Taxpayers should have a reasonable expectation that when government employees get performance bonuses, they performed well.

Not at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Besides coming in with a $1 billion budget shortage last year that shortchanged vets' health care, the VA also has government's most impenetrable bureaucracy and a reputation for leaving its laptop computers strewn about the country. It's hardly a performance record that merits self-congratulation, but the VA has just awarded itself the government's most lucrative bonuses.

According to an analysis by The Associated Press, the agency's senior career officials received more than $3.8 million in bonuses, or as much as $33,000 each. That figure equals about 20 percent of many base salaries. Among the recipients were administrators who rigged the accounting that produced the flawed 2005 budget that grossly underestimated war costs. Also getting cash was the deputy undersecretary for benefits, who manages the system with backlogs that make vets wait an average of 177 days for responses to their benefit claims.

VA Secretary Jim Nicholson, who approved the extra payments, told the AP that the bonuses were necessary to retain hard-working career officials. His agency might have set the highest dollars-for-ineptitude ratio in Washington. While the VA hierarchy pocketed extra cash, wounded veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan were stuck in shoddy conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center without claims processors to get them through the bureaucratic morass. That $3.8 million would have fixed most of what was wrong at Walter Reed.

Rep. Phil Hare, D-Ill., of the House Veterans Affairs Committee called for Mr. Nicholson's resignation this week. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called for Mr. Nicholson's resignation last year, when the VA lost vets' data files and blew its budget. The incompetent Mr. Nicholson's job is safe; the White House fires only competent U.S. attorneys.

While the VA brass exchange checks, vets and their families wait months to get their government to notice them. If these bonuses are for performance, they must be for inept performance.