Should he be confirmed, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Denis McDonough, has a lot of work to do to restore trust in the agency — and to do right by the men and women it serves, including a great many right here in the Upper Peninsula and northeastern Wisconsin.

For decades, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, promises have been made that the VA would be cleaned up. It never seems to happen.

Let us be clear: Overwhelmingly, the men and women who work at the VA do their very best to serve veterans of military service. Many veterans who have received treatment at VA hospitals are lavish in their praise of the facilities’ employees.

We’ve heard many good things about care given at the Oscar G. Johnson VA Medical Center in Iron Mountain.

However, management, nationwide is another story. Gigantic cost overruns for VA construction projects and the “wait-list” scandal of a few years ago are examples of failures.

Shoddy, sometimes dangerous care of veterans can be a concern. In February, a former nursing assistant at the VA hospital in Clarksburg, West Virginia, will be sentenced for her homicidal spree there. Somehow, over a period of months in 2017-18, Reta Mays got away with murdering at least eight veterans by injecting them with insulin they didn’t need. VA officials have yet to release a satisfactory explanation for how that happened.

Then, just weeks ago, the current VA secretary, Robert Wilkie, came under fire from several veterans’ organizations. Wilkie is accused of attempting to discredit a female veteran who filed a sexual harassment claim, rather than properly investigate the accusations.

McDonough is not a veteran himself. He says he understands the challenges that might present in building confidence, but that he is committed to “fight like hell for our veterans,” and remove impediments to true service for them such as “mismanagement, staff shortfalls, leadership gaps and IT systems failures.”

Good. Now if he is confirmed, let us hope he is true to his word. Those who were willing to give their lives for the rest of us deserve the best treatment this nation has to offer. It is time they received it.

— The Mining Journal, Marquette