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Experienced skilled army employees replaced with privatization Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/03/tnsharvey070302/http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/03/tnsharvey070302/
Walter Reed woes bring turmoil at the top
By Kelly Kennedy, William McMichael and Gina Cavallaro - Staff writers
Posted : Monday Mar 5, 2007 11:28:54 EST
The more than 1 million soldiers of the Army, deeply involved on two war fronts, suddenly find themselves serving under leadership tainted by scandal and in critical transition. Army Secretary Francis Harvey is out, pushed out the door by his boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Gates was unhappy with the Army’s response to revelations, reported by Army Times and The Washington Post, that wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington were consigned to squalid quarters and mired in administrative red tape while awaiting care and evaluation for benefits.
“I am disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation pertaining to outpatient care at Walter Reed,” Gates said in the Pentagon briefing room.
“Some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging into and addressing the problems,” Gates said.
“Also, I am concerned that some do not properly understand the need to communicate to the wounded and their families that we have no higher priority than their care, and that addressing their concerns about the quality of their outpatient experience is critically important.
“Our wounded soldiers and their families have sacrificed much and they deserve the best we can offer.”
He took no questions from reporters.
Harvey was at Fort Benning, Ga., the morning of March 2, when he cut short his visit to return to Washington to meet with Gates. Sources told Army Times that Gates asked for Harvey’s resignation. However, in an interview in his office shortly after the announcement, Harvey said he offered Gates his resignation because he believed the Army let down the wounded soldiers. He said the furor has depressed the staff at Walter Reed, and he wanted to prevent any others from leaving or being fired.
“We can’t have them leave,” said Harvey, a former corporate leader appointed to the top Army civilian post in November, 2004. “We can’t have them be so demoralized that they leave. So I figured what the heck, if I offer my resignation, that may stop all this bleeding, and it was accepted.”
Army Undersecretary Pete Geren will serve as acting secretary until a new secretary is nominated and confirmed. The transition has already begun, an Army official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Army also announced the same day Harvey resigned that Maj. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker will become the new commanding general of Walter Reed. Schoomaker, now the commanding general of the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, Md., is a doctor and the brother of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, who is retiring in April.
Eric Schoomaker replaces Army Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, whom Harvey fired March 1. According to a statement released by the Army, service leaders had “lost trust and confidence” in Weightman’s ability “to address needed solutions for soldier outpatient care.”
Another Army official, who also asked not to be named, said Harvey’s abrupt dismissal came as a surprise, even within the Army staff, which learned of the resignation shortly before 4 p.m. March 2, when the announcement was made.
Harvey had left Washington late March 1 to visit Fort Benning, Ga., and had spent the night at the post, according to sources there. The next day, he had breakfast with students attending the Maneuver Captains Career Course and met with other junior leaders. He observed urban training and received an update on housing construction and Fort Benning’s base realignment and closure progress.
The Army official said “he cut short his visit” and returned to the Pentagon during the lunch hour. Officials couldn’t confirm whether Harvey was summoned back to Washington, but sources received word at 9 a.m. to cancel a media brief scheduled for 1 p.m.
Harvey met with Gates sometime the afternoon of March 2 after returning to the Pentagon, the Army official said.
It remains to be seen what sort of impact Harvey’s resignation will have on the Army during a time of war, during the annual budget process and during the Walter Reed debacle. Asked to comment, Army spokesman Paul Boyce said: “The Army is a strong team. The team is made up of more than one individual, all forming links that, as a team, are there for the nation’s defense.”
Nevertheless, the Army and the Pentagon have undergone an unsettling whirlwind of change in recent months, beginning when President Bush fired then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Nov. 9. Gates was quickly confirmed as his replacement, and shortly thereafter, Gen. George Casey was replaced as top commander in Iraq by Gen. David Petraeus. Casey is set to replace Gen. Peter Schoomaker next month as chief of staff. That will leave the Army with new leadership at the top civilian and military posts.
Harvey was the second consecutive Army secretary forced out. In April 2003, Rumsfeld sacked former secretary Tommy White.
Retired Brig. Gen. David Grange said it will be up to Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody to provide steady leadership for the service while Harvey’s replacement and incoming Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey settle into their jobs.
“As the vice chief, he is going to be the steadfast leader in this period,” Grange said. “You really have to have Cody kind of holding things together.”
