Inside Joe Biden's Veteran Braintrust
Biden Did Better With Veteran Voters Than Hillary Clinton. Will He Listen To Their Concerns?
On July 29, Alex McCoy, a former Marine and the political director of the progressive group Common Defense reached out to officials inside Joe Biden’s presidential campaign with good news: the organization had managed to build “consensus among our veteran membership to affirmatively endorse” Biden.
This was no small step for Common Defense. In 2016, leaders inside the then-fledgling organization were deeply disaffected by Hillary Clinton’s record. Organizers worked against Donald Trump rather than for Clinton. In 2020, Common Defense initially endorsed Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, largely due to their rock-solid support of universal healthcare and pledges to end the Forever Wars.
Biden, of course, voted to invade Iraq in 2003. Then, in 2008, he fought to put more troops in Afghanistan. Biden became far more dovish as Vice President, however, repeatedly urging President Obama to scale back operations in the Middle East. Some attribute Biden’s policy shift to his son Beau’s 2009 deployment to Afghanistan.
Many of the 700 or so core veterans inside Common Defense were deeply conflicted over this mixed record. Yet a majority became convinced that Biden — who, on the campaign trail, expressed firm if ill-defined pledges to end the Forever Wars and support the Department of Veterans Affairs — was the right man for the job.
McCoy told Team Biden that the endorsement could be made right before the Democratic National Convention. He argued it would help undermine a key Trump attack — of Biden as a war hawk. And he made clear that the endorsement would be accompanied by assistance from Common Defense’s organizing network of 150,000 members, 20,000 veteran volunteers and 150 “cadre leaders” working out of swing states including Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Biden campaign officials met with Common Defense to discuss the endorsement. But at the end of the day, they notified the group’s leadership that they were rejecting the show of support because, according to one knowledgable source, “Biden was trying to court moderate Republicans” and Common Defense was “known for chasing Republican lawmakers down the halls of Congress during impeachment.”
“I don’t think that’s the whole story,” this source added. “I suspect that there were a combination of competitor veterans organizations and hawkish foreign policy advisers against the endorsement.”
In the end, Common Defense still publicly endorsed Biden, and worked outside campaign channels to get him elected. There were other veteran political groups supporting this effort, including Vets for the People and Vets Forward. The most established group, VoteVets, blasted the airwaves with anti-Trump ads and texted thousands of veteran voters. (VoteVets later suggested that it was their texting program — and not a massive, Black-led organizing and voter-registration drive — that clinched Biden’s win in Georgia.)
Trump earned historic support among veterans in 2016, and he again won this constituency in 2020. But Biden ate into his numbers significantly. According to exit polling from Edison Research, there was a 16-point shift of veterans from Trump to Biden on Election Day. More granular data recently published by The New York Times shows big swings towards Biden in a number of communities with military bases and high veteran populations, including Colorado Springs, Colorado — home of the U.S. Air Force Academy — and Bremerton, Washington — which hosts Naval Base Kitsap.
The reasons for this realignment are far from clear. Organizing surely played some part. Some vets were also clearly spurned by Trump’s degradation and politicization of the military and offended by his reported remarks describing dead soldiers as “losers” and “suckers.” Others were surely drawn to Biden for his status as a military father, for his Senate work securing Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles for our boys and girls in Afghanistan, and for his long-held rhetorical nods to military and veteran families, including his tradition of ending virtually every speech with “May God bless America, and may God protect our troops.”
Yet it also appears that Biden faced a far less savvy GOP veteran organizing apparatus than the one Clinton contended with in 2016. One of Trump’s top (if technically unofficial) 2020 veteran organizers, after all, was Joshua Macias, a Navy veteran and QAnon conspiracy theorist who was recently arrested and slapped with gun charges after driving his gray Hummer to Philadelphia and staking out a convention center where election officials were counting ballots. (If by this point you still don’t doubt Macias’ general aptitude and acumen, recall that his “Veterans for Trump” Facebook page was hijacked by North Macedonian businessmen.)
When I spoke to Macias over the summer, he told me that his highly active “Veterans for Trump” group was strong, savvy, and tacitly supported by the Republican Party. “We will move the veteran vote even more towards Trump than we did in 2016,” Macias inaccurately predicted. “I will stake my life on that.”
