Brown Reported Leaving Veterans Affairs Position

WASHINGTON — Veterans Affairs Secretary Jesse Brown, a career advocate for veterans who convinced President Clinton that the nation should spend more money on its former military personnel, has submitted his resignation, according to administration officials.

Officials said Brown’s departure was not unexpected. Near the end of Clinton’s first term, Brown told then-White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta that he did not expect to remain in the Cabinet for long, the officials said. He is the eighth member of the original Clinton Cabinet to leave or take another job since the end of the president’s first term.

Deputy VA Secretary Hershel W. Gober, a longtime Arkansas friend of the president, is considered by many members of Washington’s veterans lobby as Brown’s likely successor. Gober was formerly state director of veterans affairs in Little Rock and was a key force in mobilizing veterans support for the president in his 1992 campaign.

A combat-disabled Marine, Brown, 53, established a reputation early in Clinton’s first term for defying pressures to shrink his agency and brashly telling lawmakers they should cut other programs before touching his. “I don’t think, quite frankly, they have had to deal with a veterans’ advocate before,” he said.

Although he strongly supported the VA’s massive bureaucracy, Brown successfully forced the department to begin moving away from its huge hospital system and toward a system of outpatient care for the nation’s 26 million veterans.

That and the increases of almost a $1 billion a year in funding he won for his department in an era of a declining veterans’ population may be his biggest legacies, veterans groups said.

With a budget of $41 billion a year and 215,000 workers, the VA is second in the Cabinet only to the Defense Department in its number of federal employees.

Brown was traveling and could not be reached for comment. Sources in the administration said the secretary offered Clinton his letter of resignation last month and Brown had told him wants to leave this summer.

Gober, 60, a Vietnam veteran, has served as the department’s chief operating officer since Clinton took office. Most recently, he has taken the lead in defending the VA from charges that it has been insensitive to female employees who were harassed by male supervisors.