As Eric Shinseki, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, apologized for the problems at his agency on Friday morning, a few hours before he resigned, he must have known that his days were probably numbered. Following the publication of an interim inspector general’s report showing that officials throughout the V.A. system falsified records about how long patients were waiting to see doctors, Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill had been calling for his resignation. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, at his daily press conference on Thursday, had repeatedly refused to say that President Barack Obama still had confidence in Shinseki. On Friday, after meeting with Shinseki, the President said that he had, “with regret,” accepted his resignation, adding, “He does not want to be a distraction.”

With the midterms approaching, politics is driving things. By its very nature, the treatment of veterans is an explosive issue, and the conservative media has seized upon this story as another Benghazi. The cable channels, and indeed the regular networks and newspapers, are full of stories about patients being deprived of medical attention, and many of these reports are accompanied by truly heart-rending footage of young veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on artificial limbs. It’s no surprise that Democrats like Senator Kay Hagan, who is facing a tough reëlection race in North Carolina, joined the calls for Shinseki to step aside.

Veterans groups were split, but the largest one, the American Legion, called for Shinseki’s resignation weeks ago. Before the President took this step, however, he had to consider two things. There’s no evidence, as yet, that Shinseki or any of his immediate circle did anything specifically wrong. And many of the problems afflicting the V.A. are a result of Congress’s refusal to fund the agency properly in the wake of two wars that produced huge numbers of casualties.

To the extent that any chief executive is responsible for what happens on his watch, Shinseki was obviously culpable. But the V.A. is a huge agency. Its annual budget is almost a hundred and fifty billion dollars; it employs more than a quarter of a million people; and it operates hundreds of medical facilities all across the country. In such a big institution, the job of the Secretary is to provide effective leadership and to respond proactively to problems as they arise.

The report, by the V.A.’s inspector general, which found that efforts to disguise the length of waiting times were “systemic” at the agency, and dated back at least to 2010, raised questions about why Shinseki didn’t learn about the problem earlier, and about how hands-on he was. So far, however, nobody has suggested that the Secretary or any of his immediate staff tried to cover it up. In his public remarks on Friday, before meeting with Obama, Shinseki apologized for the scandal, saying, “I can’t explain the lack of integrity among the leaders of some of our health-care facilities.” He said that he had been too trusting of some of his subordinates, and asked Congress to give him more power to hire and fire senior staff.

As he demonstrated during the Iraq war, when he warned the Bush Administration that it would need a lot more troops to occupy the country than the Pentagon was deploying, Shinseki is a man of honor. Despite this scandal, he has done a number of positive things in his time at the V.A., such as expanding the treatments offered to victims of past wars, including the war in Vietnam, and helping to reduce the number of homeless veterans by a third. His remarks on Friday were made before the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, which gave him a standing ovation.

The underlying problems facing the V.A. are well known in Washington, and they go back at least a decade. As the number of wounded veterans has increased sharply, the agency’s budget hasn’t been raised in line with the increased demand for medical services. That’s why there are such long waiting lines: there are too few doctors and beds available for all the patients that need them.

In any publicly financed medical system, funding is a chronic problem, and so is internal organization. (If you want another example of this, look at the history of the British National Health Service.) One possible solution would be to link the V.A.’s budget to the number of veterans and patients, effectively turning treatment into an entitlement program, but this hasn’t been done. Instead, Congress appropriates money for the agency in every budget cycle, and, in recent years, it has often come up short.

The Republicans in Congress are largely responsible for this. As recently as February, more than forty G.O.P. senators voted against a bill that would have expanded funding for the V.A. Some of the Obama Administration’s well-intentioned policies have also contributed to the squeeze on resources. By making it easier for veterans of all ages to get treatment for ailments that aren’t necessarily conflict-related, the Administration increased the demand for medical services. However, the V.A. system still has the same number of hospitals and staff—indeed, as the Times reported on Friday, the agency has a big shortage of doctors.

That wasn’t Shinseki’s doing. He’d been quietly lobbying for more funding and more investment, which hasn’t been forthcoming. But now he is the fall guy. That is, unless President Obama stands up and tells people what the real problem is.

Photograph by Matt Eich/The Washington Post.