“We got VA Accountability. Sounds easy, but when you have civil service and you have unions and you have all of this -- for 40, 50 years, they've been trying to get rid of it. That's -- they don't take care of our vets, we fire them. Before, you couldn't. They were sadists.”
— Speech, 05/22/2020
The Department of Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017 was an important measure for accountability and whistleblower protection at the VA. But this law builds on firing authority given to the VA secretary through the Choice, Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 in response to the 2014 Phoenix VA scandal. Trump frequently claims that before the law, no one could be fired, but the agency fired about 2,000 people a year before the law was enacted. The baseline rate of firing in the VA, before the law, was about 220 people a month -- and under Trump it has increased to about 290 people a month.