A top adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, who was an outspoken critic of wasteful practices there before he joined the department, has come under fire for billing the government for the cost of commuting between the department’s headquarters in Washington and his home in California.

The adviser, Darin Selnick, who is spearheading a controversial plan to shift billions of dollars from government-run veterans’ hospitals to private health care providers, spent more than $13,000 on his bicoastal commute in three months, including airfare, hotel stays and other outlays, according to expense reports published by the nonprofit news organization ProPublica.

Federal regulations generally do not allow reimbursement for travel between officials’ homes and their regular duty stations.

On Wednesday, the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, Mark Takano, Democrat of California, sent a letter to the secretary of Veterans Affairs, Robert Wilkie, saying that the money appeared to have been spent improperly, and may have to be repaid.

“If Mr. Selnick was an adviser to the Office of the Secretary, his duty station should be Washington, D.C., in the same location as the Office of the Secretary,” Mr. Takano wrote. He asked the secretary to clarify who had approved Mr. Selnick’s travel.

Susan Carter, the department’s director of media relations, said on Wednesday that the reimbursements were appropriate because the department considers Mr. Selnick’s duty station to be in California, not Washington. “Travel costs are standard for federal employees who travel periodically to implement their responsibilities,” she said.

Expense reports published by ProPublica suggest that Mr. Selnick has been spending about one-third of his time in Washington.

Mr. Selnick did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

Problematic travel expenses have dogged a number of Trump administration appointees. Similar questions over travel spending contributed to the ouster of the former secretary of Veterans Affairs, Dr. David Shulkin.

While Mr. Selnick’s expenses were modest in comparison with several cabinet members’ spending on first-class tickets and chartered flights, some veterans’ groups said they found them galling in light of Mr. Selnick’s past criticism of wasteful spending at the department, which he once called, “the V.A. rabbit hole.”

“The department has serious performance and accountability issues, for which our veterans and their families are paying the price,” Mr. Selnick said in a 2014 news release that is typical of dozens of statements he made before the 2016 election.

Before joining Veterans Affairs, Mr. Selnick was associated with an advocacy group called Concerned Veterans for America, financed largely by the billionaire conservative activists Charles G. and David H. Koch.

Mr. Selnick, a former Air Force captain who had worked for a chain of California weight-loss clinics, became a leading health care policy analyst for the group despite having little experience in the field. He and the group pushed proposals to shift away from providing veterans with care through the current system of public veterans’ hospitals, and toward private providers and a payment system akin to private health insurance.

Concerned Veterans for America had been somewhat obscure before the 2016 election, and was generally dismissed by major veterans’ associations like the American Legion. But after President Trump was elected, the group was given a leading advisory role, and Mr. Selnick was hired by Veterans Affairs and appointed to the White House Domestic Policy Council.

There he clashed with Mr. Trump’s first Veterans Affairs secretary, Dr. Shulkin, who fired him, according to former department officials. After Dr. Shulkin was replaced by the president last spring, Mr. Selnick returned as a senior adviser to Dr. Shulkin’s successor, Mr. Wilkie.

Staff members at the department, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said that Mr. Selnick took over planning for how to implement the V.A. Mission Act, a sweeping law passed in 2018 that veterans’ groups say may reshape veterans’ health care and perhaps the department as well. In January the department announced that it was greatly expanding the scope for veterans to receive publicly paid care from private health providers.

The country’s largest veterans groups have generally opposed Mr. Selnick’s plans, saying that increased privatization of veterans’ health care would be costly and could undermine the existing veterans’ hospital system.

Jeremy Butler, a Navy veteran who heads the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said on Wednesday that at the very least, the travel reimbursements for Mr. Selnick raise questions about administrative competence at Veterans Affairs.

“Our members are deeply concerned in what we are seeing as a trend of waste and mismanagement at the department,” he said. “Every dollar wasted on travel is a dollar that is not going to fund veteran suicide and veteran homelessness” prevention programs.

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