The Wall

Gee, our old LaSalle sure ran great.
Those were the days.

I don't know the details of the hiring freeze. If it's anything like the hiring freeze that past Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels implemented about 12 years ago, this would include the flexibility for the legislator to have a total freeze, but they could shrink one agency, and grow another.

Daniels just said, figure it out boys and girls. And you know what, the citizens didn't see a decrease in the quality of service while the number of state employees decreased by 18%. I suspect that the federal government is far fatter than Indiana was, and they could shed 50% of their employees without the citizens noticing.

We really need to sign it into law, so we can learn what's in it.

It's difficult to fire any Federal worker period, I don't think a hiring freeze has any impact on that point.

Candy would be the one to ask.

Is this supposed to be another of your "witty", non-answer reply's that goes over others heads?

Please tell me, what is good about the good ol' days at the VA? It was discovered that there was massive and blatant disregard for the veterans and you reply with a ditty about the "good ol'days"?

John, since you were the last to bring up the VA as a "mess", I'll pile on to your post. I'm a retired VA nurse as of May 2014 (34 years). You guys talk about a "hiring freeze" like it is a new concept. Whether termed a "hiring freeze" or "downsizing" or whatever, hiring at VAs, at least for nurses, has been "frozen" in various forms for decades, and with no COLA for the past 3-4 years. (I think they got a small COLA this year--annuitants like myself got a 0.02 percent COLA).

In 1980 when I hired on, a vacancy due to resignation, retirement, etc. would be filled in due course. Personnel is the highest expenditure in an organization, in most organizations, but without personnel, what have you got?

In about 1985 or 1990 more veterans began using VAs, Vietnam as well as WWI and WWII, Korean, Gulf, others, and hundreds of thousands of Veterans who lacked private insurance for private care were recruited and poured into our Primary Care services as well as every other clinical area. Many had not seen a doctor in decades so entered our system with multiple medical co-morbidities to be taken care of. In the meantime the process changed whereby nurse vacancies were NOT guaranteed to be filled (freezes or whatever), and for each vacancy the manager (like myself) had to submit reams of justification for authority to fill that vacancy. That documentation spent weeks, months traveling through 'committees and boards' to evaluate the justification, get voted on yea or no to fill. In the meantime, patient care suffers, staff morale declines and more of your staff leave for other positions or places because the stress of added workload eventually overwhelms. Also in the meantime, salaries became non-competitive with the private sector, which didn't help recruiting if I ever got permission to fill a vacancy. And not even talking about INCREASING the number of staff positions when our patient care load tripled.

I certainly can't speak for every VA, but in mine these hiring 'freeze' mandates came from the top, as in Washington DC, to put the skids on hiring for as long as possible. After all, a vacant position saves the organization money for that period of time, be it 6 months or 2 years, and there were many of those. But what does it do to patient care? Well, you've been reading some of what happened, because when people are called on to do the impossible (schedule every new patient a PC appointment within 30 days), they come up with work-arounds. Keeping one's job depended on reporting 'numbers' that met a standard for 'excellence' set, again, in DC. Hospital Directors stood to be fired (yes, back then) if they couldn't report the proper numbers of everything from every department. Not my department thankfully, as we just worked long into the night to take all comers.

The media (and most who read/listen to it) love that "scandal" word that has been tagged to problems in VAs that eventually bubbled up. Our newspaper has seen numerous letters to the editor praising their inpatient and outpatient care at VA, and most of them did not expect to find that excellent care (and numerous, numerous other healthcare services available to them that they couldn't afford in the private sector). I spoke with a taxi driver who had dreaded having to seek care at his local VA, yet he was astounded at the great care.

I must stop, and apologize for the hijacking from drmilled's topic, but you who slam the VA without knowing facts are doing Veterans a disservice and continuing false perceptions of the VA as nothing but a bunch of 'old soldiers' homes', as they probably started out to be in the 1950s. I truly hope Mr. Trump has enough business sense to dig into things and find solutions, because Veterans deserve to be served, not to be squeezed on their healthcare due to inadequate numbers of caregivers.

From what I have read, the problem seems not to be in patient care, but with the bureaucrats running the facilities. Since it a cival service job, the morons can't be fired

Everything trickles down to patient care and services.

The "Removal" process for Fed agency employees is written in law and includes appeals processes out the ying yang. There are 1 and 2 year probationary periods within which one can be terminated WITHOUT those exhaustive appeals protections. Certainly at the top of every Fed agency is a hierarchy (including the President--impeachment), a club that is loathe to expel their peers.

The irony here is that an "off with their heads" mentality for those at the top, such as the VA Secretary who was either fired or offered his retirement papers...I forget...only because the VA got bad press, accomplished what? Those guys probably get few clues as to problems that affect the agency leadership, the workers, the patients, because of fear of reporting that they cannot meet an impossible (and not that critical in some cases) performance requirement for various reasons. They dream up a performance measure one year and expect to be told it was met in the next rating year, though impossible to meet. Like zero occurrences of this, or 100 accomplishment of that, which is often a 180 degree change from a previous process.

To be fair I should say that in some cases I would have been happy to see a front line staff person (nurse, clerk, housekeeper) fired. What happens is that the 1 or 2 years or whatever slips by and at some point a manager or supervisor realizes problems should have been addressed during that probationary period and the process of Removal started. Otherwise after that period the employee is subject to those protections and appeals and it is an onerous process to even try for Removal (disciplinary action up to and including suspension, yes; Removal, not so much).

I would wish Mr. Trump luck in simplifying those processes to be in alignment with the private sector (I hear they can fire people more quickly?) Of course, like asking the police to monitor your street for speeders, you might be the first one stopped! LOL.

I think we would all want a termination consideration process to be fair if we were the person being threatened with loss of our job.

Lol, Trump is putting up chain link fencing and calling it wall. A handheld wire cutter will make short work of it. A real wall is made of concrete and steel.

It's the last two lines from the "All In The Family" theme song

Which, by the way, was supposed to have been done with a band/orchestra and professionally recorded. But they wanted to save money so they had Edith (who was actually a very good singer and could play piano) just do the song live with Archie.

What hiring freeze?

He just signed one of those unAmerican Executive orders today to hire 15k border patrol and immigration enforcement officers. No financial appropriations or budget reconciliation is accompanying it, But don't worry. They're republicans so I'm sure they won't just add it to the deficit. Or the wall either.

Im sure we'll be getting some kind of alternative fact soon that explains how it all gets paid for.