VA Secretary explains why agency will never be the same after COVID-19

In today's Federal Newscast, the Department of Veterans Affairs says it's a different agency today because of the pandemic.

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  • The Department of Veterans Affairs said it’s a different agency today because of the pandemic. VA Secretary Denis McDonough said some of the changes the department made to respond to the pandemic will stay for the long haul. VA held 2,500 telehealth appointments per day in March 2020. VA clinicians are now hosting 45,000 virtual appointments daily today. “We want our lives to get back to normal … we were just talking about that right here. But at VA there’s no going back to the old normal. The work we’ve done to respond to the pandemic has forged us into a stronger and better department for the nation’s veterans,” McDonough said.
  • On this Veterans Day, the job board site Monster.com along with Military.com have listed the top organizations that hire veterans, which included three federal agencies. Included in the list was U.S. Customs and Border Protection where 90% of 2020 veteran hires have stayed longer than a year. Also mentioned were the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
  • The USPS Board of Governors reelects its chairman, but the length of his tenure remains unclear. Ron Bloom, a Democrat on the board, remains its chairman. But his tenure runs out in less than a month. President Joe Biden hasn’t indicated whether he expects to nominate Bloom for a full seven-year term. Two of Biden’s picks on the board — former Deputy Postmaster General Ron Stroman and Anton Hajjar, former general counsel for the American Postal Workers Union — asked to postpone the election, but were overruled. They both voted against Bloom’s re-election.

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