ARE “SLIM AND NONE” THE ODDS THIS WILL FIX VA? Department of Veterans Affairs leaders want Congress to let them reclassify dozens of government hospital directors – members of the career civil service’s elite Senior Executive Service – to Title 38 doctors. Doing so would more than double their current salaries that can be as high as $180,000. Yes, you read that right – “more than double their current salaries that can be as high as $180,000.”

These are the same VA hospital directors whose facilities are in many cases hellholes for veterans seeking the medical care they were promised when they put on the nation’s military uniforms. Thousands of veterans have been forced to wait months on end for appointments with doctors and dozens of them died while waiting.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Luke Rosiak reports that VA leaders claim the higher salaries are needed to keep the hospital directors from fleeing the government for better-paying positions in the private sector and that changing them from SESers to doctors will make it easier to fire the incompetents. Neither of those claims are true, according to Rosiak. So why is it government’s solutions for its problems so often result in better pay for the bureaucrats?