Grange said he was surprised to hear that conditions at Walter Reed had deteriorated so badly and said that in the end, Harvey is responsible.
“If you are in charge, you are accountable,” Grange said. “I’m sure they were not resourced the way they should have been.”
Grange said being wounded twice in the Vietnam War showed him first-hand that medical care for wounded soldiers is always neglected.
“When you are going to go to war, what never is financed is the second- and third-order effects like veterans benefits and patient care,” he said. “That’s always frustrated me. Having been wounded a couple of times and sent to [military] hospitals, ... you see a lot of things.”
Good, but good enough?
In Congress, Harvey’s sudden resignation didn’t end concerns that the military leadership had forgotten the basic mission of taking care of the troops.
The House Armed Services Committee chairman, Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., praised Harvey for stepping down.
“First-hand accounts and news reports of conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s outpatient facilities are deeply disturbing, and in this instance, the buck stops with Army Secretary Harvey,” Skelton said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called Harvey’s resignation “further evidence of the administration’s inability to competently discharge its responsibilities to those most deserving of the nation’s attention.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who, with fellow Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, is sponsoring legislation to overhaul how the military treats wounded troops and their family members, thinks the wrong person resigned.
“I think the change that Secretary Gates announced today is positive, but the fact remains that the general in charge of the medical command knew of the problems and then diminished them when they became public,” she said, referring to Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, who had been the Walter Reed commander until August.
“I agree with Secretary Gates that the doctors and nurses at Walter Reed are top-notch, but today’s announcement does not go far enough,” McCaskill said. Kiley, she said, “was responsible for the command culture that caused these problems and should be relieved of his command.”
Committee questions
Some supporters have said Weightman was a fall guy for those higher up the chain. After he was fired, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sought to have him testify, but Army officials refused to allow the general to appear before the legislators, who then subpoenaed him to a scheduled March 5 hearing.
Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and national security and foreign affairs subcommittee Chairman Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., said they want Weightman to testify about a memo written in September by Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi to Weightman.
In a letter from the committee to Weightman, the members said the Garibaldi memo “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel.’ ... According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”
The committee’s letter also noted that Walter Reed awarded a five-year, $120 million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.
The committee also noted that more than 300 federal employees providing facilities management services at Walter Reed dropped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, the day before IAP took over facilities management. IAP replaced the remaining 60 employees with 50 private workers.
“The conditions that have been described at Walter Reed are disgraceful,” the committee statement said.
“Part of our mission on the oversight committee is to investigate what led to the breakdown in services. It would be reprehensible if the deplorable conditions were caused or aggravated by an ideological commitment to privatize government services regardless of the costs to taxpayers and the consequences for wounded soldiers.”
The committee letter said the Defense Department “systemically” tried to replace federal workers at Walter Reed with private companies for facilities management, patient care and guard duty — a process that began in 2000.
“But the push to privatize support services there accelerated under President Bush’s ‘competitive sourcing’ initiative, which was launched in 2002,” the committee letter states.
During the year between awarding the contract to IAP and when the company started, “skilled government workers apparently began leaving Walter Reed in droves,” the letter states.
“The memorandum also indicates that officials at the highest levels of Walter Reed and the U.S. Army Medical Command were informed about the dangers of privatization, but appeared to do little to prevent them.”
The memo signed by Garibaldi requests more federal employees because the hospital mission has grown “significantly” during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It states that medical command did not concur with their request for more people.
“Without favorable consideration of these requests,” Garibaldi wrote, “[Walter Reed Army Medical Center] Base Operations and patient care services are at risk of mission failure.”
‘No way they didn’t know’
Weightman arrived at Walter Reed as commander in August. By then, a Government Accountability Office report had already laid out the problems with the Army’s medical evaluation system that occurred between 2001 and 2005, and an inspector general investigation was underway that ultimately found 87 problems with the medical evaluation system.
Those well-documented problems occurred during the tenures of Maj. Gen. Kenneth Farmer, now retired, who was at Walter Reed from 2004 to 2006, and Kiley, now the Army surgeon general, who served as Walter Reed chief from 2002 to 2004.
“It’s clear that General Kiley, the surgeon general at the Army, knew about the conditions at Building 18,” McCaskill said, referring to the facility just off the Walter Reed campus where some outpatient troops are housed.
