The Indian Treaty Room is a grand two-story meeting space in
the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, with French
and Italian marble wall panels, a pattern of stars on the ceiling and the image
of a compass worked into the tiled floor. Over the years, it has hosted signing
ceremonies for historic foreign policy pacts such as the Bretton Woods
agreement and the United Nations Charter.
On Nov. 16, 2017, it hosted a different kind of gathering:
an intimate meeting called by the White House to discuss the future of the
Department of Veterans Affairs. In the 10 months since Donald Trump had taken
office, his administration had been pushing a bold and controversial agenda to
privatize more of the VA’s services.
The Trump administration’s ambitions are well documented.
But what has not been publicly revealed until now is the extent to which the VA
– a sprawling agency with a $180 billion annual budget that includes the
nation’s single largest health care system, a network of cemeteries and a
massive bureaucracy that administers the GI Bill and disability compensation
for wounded veterans – has become a massive feeding trough for the lobbying
industry.
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| e-mail obtained through FOIA request |
The VA’s then secretary, David Shulkin, was at the
previously undisclosed meeting, along with a contingent of conservative
thinkers on veterans policy, including current and former members of Concerned
Veterans for America, known as CVA, an advocacy network largely backed by
conservative donors Charles and David Koch. Also present were “Fox &
Friends” host Pete Hegseth, a former CVA executive repeatedly floated to be
Trump’s pick for VA secretary, and David Urban, a right-leaning CNN commentator
who served as a senior adviser on the Trump campaign.
During an intimate November 2017 meeting called by the White
House, attendees drafted a strategy to “echo/amplify” President Donald Trump’s
“priorities/initiatives” for accelerating the privatization process at the VA.
According to emails obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act, the group drafted a strategy to “echo/amplify” Trump’s
“priorities/initiatives” for accelerating the privatization process. According
to three people who were there, the participants discussed how best to respond
to expected resistance from traditional veterans advocates, who historically
have opposed privatizing key agency services. Representatives from “the Big
Six” major veterans organizations, including the American Legion and Veterans for
Foreign Wars, were not invited.
But it was the presence of the most powerful lobbyist for
the companies now trying to get a piece of the VA’s budget – a tan, affable
Floridian named Jeff Miller – that would have raised the most eyebrows, had his
attendance been known at the time.
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