September 29, 2009--Where's Michelle?

I don’t like it but I can live with a delay in the government getting rebate checks to folks who turned in clunkers to buy new cars. But not with the fact, as recently reported in the New York Times, that hundreds of thousands of current veterans are being forced to wait many months to get reimbursed for the college tuition benefits promised them in the so-called New GI Bill. (Article linked below.)

The cash-for-clunkers program was passed on the fly by a Congress and a president wanting to do a quick host of things to stimulate our lagging economy and so there was relatively little time for the Transportation Department to gear up to handle the flood of inevitable paperwork. But the New GI Bill has been on the books for more than a year and thus the Veterans Administration had amply time to figure out how to make it work.

The program was designed to pay for tuition, fees, student housing, and books. Most of the costs associated with attending college. But because of governmental ineptitude most Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who are attempting to take appropriate advantage of the program, veterans who the leaders of both political parties with tears in their eyes always refer to as “heroes,” are being forced to lay out all the money required to enroll and are being forced to wait for many months to get their checks. This has meant that they have had to borrow money at high interest rates—which will not be reimbursed—or put off buying the books they need or dig into savings in order to begin college this fall when the program first took effect.

Back last August, when the legislation was approved (over the hypocritical objections of most Republicans, including initially John McCain) and the administration of the program was assigned to the VA, the Veterans Administration choose not to hire an outside contractor to run it even though the VA did not have the capacity to handle all the applications for benefits.

277,000 veterans have thus far applied. This was not a surprise—the VA correctly anticipated how many would submit applications and it also knew it had antiquated technology and thus would be forced to process the applications manually. They also knew, or should have, that as a result there would be significant delays in paying colleges and reimbursing veterans for their other covered expenses. In spite of this, they declined to hire an outside contractor with the capacity to administer the program quickly and efficiently. As a result, of the more than 200,000 applicants, only 20,000 have had their tuition paid and only another 13,000 have been reimbursed for their eligible out-of-pocket costs.

This is how we treat our heroes.

Though the Bush administration can be fully blamed for getting us involved in Iraq and Afghanistan and they were most cynical in their emotional exploitation of veterans, trotting them out for public praise while more privately not providing them with the body armor and other methods to protect and defend themselves; and they were fully responsible for the infamous situation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other VA healthcare and rehabilitation facilities. But this current fiasco is largely happening on Barack Obama’s watch.

He, and his wife Michelle, came into office proclaiming that taking better care of veterans would be one of their highest priorities. Michelle Obama, especially, made a big thing of devoting her energies to assuring that veterans and their families would be treated as their service and sacrifices deserved. But here we are with this unforgivable mess on our hands.

I cannot help but wonder how often the Obamas have checked out what is now happening at Walter Reed, literally walking distance from the White House. I cannot help but wonder what they have done—besides decrying the situation and making speeches about it—to alleviate the situation among the still nearly 200,000 homeless veterans. A full one-third of the total population of homeless Americans. I haven’t noticed any visits to homeless camps. I haven’t heard about new facilities for homeless vets. I do know there will be a conference on the subject in October, nearly a year after Obama was elected. And we all know what these conferences are about—posturing and promising and getting on the evening news.

Providing tuition benefits and providing homes for the homeless are solvable problems. Much less complex than fixing our industrial economy or figuring out what to do in Pakistan or Iran. I do not for the life of me understand why Barack and Michelle Obama don’t every week pound the table and demand these matters get taken care of.

A vegetable garden on the White House grounds we have.

After World War II, when all administrative work was done manually and on paper, fully 7.8 of the 16 million veterans went to college on the original GI Bill. Somehow the VA at the time managed to get the work done. 7.8 million. But now after all the progress we’ve made with computing and automation we cannot manage to process a miserable 277,000 applications.

I have a friend who runs a successful software business. He supplies systems to banks to help them handle their workload. I asked him to look into the current situation at the VA and to tell me how long it would have taken him to develop a fully automated system to handle the paper flow. A few hours later he called back and said he could have a designed a software system to handle this in less than two weeks. So much for change we can believe in.