Faith in Agency Clouded Bernie Sanders’s V.A. Response



Senator Bernie Sanders, center, at a hearing in July 2014, often points with pride to the two years he spent as chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times



There were reports of secret waiting lists to hide long delays in care. Whistle-blowers said as many as 40 veterans had died waiting for appointments. And Congress was demanding answers.

Despite mounting evidence of trouble at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Senator Bernie Sanders, then the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, initially regarded the complaints as overblown, and as a play by conservatives to weaken one of the country’s largest social welfare institutions.

“There is, right now, as we speak, a concerted effort to undermine the V.A.,” Mr. Sanders said in May 2014, two weeks after the story was picked up by national news organizations. “You have folks out there now — Koch brothers and others — who want to radically change the nature of society, and either make major cuts in all of these institutions, or maybe do away with them entirely.”

But the scandal deepened: The secretary of veterans affairs resigned. Reports showed major problems at dozens of V.A. hospitals. And an Obama administration review revealed “significant and chronic systemic leadership failures” in the hospital system.

Mr. Sanders eventually changed course, becoming critical of the agency and ultimately joining with Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and other colleagues to draft a bipartisan bill to try to fix the veterans health care waiting list.

Mr. Sanders’s chairmanship of the committee, his most notable leadership post in the Senate, has become a go-to credential in his upstart quest to win the Democratic nomination for president. He routinely boasts of praise from the largest veterans organizations, who lauded his fight to expand benefits. And he frequently speaks of how he helped devise the wait time fix and was able to “crack the gridlock” of Washington, as one of his campaign mailers put it.

But a review of his record in the job also shows that in a moment of crisis, his deep-seated faith in the fundamental goodness of government blinded him, at least at first, to a dangerous breakdown in the one corner of it he was supposed to police. Despite inspector general reports dating back a decade that documented a growing problem with wait times, Mr. Sanders, who had served on the committee for six years before he became its head, was quick to defend the agency and slow to aggressively question V.A. officials and demand accountability.

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