Critics, including soldiers, lawyers and lawmakers, say the the problems at Walter Reed have been known for years — through soldier complaints, congressional testimony, and investigations by the GAO and the Rand Corp.
“The chain of command knew about this,” Paul Rieckhoff, director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, told Army Times. “There is no way they didn’t know. In 2004, we knew soldiers were carrying the paperwork through the snow. Congress needs to find out who knew and clean house.”
Congress added a couple of provisions to the 2007 Defense Authorization Act in hopes of helping soldiers through the process — including better training for counselors in the physical evaluation board system, and a requirement that board members document the medical evidence behind service members’ disability ratings, rather than denying them by simply writing “pre-existing condition.”
Army Times also reported problems with the physical evaluation board system in June, while several other papers reported problems as they wrote stories about individual soldiers.
So why all the attention now?
“People are seeing it as a conglomerate now — an accrued set of grievances,” Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., told Army Times in a March 1 interview.
He said he and his staff had heard anecdotes of problems but that no one seemed to know how widespread they were.
“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “It makes me very angry to see another generation coming through with the same fight we thought we had won.”
Kerry referred to the work veterans did after Vietnam to make sure soldiers were cared for physically and mentally.
Retired Army Lt. Col. Mike Parker also finds it frustrating. For at least two years, he has gathered thousands of pages of documents — which he shared with Army Times — and banged on doors trying to get the problems he saw fixed. He spends much of his free time trying to help soldiers through the process.
Parker also spent time alerting lawmakers and speaking before the Veterans’ Disability Benefits Commission — which has heard testimony from doctors in the disability rating system who say much needs to be done to help soldiers.
In March 2006, Parker filed a complaint with the inspector general at Walter Reed, asking for an investigation of whether the medical evaluation boards were following the law, and another complaint with the Army’s Human Resources Command.
He said the Army is supposed to rate injuries according to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Schedule for Rating Disabilities but charged that Army officials wrote their own regulation in the mid-1990s that allows them to rate disabilities differently — and at lower percentages. No other service has such a regulation.
When Parker filed a complaint asking about the legality of that regulation, the Human Resources Command Inspector General’s Office sent him a reply stating that the issue was “not within our purview.”
“It took them 10 months ... to tell me there’s a regulation that says [the Army] can do it,” Parker said, shaking his head and laughing. “No shit, Sherlock.”
Meanwhile, he said, he was told last spring that the Army inspector general was reviewing the whole system — which Army officials verified this week. The IG asked him to provide documentation from the cases he had looked at.
“I did,” he said. “But then they told me to stop, saying, ‘We’ve already talked to people — it’s not a problem.’”
He has letters documenting the responses.
Another complaint resulted in a “final response” that he hadn’t provided enough information for an investigation — even though Parker never appears anywhere without PowerPoint slides packed with information.
“I’ve hit them time after time,” he said. “I can show you back to March 1, 2006.”
So then he started hitting Congress, where the response was often disbelief.
“That’s typical,” Parker said. “It is hard to believe.”
The Army response to media coverage of the problems seems to have loosened things up — though the blame, he said, is rolling downhill.
Soldiers in Building 18 reported that their first sergeant and platoon sergeants would be replaced within a month.
But several soldiers told Army Times in December that those were exactly the people who were trying to fix things, and that they were brought in specifically to solve some of the problems in January 2005.
A new beginning
Pvt. Martin Jackson, of the 1st Armored Division, spent almost two years in the Medical Hold Unit recovering and waiting on paperwork. Though he complained extensively about the physical evaluation board system, he praised his noncommissioned officers.
“Now we have formations once a day, and we don’t have to hunt down our platoon sergeant,” as they had to before 2005, Martin said. The current first sergeant is “the first one here and the last to leave. The platoon sergeants you have now? They actually care. With the new [company] commander and first sergeant, there’s been a big turnaround.”
Spc. Karl Unbehagan, of the 3rd Infantry Division, also spent several months at Walter Reed and remembers what it was like before the new first sergeant.
“The platoon sergeant was in medical hold with mental issues,” Unbehagan said. “He’d answer your questions between slugs of Cold Duck. If it weren’t for our [current] direct chain of command, I wouldn’t have gotten anything done.”
Staff writers Matthew Cox, Kris Osborn and Rick Maze contributed to this report.
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