy as part of its broader libertarian agenda.)

Four former senior VA officials said Selnick and O’Rourke were leaders in what they described as a pack of Trump-backed goons who worked to “break” or “blow up” the VA. (For this story, The Intercept spoke to five former senior VA officials, all of whom, apart from Williams, requested anonymity to insulate themselves from professional backlash.)

Two of the former VA officials singled out O’Rourke, who also briefly served as chief of staff and acting VA secretary, as being woefully unprepared for the job. Before the VA, O’Rourke helmed Strong America Now, a now-defunct Republican PAC that pushed presidential candidates to embrace a business-efficiency model known as “Lean Six Sigma.” Neither O’Rourke nor Selnick responded to press queries.

As head of the accountability office, O’Rourke pledged to target misconduct and fire poor leaders, but VA data I analyzed at the time showed that his office and authority were weaponized to discipline thousands of low-level employees, many of whom were veterans. (Roughly a third of all VA employees have a history of military service.)

“Management spends more time getting rid of people than helping them.”

Under the new law, a veteran employee at the VA medical center in Pittsburgh was recommended for dismissal and charged by the VA Police with disorderly conduct after he took away a television remote from a patient who had entered the dining hall after hours and demanded to watch television. The employee had gotten sober through his VA job, and he said his life would be ruined if he lost it. “It was good to get in — it gave me a sense of purpose and a chance at life,” he explained. “But it seems that now management spends more time getting rid of people than helping them.”

While the accountability office targeted front-line workers, it failed to scrutinize a senior official who’d advised staff to keep quiet about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at the hospital, which killed at least six veterans and sickened more than a dozen others. 

This slanted approach to justice was personally embodied by O’Rourke who, according the VA’s Office of Inspector General, personally interfered in an investigation against his VA golf buddy, Peter Shelby, who had been accused of retaliation, harassment, and discrimination. According to the watchdog, O’Rourke personally pulled a seasoned investigator off the Shelby case and replaced him with someone directly under his control. O’Rourke’s office also launched an investigation into one of the whistleblowers who raised concerns with Shelby. 

Then came MISSION. One year after Trump ratified the Accountability Act, he signed the law that would push millions of patients out of the VA and into private care. “As a candidate for President, I promised to make reforming the VA one of my absolute highest priorities,” Trump said at the ceremony, beaming. “And from the first day of my administration, that is exactly what we’ve done.”

Getting the law passed had required a delicate approach. Studies consistently show that VA health care outperforms the private sector on quality and wait times while, in surveys, veterans express support for VA care and opposition to agency privatization. Trump allies pledged that MISSION would only supplement VA care, not replace it, and they sweetened the deal by injecting the law with a massive expansion of VA caregiver benefits — long a priority of veterans’ groups.

Yet core promises were broken immediately after the law was signed. Hours after Trump’s Rose Garden ceremony, the White House announced it would ignore some of the law’s key oversight statutes, including one that granted congressional input over future pilot programs with private partners. They also began freezing out veterans’ groups and lawmakers from the regulatory and rollout processes. One internal report I obtained at the time claimed Hill staff faced “coordinated and unprecedented obstruction” by national VA staff in their oversight efforts of MISSION Act implementation. “We have some concerns that whoever they are collaborating with might be running this thing off the tracks, and pushing for privatization,” a senior legislative staffer told me at the time.

Selnick played a key role. Along with his allies, he pushed MISSION to create what one of the former VA officials called “extreme eligibility” for private care. “[Selnick] bragged about passing MISSION by including the caregiver support elements to get veterans groups on board as a trick,” Williams said. “It was sabotage,” added another official. “They wanted to create an opportunity to dismantle VA without any concern for what happened in the interim.”

“They wanted to create an opportunity to dismantle VA without any concern for what happened in the interim.”

The severe consequences of MISSION were starkly laid out earlier this year in a VA Red Team Report authored by a bipartisan panel of health care experts. They detailed how the cost of VA care outsourcing has more than doubled in recent years, to nearly $30 billion annually, with 40 percent of all VA patients now getting some private sector care. The report deemed this trend an “existential threat” to the VA system, warning that, without a course correction, VA clinics and service could soon cease to exist, thereby “eliminating choice for the millions of Veterans who prefer to use the [VA] for all or part of their healthcare needs.”

One of the former officials, echoing others, told me that veterans were not factored into key decisions. Instead, ego, politics, and deception often dominated work and decision-making. As one example, two officials recounted that Selnick had a habit of parking in handicapped spots near the entrance of medical centers he was visiting. Once, when a security guard informed Selnick that he could not park there, he answered by saying: “I’m from the White House.”

O’Rourke and Selnick also faced allegations of misusing taxpayer resources. Selnick landed in hot water after ProPublica reported that he was commuting between his California home and D.C. on the taxpayer dime. O’Rourke was forced to resign after officials complained to the Washington Post that he was doing little work for his $161,000 salary.

In July 2018, Tim Walz, then the ranking member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, led a letter to the Department of Justice, alleging that O’Rourke had lied and withheld information from Congress and demanding a criminal probe, though this probe never came to pass.

Today, this pair is now leading a think tank, Veterans 4 America First, a semi-active 501(c)(3) staffed with a number of former Trump VA officials, promulgating policies and apparently waiting in the wings should Trump win reelection. From this perch, O’Rourke and Selnick recently published an op-ed entitled “Biden’s Big Lie on Veterans.” (An email seeking information on the nonprofit’s finances and goals to the group’s only listed address bounced back.)

Dozens of competent people ran for the doors during the Trump administration as well. Responding to this staff exodus, a VA spokesperson at the time said, “We understand that not everyone is ready for this level of reform.”

In the past four years, Biden’s appointments to the VA have reasserted a level of professionalism throughout the agency, and the PACT Act, passed in 2022, secured a major increase in veterans’ benefits. But even as Biden’s VA officials express support for VA services in public, they’ve continued to carry out the privatization dictated by the MISSION Act, putting the VA and its patients in increasingly precarious positions.

Another four years of Trump could reshape the VA beyond recognition. “The danger now is that they’ve been vetting people, and doing more prep work,” Williams said. “And the stakes are high. Veterans die when terrible decisions are made at the largest integrated health care system in the world.”

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