As Biden has yet to be given the keys to Washington, his plans for military and veterans’ policymaking are foggy and faint.
The future seems more certain in the foreign policy realm, with The Intercept reporting that Biden’s national security moves “herald a return to hawkish normalcy.” One skeptical veteran politico I spoke with joked that we are headed for the “Lincoln Project’s Department of Defense.”
Biden’s choice for Defense Secretary — Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III — would make history as the first African American to command the Pentagon. Yet in many ways he falls squarely in line with most leaders of the military establishment — from his status as a Raytheon board member to his mixed military record in the Middle East. (The law also mandates that a civillian run the DoD for a number of well-articulated reasons. Austin can be granted a waiver, though some lawmakers and activist groups, including Common Defense, are opposing such action.)
As folks inside the Biden campaign — and now, the Biden transition — haven’t ever responded to my press inquires, it’s hard to know what the Department of Veterans Affairs will look like after Inauguration Day. But based on background conversations with sources engaged in the transition, it seems clear that Biden is overwhelmingly interested in reverting the VA back to the Obama era.
His VA transition team is packed with Obama alums, including:
Dr. Baligh Yehia, who served as the first deputy under secretary for health for Community Care at VA. He was the main man responsible for implementing the 2014 VA Choice Act, which mandated far more outsourcing of veterans’ care to the private sector. Yehia’s rollout of the VA’s amped up community care program was a mess and a key goal of Choice — to reduce wait times for care — was not meaningfully addressed. (To be fair, Yehia did not conceive of Choice, and had only 90 days to put everything together.)
Phillip Carter, a highly competent veterans’ policy wonk, founding member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), and former national veterans director for the 2008 Obama campaign. (In his campaign role, Carter pulled off the Democrats’ best showing with veteran voters in a generation.)
Kayla Williams, Obama’s former director of the VA’s Center for Women Veterans. (Williams’ recent collection of Op-Eds are chock full of imaginative ideas on how to bolster and improve the VA for the future.)
Leading the VA transition is another former Obama official, Meg Kabat, a deeply respected public servant and trained social worker who formerly ran the VA’s Caregiver Support Program.
As reporters Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early recently pointed out in The American Prospect, the transition team, while stocked with many encouraging officials, lacks representatives from Veterans Service Organizations (VSOs) and organized labor.
In quick response to these concerns, transition officials have begun holding lengthy listening sessions with established VSOs like IAVA and AMVETS, as well as newer ones, like Minority Veterans of America. “The level of communication, transparency, and willingness to listen is a huge contrast with how we experienced the Trump transition four years ago,” one senior VSO leader told me.
“I’m really encouraged by the fact that this wasn’t a monologue, they were asking how the last four years impacted our organizations,” echoed Lindsay Church, who co-founded Minority Veterans of America. “They want to rebuild trust, but it’s not going to come inherently. The last four years have involved leaders being not only dismissive but actively against women and minority veterans.”
Church is right. Trump’s VA experienced a spike in hateful acts, including a senior leader hanging a painting of the KKK’s first grand wizard in his office. VA Secretary Robert Wilkie, meanwhile, is a man with a deeply prejudiced past.
Biden must listen and prioritize the needs of younger vets who feel spurned by Wilkie’s VA’ and work to squash its regressive atmosphere. They must enact tangible new policies and appoint leaders who reflect the growing diversity in the ranks. (One encouraging rumor I’ve heard is that the transition is considering a senior VA post for Melissa Bryant, a black female veteran and former IAVA wunderkind who quit the American Legion earlier this year after becoming fed up with the group’s racist dog-whistling.)
Biden’s VA is also intent on re-establishing strong ties with Congress — especially the House Veterans Affairs Committee (HVAC). This relationship was badly damaged by Brooks Tucker, a Trump loyalist in the VA’s Office of Congressional and Legislative Affairs who threw up roadblocks and expressed annoyance at even the simplest information requests. Wilkie himself often didn’t show up to testify in front of HVAC and he sought to dig up dirt and discredit a female Navy veteran working on the committee staff after she revealed to The New York Times that she’d been sexually assaulted at the Washington, D.C. VA.
