More malicious crap at the VA - Update

Traitor Trump is skilled at having others do his dirty work, though not at keeping his own grubby mitts clean.

Newly released emails about the three Trump associates who secretly steered the Department of Veterans Affairs show how deeply the trio was involved in some of the agency’s most consequential matters, most notably a multibillion-dollar effort to overhaul electronic health records for millions of veterans.

Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter, West Palm Beach physician Bruce Moskowitz and lawyer Marc Sherman — part of the president’s circle at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida — reviewed a confidential draft of a $10 billion government contract for the electronic-records project, even though they lack any relevant expertise...

But none of the three men has served in the U.S. military or elsewhere in government, and none of them has expertise in health information technology or federal contracting.

The list is one of hundreds of newly released documents about the so-called Mar-a-Lago Crowd’s sway over VA policy and personnel decisions. The records show them editing the budget for a government program, weighing in on job candidates and being treated as having decision-making authority on policy initiatives. - ProPublica

The roots of this next one are pre-Trump. But better leadership now could have resulted in getting this fixed.

 A few weeks ago NBC News reported that U.S. veterans attending school under the GI Bill weren't getting the benefits promised to them because a small change to how student housing claims were calculated had the side effect of breaking the entire system. The ancient technology relied upon by the Veterans Benefits Association could not handle the required change in zip code processing, creating a backlog of more than 100,000 unprocessed claims. Some veterans have ended up getting incorrect amounts, but others haven't gotten their benefits at all, leading to dire financial stress as students struggled to suddenly come up with money that the Veterans Administration suddenly wasn't sending them.

Now we're learning that veterans who didn't get their full payments cannot expect the VA to make good on the rest of the money. They're out of luck. NBC reports that congressional staffers have been told by the department that the veterans who were underpaid can expect to be stiffed for the rest of their claims because the department can't audit those past underpayments without even worse delays to current payments, due to the same system frailties. - Daily Kos

Update: "After pressure from Congress, VA reverses course and promises full benefits to veterans." Note that it's pressure from Congress, not from Trump.