Top Republicans on the House and Senate VA Committees are leading a bill meant to help the Department of Veterans Affairs fire poor-performing employees more quickly.

Congress passed a similar bill into law in 2017, but implementation fell short of some lawmakers’ expectations.

Senate VA Committee Chairman Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and House VA Committee Chairman Mike Bost (R-Ill.) reintroduced the Restore VA Accountability Act on Thursday. The bill is cosponsored by 25 House lawmakers, and seven Republican senators.

Lawmakers wrote in a fact sheet that the bill “would ultimately help VA remove the small percentage of employees who are hurting veterans in weeks or months, rather than years.”

The bill didn’t make it through the House of Senate during the last session of Congress. But lawmakers are making the fast-track firing bill a legislative priority in a new session of Congress, as the incoming Trump administration is calling for policies making it easier to fire career federal employees.

The VA fired thousands of employees through an expedited removal process created under the  2017 VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act. But federal judges and the Merit Systems Protection Board repeatedly blocked many of the legislation’s provisions from covering most VA employees.

The department reinstated 120 employees — about 3% of the 4,000 employees fired under the widely challenged law paid about $134 million to other former employees the VA fired. The VA agreed to these actions, as part of a settlement it reached with the American Federation of Government Employees in July 2023. No employee fired for grievous misconduct has been rehired.

Republican lawmakers said the reintroduced bill would “close the gaps that courts have created in the 2017 Accountability Act by reinstating Congress’s intent to provide the VA with the authority necessary to swiftly remove, demote and suspend employees who do not serve the interests of veterans.”

The bill also seeks to hold VA managers accountable by holding them to the same disciplinary procedures as members of the Senior Executive Service.

Among their options, agencies can discipline career SES members for alleged misconduct, neglect of duty or malfeasance by cutting their pay by up to 10% or through involuntary relocations. In both cases, agency leaders must give written notice 15 days before the disciplinary actions go into effect.

VA leaders under the Biden administration said the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act didn’t help them fire poor performers, after losing several legal battles over its implementation — and that expect it would see similar results with these latest bills.

Former Senate VA Committee Chairman Jon Tester (D-Mont.) led another proposal to hold VA employees accountable in the last session of Congress.

The 2023 Leadership, Engagement, Accountability, and Development (LEAD) Act would’ve directed VA to standardize the way it builds a case against employees who face allegations of misconduct or poor performance, and to train the entire VA workforce on the ins and outs of the process.

A March 2023 memo from a top VA human resources official stated the department would not propose new adverse actions against VA employees using the 2017 law.

According to the memo, rulings from the Merit Systems Protection Board, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority led to the legislation being “inapplicable to a large portion of the workforce.”

McDonough told reporters in March 2023 that the VA’s use of its Section 714 authority under the VA Accountability Act and Whistleblower Protection Act wasn’t helping the agency effectively manage its workforce.

“To be honest … the exercise of Section 714 wasn’t really helping us necessarily manage our workforce, as much as it was getting us in front of federal judges and in front of administrative bodies,” McDonough said.  “So we just want to make sure that we’re exercising the authorities that we do have.”

Some VA employees told Federal News Network in 2018 that they feared relatively minor mistakes could cost them jobs. One employee accepted a demotion to a lower General Schedule level, and an $11,000 pay cut, rather than risk removal.

Republican lawmakers wrote in the fact sheet that poor-performing employees impact the delivery of veterans’ health care and benefits, but also “drive away motivated and talented people who chose not to work at VA because of a negative culture or workplace environment.”

“The committee has observed instances where years of investigations and thousands of pages of damning evidence is not enough for VA to remove an employee. This is not what taxpayers fund or what veterans deserve from the VA,” they wrote.

Bost said in a statement that the bill would “hold that 1% of bad VA employees accountable.”

“Over the past two years, we uncovered scandal after scandal of bad middle managers or employees at VA committing wrongdoing. But time and time again, we saw these bad VA employees who don’t have veterans’ best interests at heart, just reshuffled to another part of the agency. That has a direct impact on not only veterans, but the mission of VA and the employees who are trying to do their jobs well,” Bost said.

Moran agreed that “while VA employs some of the finest men and women, it only takes a few bad employees to disrupt the culture and service at the VA.”

“Veterans are best served when VA leaders have the ability to act swiftly to remove bad employees from the VA workforce,” Moran said.

The Detroit News reported the VA fired the former director of the VA Medical Center in Detroit in June 2023, after its Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection found she “failed” to oversee staff and ensure the quality of the hospital’s surgery program.

The VA also reassigned the director and chief of staff of the VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System in Aurora, Colorado, after a VA inspector general report found leaders “created a culture of fear” that contributed to some top officials leaving the hospital.

McDonough told reporters at a press conference last month that those two examples were cases “where we, using our existing authorities, have moved with dispatch to change and improve our situations where veterans were not getting the care they deserve.”

“It is true also that there are additional authorities that Congress has enacted, that when VA has tried to use them in the last five years, we end up more before federal magistrates and judges than in individual conversations with our providers and holding them to account. I’d much prefer us to be able to just manage our building rather than spend so much time before judges,” McDonough said.

“When our providers do not live up to those accountability requirements, we hold them accountable,” he added.

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