“This is absolutely the wrong way to treat our troops, and serious reforms need to happen immediately,” said Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.), chairman of the subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. 

The panel conducted a field hearing at Walter Reed Monday to get a firsthand look at the facility that went  “from the flagship of our military health system to a glaring problem,” according to Tierney. 

The lawmaker raised questions of whether the conditions some wounded soldiers face at Walter Reed are related to a lack of planning by a Bush administration that anticipated a short war in Iraq. Tierney also asked whether an ideological bias of the White House toward privatization was a factor that led recovering troops to live in “appalling” conditions. 

“Where does the buck stop? There appears to be a pattern developing here that we’ve seen before: first deny, then try to cover up, then designate a fall guy,” Tierney said. “In this case, I have concerns that the Army is literally trying to whitewash over the problems.” 

Democrats were not alone in their criticism of the administration. 

“For too long, complaints [have gone unanswered] about substandard and disjointed care for wounded soldiers who have been treated as distant abstractions,” the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), said. 

He added that pre-war planning errors include the Pentagon’s failure to anticipate that “deploying unprecedented numbers of reserve component troops into combat would produce an unprecedented flow of casualties. 

“As a result, the Defense Department has been scrambling ever since to lash together last-century procedures and systems to care for returning citizen soldiers,” Davis said. 

The incoming acting secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, acknowledged that the Army has “let some soldiers down.” Geren, a four-term congressman from Texas, moved into the position after previous Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey was asked to resign over the Walter Reed scandal. 

White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters Monday that, “in a sense, the president and also everybody within the chain of command are taking responsibility” for what happened at Walter Reed. 

“It’s time to shine a bright light on the entire system and find out where the failings may be, and address them,” Snow said. “The people who have served have given us their best; it’s time for us to make sure that they get our best when it comes to treatment."