In addition to healing ties with these critical partners, Biden’s VA would also do well to improve its relationship with the press corps. As I’ve previously reported, Trump’s flacks have iced out and denigrated reporters they don’t like, and even built oppositional files on some of them. (The first steps in repairing this relationship should include answering reporters’ emails and hosting routine press calls.)
Other policy priorities can be guessed at by reading tea leaves. I’d bet, for instance, that Kayla Williams will be tasked with reinvigorating the VA’s Center for Women Veterans. Meg Kabat, meanwhile, will almost certainly help steer Biden through the ongoing expansion of the VA’s caregiving program.
Because the president-elect believes that his son may have contracted brain cancer from his exposure to burn pits in Iraq, I also hope that his administration will be open to ensuring care and guaranteeing compensation for veterans who credibly claim that the noxious smoke from these pits made them sick.
The Biden team could also take up some of the 15 policy prescriptions recently laid out to them by former VA Secretary Dr. David Shulkin. In an interview, Shulkin ran through his roadmap for the future, which includes proposals to open up the VA to family members of veterans, strengthen the department’s HR teams so that filling staff vacancies is easier, and modernize departmental facilities through public-private partnerships. (For more detailed information on Shulkin’s proposals, read his blog.)
“I was 25 percent of the way through this plan when the President’s impulsive tweet decided to stop it,” said Shulkin, who was fired by Trump via social media. “And I’ve been disappointed that the new secretary — while I’m not openly critical of the things he’s doing — I don’t see a clear vision from him to create a sustainable future. “
There are conflicting indicators over how Biden will handle the most controversial issue inside the VA today: privatization. Biden himself has pledged to fill vacancies across the department and increase pay for VA officials — work that would clearly bolster care inside the department. But he has also repeatedly spoken in vague platitudes about the need to create “the right balance” between “VA care and purchased care.”
There are strong advocates on the transition team for keeping care inside departmental walls, including Williams and Dr. Shereef Elnahal, a former deputy undersecretary for health at VA who, alongside Shulkin, co-edited a 440-page book about veterans’ health care system innovation called Best Care Everywhere. As Early and Gordon write in the Prospect, “This collection of clinical case studies so contradicted the reigning [right-wing] narrative about VA ‘dysfunction’ and ‘failure’ that the White House suppressed its distribution by the Government Printing Office.”
Yet other appointees, including Dr. Yehia and Latriece Prince-Wheeler, signal an appetite for more privatization. Yehia and Prince-Wheeler are both employed by Ascension, one of the largest private hospital networks in the country that has benefitted greatly from the VA’s outsourcing efforts.
When I recently spoke to an official incredibly close to Biden’s VA transition team, they offered no real concern over Trump’s big privatizing law, The VA MISSION Act. (This source also offered no major critique of the VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act, a Trump era law that has gutted the rights of VA employees, kneecapped public sector unions, and created an office that, according to multiple federal watchdogs, has retaliated against whistleblowers.)
This official also portrayed Wilkie as someone who generally did well in his post and “cares about veterans.” Pressed on whether Trump has gone too far in outsourcing veterans’ care, this official said they weren’t sure.
“We have to give Congress and the American people a roadmap on where to invest in the VA and when to allow veterans go to community,” they said. “Nobody yet has figured out where the endpoint on community care will be. Maybe Trump and Wilkie have pushed it as far as it can go, but I’m not sure.”
Such a blasé attitude about the future of the VA is shocking in light of Trump’s transformational VA record, which includes massively outsourcing care, attacking the workforce, politicizing key offices, letting racism fester, forging dubious private partnerships, funneling veterans into mental evidence-free mental health treatments, and fully privatizing compensation and pension exams.
This week it was also revealed that Trump is quietly converting a number of his VA political appointees into permanent roles and aims to illegally appoint the members of an impending VA Asset and Infrastructure Review Commission. A commission of this sort that is stacked with privatizers will almost certainly promulgate plans to shutter VA facilities across the country.
Dave Cann, the American Federation of Government Employees’ Director of Bargaining, told me that he will soon meet with the Biden transition team. He said he hopes transition officials will both pledge to scale back VA privatization and call a cease fire in Trump’s war on VA employees — a third of whom are themselves veterans.
