The adviser, Darin Selnick, who is spearheading a controversial plan to shift billions of dollars from government-run veterans’ hospitals to private health care providers, spent more than $13,000 on his bicoastal commute in three months, including airfare, hotel stays and other outlays, according to expense reports published by the nonprofit news organization ProPublica.
Federal regulations generally do not allow reimbursement for travel between officials’ homes and their regular duty stations.
On Wednesday, the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., sent a letter to the secretary of Veterans Affairs, Robert Wilkie, saying the money appeared to have been spent improperly, and may have to be repaid.
“If Mr. Selnick was an adviser to the Office of the Secretary, his duty station should be Washington, D.C., in the same location as the Office of the Secretary,” Takano wrote. He asked the secretary to clarify who had approved Selnick’s travel.
Susan Carter, the department’s director of media relations, said on Wednesday that the reimbursements were appropriate because the department considers Selnick’s duty station to be in California, not Washington. “Travel costs are standard for federal employees who travel periodically to implement their responsibilities,” she said.
Expense reports published by ProPublica suggest Selnick has been spending about one-third of his time in Washington.
Selnick did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Problematic travel expenses have dogged a number of Trump administration appointees. Similar questions over travel spending contributed to the ouster of the former secretary of Veterans Affairs, Dr. David Shulkin.
While Selnick’s expenses were modest in comparison with several Cabinet members’ spending on first-class tickets and chartered flights, some veterans’ groups said they found them galling in light of Selnick’s past criticism of wasteful spending at the department, which he once called, “the VA rabbit hole.”
“The department has serious performance and accountability issues, for which our veterans and their families are paying the price,” Selnick said in a 2014 news release that is typical of dozens of statements he made before the 2016 election.
Before joining Veterans Affairs, Selnick was associated with an advocacy group called Concerned Veterans for America, financed largely by billionaire conservative activists Charles G. and David H. Koch.
Selnick, a former Air Force captain who had worked for a chain of California weight-loss clinics, became a leading health care policy analyst for the group despite having little experience in the field. He and the group pushed proposals to shift from providing veterans with care through the current system of public veterans hospitals, and toward private providers and a payment system akin to private health insurance.
Concerned Veterans for America had been somewhat obscure before the 2016 election, and was generally dismissed by major veterans’ associations like the American Legion. But after President Donald Trump was elected, the group was given a leading advisory role, and Selnick was hired by Veterans Affairs and appointed to the White House Domestic Policy Council.
There he clashed with Trump’s first Veterans Affairs secretary, Shulkin, who fired him, according to former department officials. After Trump replaced Shulkin last spring, Selnick returned as a senior adviser to Shulkin’s successor, Wilkie.
Staff members at the department, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said Selnick took over planning for how to implement the VA Mission Act, a sweeping law passed in 2018 that veterans’ groups say may reshape veterans’ health care and perhaps the department as well. In January the department announced that it was greatly expanding the scope for veterans to receive publicly paid care from private health providers.
The country’s largest veterans groups have generally opposed Selnick’s plans, saying that increased privatization of veterans’ health care would be costly and could undermine the existing veterans’ hospital system.
Jeremy Butler, a Navy veteran who heads the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said Wednesday that at the very least, the travel reimbursements for Selnick raise questions about administrative competence at Veterans Affairs.
“Our members are deeply concerned in what we are seeing as a trend of waste and mismanagement at the department,” he said. “Every dollar wasted on travel is a dollar that is not going to fund veteran suicide and veteran homelessness” prevention programs.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.