Category Archives: Veterans Affairs

Why?

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…is this man still on the payroll?

Robert McDonald, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, wrongly claimed in a videotaped comment earlier this year that he served in the Army’s elite special forces, when his military service of five years was in fact spent almost entirely with the 82nd Airborne Division during the late 1970s.

Haven’t had done, yet, with these problems of stolen valor, now that it’s reaching into the upper echelons of our Federal government?

US special operations forces (SOF) are composed of exhaustively trained and highly capable troops from each military service, including the Army Rangers, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and Army Special Forces (also known as the Green Berets)—but not the 82nd Airborne. They [SOF] are certified to undertake the most dangerous and delicate missions….

To be sure, after having been found out, McDonald has issued an apology for his lie:

While I was in Los Angeles, engaging a homeless individual to determine his Veteran status, I asked the man where he had served in the military. He responded that he had served in special forces. I incorrectly stated that I had been in special forces. That was inaccurate and I apologize to anyone that was offended by my misstatement.

This was no little white lie, though, nor a politician’s…exaggeration for effect. On something of this magnitude, I get a little stiff-necked, and I ask: if McDonald had any integrity, he never would have made the claim in the first place; how, then, can we take his apology at face value? How, too, can we trust his apology when it didn’t come spontaneously, but only after he’d been caught out in his lie?

Because, Veterans

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President Obama’s 2016 budget blueprint proposes rolling back a program that gives veterans the right to receive faster care outside of the long waitlists at the troubled Veterans Affairs medical system.

Obama signed the Veterans Choice Program into law in August following months of partisan wrangling on Capitol Hill….

His 2016 budget “proposal” doesn’t zero out the program; instead, it achieves elimination of the funding by allowing the VA to reallocate that part of its budget to other purposes

to support essential investments in VA system priorities in a fiscally responsible, budget-neutral manner.

Apparently, veteran choice isn’t an essential investment, or it’s not a fiscally responsible use of the money, or both.

Because veterans are another group of Americans whom Obama and his Democrat minions don’t think are capable of making their own decisions.

On the other hand, it was a Republican addition to last year’s compromise and interim bill for reforming the Veterans Administration. Maybe because, Republicans.

The Veterans Administration Revisited

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To repeat: the VA needs to be disbanded, its employees returned to the private sector, and its budget distributed to our veterans as vouchers with which they can get the care they need from the doctors and facilities they choose.

The latest example of the VA’s fatal dysfunctionality is a hospital in Aurora, CO—rather, a hospital shell, since the VA has been mismanaging this project to the tune of claiming to “need” $1 billion (yes, that’s with a “b”) to finish—finish, mind you—building this building.

Those billion dollars are three times the original construction cost estimate in 2005, just nine short years ago. Accounting for inflation, that original estimate of $328 million would be a bit over $400 million today. Assuming it really would have needed all nine years to build the thing. Apparently, though, including VA incompetence, 18 years will be needed; the “hospital” is only half done. And just to saucer and blow it: the VA “is in arrears” with the payments it owes its current contractor.

Hoover Dam was built in five years (yes, yes, the dam wasn’t hindered by other government claptrap that also is in the VA’s way, but still…).

VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson has conceded VA fault, and he’s actually apologized (to his credit, it wasn’t one of those 21st century pap statements being masqueraded as an apology).

I apologize to veterans here in Colorado. I apologize to the taxpayers. We have let you down[.]

Sorry, though. It’s a fine apology (I’ll assume sincerity), but words don’t get the hospital built. Words don’t recover those hundreds of millions of lost dollars. Coming as they do in the midst of ongoing VA failure, words of apology are entirely worthless.

Get rid of the VA.

Another VA Problem

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This one, though, isn’t primarily the Veterans Affair’s doing.

Veterans at the Shreveport, LA, Veterans Administration hospital have been going without toothbrushes, toothpaste, pajamas, sheets, and blankets while department officials spend money on new Canadian-made furniture, televisions to run public service announcements and solar panels….

Some specifics:

According to the VA, the department spent $74,412 on 24 flat screen TVs for “patient/employee information”—one 50 inches wide and the others 42 inches. The furniture cost $134,082, and the solar project was approximately $3 million.

This is shameful, but this falls on Congress. Under Federal funding rules, capital equipment—the TVs, solar, etc—fall into one funding category, and supplies—toothbrushes and paste, blankets, etc—fall into a separate category. Under those same rules, the VA (and any other agency whose funding falls into different categories) cannot take funds from, say, capital equipment, and spend it on, say, supplies. It gets even more bureaucratic than that. Agencies can’t reallocate capital expenses from one capital item to another: the VA can’t, for instance, take some of those $3 million from solar and buy more TVs with it. Only Congress can authorize such reallocations.

No, Congress must answer for this misallocation. That it’s what the VA asked for in its budget request may be true, but Congress—that collection of our directly elected representatives—isn’t supposed to be a rubber stamp for every request for money that wanders by. It’s our money Congress is allocating, not Congress’ and not the VA’s.

It’s true enough that the VA could have—should have—gone to Congress and asked for a reallocation on recognition of the supply funding shortfall. That it seems not to have is an internal VA problem that supports my argument for disbanding the VA and using the budget to fund vouchers sent directly to our veterans.

There are other problems described at the Watchdog.org link above that are entirely within the VA’s ability to correct, but this one is not.

This Needs to get Moving

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Fort McClellan, Anniston, AL, housed among other units the Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Corps. This Corps was responsible for the containment and disposal of chemical weapons, and it carried out this function, primarily, at Ft McClellan, a task it had done since before WWII. The base was closed 15 years ago due to failures in containment and leaching of the toxins into the soil and local water supply.

Monsanto also had been leaking toxins into the area’s water supply and soil from its own herbicide manufactory. Locals suffering from the effects of these contaminants successfully sued Monsanto in 2003, four years after McClellan’s closure, but for reasons that aren’t particularly important to this post Army personnel and their families who had been stationed at the base were blocked from joining the suit.

In January of last year, the Fort McClellan Health Act was introduced to fill the resulting gap in these veterans’ ability to get coverage and medical treatment for the effects of their own and their families’ exposure to the toxins handled at the base. It’s been languishing in committee (first in the House’s Committee on Veterans Affairs, then the Subcommittee on Health) since then.

This is an unacceptable bureaucratic delay (because I don’t think the Congressmen themselves don’t care about our veterans’ or families’ health), and it must stop. This bill needs to be promptly debated and brought to fruition, properly paid for, and moved along to House passage, following which the Senate needs to move it to a vote and the President sign it into law.

Write your Representatives and Senators. Call them. Email them. Social media. There’s been enough delay, not just for the last 21 months, but since this problem first came to light over a decade ago.