Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders initially defended the Department of Veterans Affairs in Congress after conservatives criticized the agency for inefficiency, believing it to be a part of a partisan attack. Sanders said the criticism was meant to strip funding from the department.
As a Senator for Vermont and head of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, Sanders said the allegations against the V.A. had been an overblown attempt to weaken one of the government's largest welfare distributors.
"There is, right now, as we speak, a concerted effort to undermine the V.A.," Mr. Sanders said, in the wake of national media attention given to the issue. . "You have folks out there now - Koch brothers and others - who want to radically change the nature of society, and either make major cuts in all of these institutions, or maybe do away with them entirely."
However, the criticism of conservatives in Congress proved to be more than conjecture, and the V.A. scandal only deepened. The chief of the V.A. resigned, massive delays for treatment compounded, and even President Barack Obama recognized the need for immediate action, reporting "significant and chronic systemic leadership failures" in the department.
Although Sanders changed his opinion after further examining the state of the department, some were disappointed in his governing abilities. Though his chairmanship of the Senate Veterans Affair Committee has been touted as a major accomplishment in the Vermont Senator's presidential campaign, some feel that his fierce partisanship blinded him from the truth while in office.
"His ideological perspective blurred his ability to recognize the operational reality of what was happening at the V.A.," said the founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Paul Rieckhoff. "The reality was that he was one of the last people to publicly recognize the gravity of the situation."
