Jerry Moran: “this afternoon, the President will be signing an Executive order to increase accountability within the Department of…”

“this afternoon, the President will be signing an Executive order to increase accountability within the Department of Veterans Affairs. For several years, I have been calling on the VA to hold bad actors within the VA accountable. In my view, in too many instances, that has not occurred. There are far too many examples of those who commit wrongdoing while working at the VA, and even crimes against veterans and other VA employees have occurred without any consequence. On his first day in office, I wrote the President urging him to make accountability within the Department of Veterans Affairs one of his top priorities. We see too many examples, and unfortunately one of those examples--one of those egregious examples--is in my home State of Kansas, where we face a terrible example of a VA employee violating the trust of veterans. Yet the VA seems to have no real sense of urgency in holding this person accountable or committing to fix the process by which he got into the position that he could commit the acts he did. In 2015, we learned from local newspaper reports--not from the VA-- that a physician's assistant at the Leavenworth VA hospital had been sexually abusing veterans. Shortly after that news broke, Leavenworth County prosecutors charged this individual with multiple counts of sexual assault and abuse against numerous veterans. He is currently awaiting trial. The stories continue to come into our office and to the prosecutor about other victims.…”