Trump is taking a small step at making good on a campaign promise to improve services and health care for vets.
President Trump on Friday signed into law Friday legislation designed to increase accountability at the Department of Veterans Affairs, taking a small step at making good on a campaign promise to improve services and health care for vets.
The VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act, which makes it easier for the agency to terminate employees for misconduct, “is a tool to see that our veterans are treated with the respect they so richly earned, ” Trump said in a brief speech from the East Room of the White House before signing the bill.
Trump said that “one of my great joys” during his presidential campaign was “all the time spent… meeting with our nation’s veterans.”
“They represent the very best of us, ” he said.
The law signed Friday was prompted by a 2014 scandal at the Phoenix VA medical center, where some veterans died while waiting for health care.
While Trump had campaigned on promises to make services and health care to veterans a top priority — vowing to clean up the VA, the government’s second-largest department — his run was marred by repeated digs at U. S. veterans, and the families of fallen U. S. veterans.
In July 2015, he ripped Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) , who spent years locked up and being tortured as a prisoner-of-war during the Vietnam War, as “not a war hero.”
“He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
A year later, he repeatedly disparaged the Gold-Star parents of Humayun Khan, a Muslim U. S. Army captain who was slain in 2004 by suicide bombers in Iraq.