“Even if we just reverted to the status quo of the previous administration we would be reviving the ability of the union and the employees to have some modicum of a voice,” Cann said. “Our hope, however, is that we will move beyond the status quo with Biden, as he speaks a lot about the dignity of work. We have an expectation that his promised values will be held.”
The scope of VA privatization moving forward will largely be dictated by the next VA Secretary, who is empowered under the MISSION Act with significant sway over how many veterans are pushed outside the VA for care.
In conversations, veteran advocates offered similar qualifications for their ideal VA Secretary — a post-9/11 veteran from a diverse background with a proven record of running a massive bureaucracy.
The only person who perfectly fits this bill is U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a former Army helicopter pilot in Iraq who was shot down, lost her legs, and earned a Purple Heart. Duckworth, the first Thai-American women elected to Congress, also ran the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs well and served successfully under Obama as the Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
Yet per my sources, the tight race for the top role is now between four white men. They are:
former VA Secretary Bob McDonald. McDonald had a long and successful career running Proctor & Gamble and was tapped by Obama to run the VA after the 2014 Phoenix wait-time scandal. McDonald is broadly seen as being competent the last time he held the job. He hired lots of staff, helped rebuild trust in the department after the Phoenix wait-time scandal, and did good work to shrink the number of homeless veterans. (In one unfortunate PR disaster, however, CBS News recorded McDonald falsely claiming to a homeless veteran that he had served in the Army’s Special Forces.)
former Pennsylvania Congressman Patrick J. Murphy. In 2006, Murphy became the first Iraq vet elected to Congress, then moved on to senior administrative work in the Army, where he served for a hot second as acting Army Secretary. Murphy is most famous for helping dismantle Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He has very little experience in veterans’ policymaking besides a few solid but unsuccessful Congressional proposals that, among other things, would’ve extended more assistance to homeless veterans, worked to expand GI Bill eligibility to the post 9-11 generation, and promoted civillian hiring initiatives for those who’ve served. Murphy is seen as the best potential spokesperson for the department, though some believe his time as an Army administrator hasn’t properly prepared him to run the second largest agency in government.
former Deputy VA Secretary under Obama Scott Gould. Gould, a Navy veteran, is married to Michele Flournoy, an early contender to be Biden’s SecDef. Gould served at VA in the run-up to the Phoenix wait-time scandal, which has left some advocates skeptical of him even as there’s no evidence he was at all complicit in what happened. Per his online bio, Gould “improved the operation” of the VA, in particular through improving the functions of the department’s nettlesome benefit claims processing system. After his time at VA, Gould became vice president at CareFirst, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan of Maryland. He now runs Mountain Lake Associates, LLC, a firm that offers healthcare technologies to the government.
former Texas Congressman Chet Edwards. Edwards isn’t a veteran, but he may be the most pro-VA candidate on the list. Edwards cut his teeth as an aide in the 1970s to Congressman Olin E. Teague, a World War II veteran and Texas Democrat who wrote more veterans’ legislation than any other lawmaker in American history. Edwards continued Teague’s Teague’s noble legacy, securing new educational benefits for children of service members, creating a public-private military family housing program, and helping boost funding for veterans’ health care by 70 percent. (Edwards was defeated in 2010 by oil man Bill Flores, who waged one of the first pro-VA privatization political campaigns, one assisted by then-U.S. Sen. John McCain, who later spearheaded passage of the VA Choice Act.)
It’s puzzling that Duckworth is not at the top of this list. Her absence likely has to do with Biden’s reticence to take anyone out of the Senate — be it Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, or Chris Coons — in case a subsequent special election goes awry. Some also privately speculate that Duckworth may be avoiding the position, as past VA Secretaries have been scarred by scandal and chaos. It’s true that the role of VA Secretary may be the most thankless job in Washington. But every federal agency faces bad press. The next VA Secretary must brush off any attempts to cast the department as broken, and push back on those who cast its employees as corrupt. They must work hard, tell the truth, love vets of all stripes, fight back against profiteers, and strongly demonstrate to both veterans and the public that the VA provides hope, healing, and health to those who’ve served.