If you thought you had seen the full extent of perfidy at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, think again. This week, the Washington Examiner reported that the agency is once again stalling veterans who seek to claim the benefits they were promised, once again in an effort to game the metrics by which agency performance is measured.
The agency is now refusing to answer Congress’s questions about its backlog of benefit applications from military veterans. It is unclear at this point how extensive this new problem is, but in just one office in Atlanta, the agency has put 1,833 applications from combat veterans in limbo. Veterans Affairs is claiming that these applications are incomplete because they do not include the applicants’ personal financial information. But combat veterans do not need to provide that information because they are eligible regardless.
This is precisely the kind of sleight of hand that Veterans Affairs managers have been using for years to push the blame for the agency’s backlog on its victims. Last week, top Veterans Affairs officials were accused of deliberately failing to tell newly retiring veterans to include their discharge papers when applying for benefits. The reason? This plan, which agency employees described in internal emails, allowed officials to blame the applicants themselves for its ever-growing backlog of 800,000 applications.
What is evident is that the bureaucracy at Veterans Affairs has failed to learn from the scandal that has roiled the agency since spring 2014. That was when bureaucrats at more than a hundred facilities were caught keeping secret medical waiting lists. The practice allowed them to leave thousands of veterans waiting for healthcare without having their poor service show up in the agency’s computer system, where it might have endangered their ability to pocket performance bonuses.
That scandal caused the downfall and replacement of the then-Veterans Affairs Secretary, Eric Shinseki, but only a handful of those responsible were fired. In fact, it seems nearly impossible to get fired at the department. This week, the Washington Examiner reported that two senior managers who were caught bilking the agency out of $400,000 are being allowed not only to keep their jobs but to keep the money as well.
Even as it neglects its basic duty to newly returning veterans, Veterans Affairs has the resources to waste money promoting Obamacare to veterans who don’t need it. The Examiner‘s Sarah Westwood reported Tuesday that even though its clients have health coverage from Veterans Affairs, the agency hired dozens of staff and spent more than $6 million on brochures and online ads to encourage them to purchase insurance on Obamacare’s struggling exchanges.
If there was ever an agency that had to be destroyed and rebuilt, Veterans Affairs is it. Veterans of the armed services put their lives in harm’s way at low pay to protect their fellow citizens and preserve the American way of life. They deserve a lot better than what they’re getting from the unethical and unaccountable bureaucracy.
