Hundreds of VA Job Vacancies Went Unfilled as Vets Waited for Care

by Dan Riehl 23 May 2014, 5:35 PM PDT

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A review of job openings within the Veterans Administration is causing some to ask why the VA never bothered staffing up for what were easily predictable increases in service needs and it's now blaming said increases for what amounts to ongoing incompetence, if not worse.

Pete Hegseth, CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, questioned why the department didn't better prepare for the returning veterans by staffing up. 

“These are self-inflicted wounds. This isn’t a money issue. This is a prioritization issue,” he said. "They knew there were going to be more veterans who needed care. Why didn't they prepare?" 

Here's former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaking just Thursday. There is nothing here that should have come as a surprise to anyone.

“We go into Afghanistan, leave Afghanistan for Iraq with unfinished business in Afghanistan,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday, suggesting these problems were years in the making. “Ten years later, we have all of these additional veterans -- in the past five years, two million more veterans needing benefits from the VA. That's a huge, huge increase.”

Yet, researchers at Fox News have now found hundreds of open positions still unfilled, even as backlogs persist and unemployment continues to be a problem across the country. At he very least, this all points to the need for a complete, thorough investigation of what went wrong, allegedly leaving American veterans to die while waiting for care on lists that may have been hidden or manipulated to cover up the problem. 

A search by FoxNews.com on Friday of the USA Jobs federal employment website showed more than 1,080 current vacancies in health-related fields at the VA. 
A search of the words “VA” and “physician” yielded 167 jobs openings with top-range salaries of roughly $295,000 a year. There are 18 openings alone in the Phoenix VA Health Care System – the same one facing allegations that up to 40 people died while waiting for treatment.
One full-time position is for the chief of medicine. The vacancy, posted April 15 and open until June 13, comes with an annual salary up to $235,000.