Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough listens during President Biden’s first full Cabinet meeting at the White House on July 20, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman. (Demetrius Freeman)
WASHINGTON — A group of senior Trump administration alumni this week launched a nonprofit group to try to extend the former president’s effort to offer veterans more access to private medical care and other policies while diminishing President Joe Biden’s priorities at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Veterans 4 America First Institute is modeled after the America First Policy Institute, the post-Trump group that launched in April with a multimillion-dollar budget and is one of several efforts by former Trump administration officials to push his priorities. The new effort is led for now by volunteers who said they are committed to “effective management and accountability” at VA and the Defense Department, with a particular focus on what they called an intransigent VA bureaucracy.
President Donald Trump sought to expand private health care to veterans — long a priority for conservatives but not seconded by Biden — and the group’s leaders said that continuing to press for private coverage would be a primary goal.
Founding members of the group, which plans a publicity campaign, include Darin Selnick, a former senior adviser to VA and the Trump White House Domestic Policy Council; Peter O’Rourke, who served briefly as the agency’s acting secretary after other senior roles; Camilo Sandoval, a Treasury Department and VA alumnus whose last role was chief information security officer for the White House budget office; Jason Beardsley, who served in senior roles at the Pentagon and VA; and Reed Rubinstein, former deputy associate attorney general at the Justice Department.
The advisory board includes Keith Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general who was Trump’s acting national security adviser and chief of staff of the National Security Council.
Leaders of the new effort insist they are nonpartisan. “Our point is not to be partisan or point a finger at the current secretary,” Selnick said in an interview. “But we have the expertise to come up with solutions and advance them.”
It is clear, however, that the new effort is intended to pressure VA Secretary Denis McDonough, particularly in the area of private health-care options.
Selnick said McDonough is “going backwards” on Trump and Congress’s commitment to encourage veterans to seek care from private doctors, by allowing wait times for these appointments to grow and, in Selnick’s view, by pushing patients to be seen at VA instead of in the community.
VA press secretary Terrence Hayes said in an email of the new group: “VA…
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