He couldn’t find a former community organizer.President Barack Obama plans to nominate former Procter & Gamble executive Robert McDonald as the next Veterans Affairs secretary, as the White House seeks to shore up an agency beset by treatment delays and struggling to deal with an influx of new veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.An administration official said Obama would announce McDonald’s appointment Monday. If confirmed by the Senate, McDonald would succeed Eric Shinseki, the retired four-star general who resigned last month as the scope of the issues at veterans’ hospitals became apparent.In tapping McDonald for the post, Obama is signaling his desire to install a VA chief with broad management experience. McDonald also has a military background, graduating near the top of his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and serving as a captain in the Army, primarily in the 82nd Airborne Division.The administration official insisted on anonymity in order to confirm McDonald’s appointment before the president’s announcement.The VA operates the the largest integrated health care system in the country, with more than 300,000 fulltime employees and nearly 9 million veterans enrolled for care. But the agency has come under intense scrutiny in recent months amid reports of patients dying while waiting for appointments and of treatment delays in VA facilities nationwide.
Expanding investigation by more than two decades, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa, R-California, has sent a subpoena to the Federal Elections Commission for all communications involving former IRS administrator Lois Lerner from January 1, 1986 to the present day.This new search is the broadest-yet for records in a year-long investigation by Issa and congressional Republicans, who are trying to assess why the agency targeted tea party and other political groups for extra scrutiny.Issa issued the subpoena to Lee Goodman, head of the Federal Election Commission, on Tuesday for communications involving Lerner, who is seen as a central figure in the controversy because she ran the division that executed the targeting.She resigned last year after the Treasury Department’s inspector general found those working under her used “inappropriate” criteria to scrutinize certain groups. Since then, Lerner has refused to testify before Congress, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. This has added to the Republican push to find any documents related to Lerner and her time in government.In the on-going, determined GOP effort, Republicans are now reaching back to her career before the IRS.Lerner joined the FEC in 1981, first working in the general counsel’s office. Issa subpoena focuses on her work after 1986, when Lerner became the head of the FEC’s enforcement division.
The federal government has spent nearly $5 billion to establish federal and state exchanges for Obamacare, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).The funding was provided by a section of the Affordable Care Act that allowed for “indefinite” funding at the discretion of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).“The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is incurring significant administrative costs to support [federally-facilitated exchanges] FFE operations,” the report, which was released earlier this month, said.According to CMS, the government spent $456 million to support “exchange operations” between fiscal years 2010 and 2012, before the law went into effect. In 2013 the government spent $1.545 billion for administrative costs associated with the exchanges, and expects to spend an additional $1.390 million this year. The agency has requested another $1.788 billion for 2015.
