VA’s Claim of an “Independent” Red Team Report Falls Apart Under Scrutiny
By
| November 25, 2024
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) billed its Red Team report on the supposed “Urgent Need to Address Community Care Spending” as an “independent” assessment. Yet, documents obtained by Americans for Prosperity Foundation through the Freedom of Information Act paint a different picture: internal emails and chat logs show VA officials actively drafting, editing, and controlling the release date of this purportedly independent report.
The VA MISSION Act created the Veterans Community Care Program, which the VA rolled out in 2019, to give greater health care choice to veterans. A key component of the program is revised access standards and eligibility criteria that give veterans the option of seeking “community care” from private providers instead of the VA, after waiting 20–28 days for an appointment with the VA, depending on the type of care needed.
The Red Team report was put together by the VA to portray third-party validation of the VA’s position that it needs to urgently “take action to control community care utilization.” This is a continuation of a years-long effort by the VA to undermine community care and prevent veterans from obtaining it.
The VA presented this report as impartial and separate from the VA, claiming it was developed to “independently assess the trends and drivers of increasing community care spending,” under the direction of Dr. Shereef Elnahal, VA Under Secretary for Health. VA Secretary McDonough echoed this in testimony to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, insisting to Senator Cassidy that the report was an “independent look.”
The records obtained by AFP Foundation reveal these claims were either intentional deception or, at best, a misleading claim of independence by the VA.
VA Employees Drafted and Edited the Red Team Report
The Red Team Report does mention that the VHA and other VA employees participated in the two-day Red Team event held in January 2024, but it never indicates that the report was authored by anyone other than the external participants. The suggested citation lists only the members of the Red Team, and nobody from the VA. The language throughout the report reflects the Red Team referring to itself in third person: “the Red Team concludes” and “[t]he Red Team could not verify such reports.” But just a few weeks after the Red Team convened on January 9-10, with a draft report already in hand, the Chair of the Red Team and former Under Secretary for Health at the VHA Kenneth Kizer asked Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Chief of Staff Ryung Suh “if it is meant to be an independent assessment?”
The question makes more sense after chat logs from April 2024 reveal that the draft report was written by the VA, not the Red Team, and then shared with the Red Team Chair Kenneth Kizer. VHA Chief of Staff Ryung Suh told a VA colleague that the Red Team’s “report/minutes from the January Meeting were not really on point, so we started from scratch on the draft report to give the [Red Team] members”
VA Wanted to Frame Report as “Independent” to Validate its War Against Community Care
Why claim the Red Team Report was independent or “external” to VA? According to VA meeting notes from May 2024, the VA thought it would “reinforce/validate” its long-running hostility to offering veterans Community Care. And the notes unironically say the report the VA drafted contains “[n]o surprises.”
In one email, VHA Chief of Staff Ryung Suh described the purpose of the report “as an opening step for a broader strategy to include an Interagency Task Force to look deeper at the issues raised in the report in greater depth.” The same email also shows the VA, not the supposedly independent Red Team, controlled the public release of the report.
Red Team Report More Evidence that the VA will Mislead to Achieve Political Goals
For years, the VA has been improperly delaying or denying community care to eligible veterans. AFP Foundation’s previous investigations uncovered that the VA misreported wait times by using outdated scheduling methods, which made veterans wait longer for treatment and reduced eligibility for community care.
The deception about the origin of the Red Team Report is just a small part of the ongoing problems with transparency and accountability in the VA’s health care system. Our veterans deserve a VA that’s willing to follow the law and tell the truth.
