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Robert Leon Wilkie Jr. (born August 2, 1962) [1] is an American lawyer and government official who served as the United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs from 2018 to 2021, during the Trump administration.
VA Secretary Robert Wilkie: In 2020, America faced a crisis in the form of COVID-19. And it became VA’s responsibility to see our Veterans through it.
Dec 10, 2020 · The inspector general for the Department of Veterans Affairs told prosecutors this fall that his investigation of VA Secretary Robert Wilkie had turned up possible criminal conduct, three...
May 28, 2020 · The Honorable Robert Wilkie was nominated by President Trump to serve as the tenth Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on July 23, 2018, and sworn in on July 30, 2018. Mr. Wilkie previously served as the acting Secretary of VA from March 28 to May 29, 2018.
- He Has Military Discipline
- No Health Care Experience
- He's Politically Savvy
- There's Been Some Controversy
- He Appreciates The Cost of War
Wilkie, who is undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, is also an intelligence officer in the Air Force Reserves, and he previously served in the Navy Reserves. He grew up an “Army brat” on Fort Bragg and in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His father was gravely injured in the Vietnam War and his great-grandfather served in World War I...
Wilkie does not have the health care experience his predecessor had. David Shulkin, whom Trump fired in a tweetin March, is a doctor and longtime hospital executive. But Wilkie said he believes the greatest problems facing the agency are "administrative and bureaucratic," rather than medical. He has the benefit of serving as acting secretary of the...
Wilkie has extensive experience on Capitol Hill, where he was an aide to former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms and a senior adviser to Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C. In the 1990s, he was counsel and international security adviser to former Senate majority leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. During the Trump administration, he helped facilitate the Senate conf...
Wilkie’s confirmation process was not without bumps. Just before his hearing in June, The Washington Postpublished a story detailing controversial positions he has taken. In 1993, he defended Helms’ effort to renew a patent on a logo featuring the Confederate flag, saying “What we are seeing is an attempt in the name of political correctness to era...
Wilkie, 55, and his wife, Julie, have known each other since childhood in Fayetteville, where they walked to high school together past a veterans’ hospital. “Every day on our way to and from high school, we would see a sign outside the veterans’ hospital that says that ‘the price of freedom is visible here,’” he said. Wilkie said that his great-gra...
Nov 9, 2018 · Robert Wilkie is the new secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with the secretary on his goals and the department's recent history of controversy.
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Senators confirmed Pentagon official Robert Wilkie as Veterans Affairs secretary. He now faces the task of fulfilling President Donald Trump's promises to fire bad VA employees and steer more...
