President Trump’s claims about VA firings

“Together, we enacted the VA Accountability Act, so that anyone who mistreats or abuses our great veterans can be promptly fired. There was a time you couldn’t fire anyone, no matter how they treated our veterans, whether they stole or they were sadists. And we had some of them, too. You couldn’t fire them, and now we can do it very, very quickly and easily. They don’t treat our veterans well. We get them out. Since then, we’ve removed more than 7,600 employees who failed to give our vets the care they so richly deserve.”

— President Trump, in remarks to the House GOP conference retreat, Sept. 12, 2019

The president regularly touts his signing of the bipartisan Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act in June 2017, but he often overstates its impact.

In Trump’s telling, such as in his recent remarks to House Republicans, before the law there was no way for the agency to fire underperforming workers. That’s simply wrong. Government records show that hundreds of Veterans Affairs employees were fired every month before the law was enacted. In 2014, Congress passed a law that was said to make it easier to remove senior officials because of poor performance or misconduct.

Moreover, we were struck by a figure that has popped up in Trump’s rhetoric in recent weeks — that the administration has removed “more than 7,600 employees” as a result of the law. How credible is that number?