The Congressman Who Turned the VA into a Lobbying Free-For-All
Source: Politico
The Congressman Who Turned the VA into a Lobbying Free-For-All
Jeff Miller helped open up the VA to private contractors. Now he’s out of office and lobbying for those businesses.
By JASPER CRAVEN April 04, 2019
Jasper Craven (@Jasper_Craven) is a writer based in Brooklyn. He produced this story with Reveal for The Center for Investigative Reporting, a non-profit news organization.
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 (FY2017) 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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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.
Until January 2017, Miller, 59, had been a member of Congress from the Panhandle and the head of the powerful House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, which oversees the VA and produces legislation affecting veterans’ lives. In 2014, as committee chairman, Miller helped draft the Veterans’ Access, Choice and Accountability Act, the law that first embraced wide-scale funding of private-sector health care for veterans. Since President Barack Obama signed the law in August 2014, millions of appointments have been made in the private sector—a monumental change in veterans’ health care delivery that has brought billions in new revenue for health care companies and created an opening for them to pitch their services as an attractive alternative to government care.
Within months of leaving office, Miller registered as a corporate lobbyist and joined McDermott Will & Emery, a white-shoe lobbying firm located a half-mile from the Capitol. By the time the meeting in the Indian Treaty Room took place, Miller had three clients vying for access to veteran patients and VA dollars. He subsequently would lobby on behalf of seven other private interests seeking a piece of the agency’s budget.
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Read more: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/04/04/donald-trump-veterans-affairs-jeff-miller-226483