Ongoing Trump vs. the VA stuff

A congressional investigation into the Mar-a-Lago trio is continuing, but it doesn’t seem to be a big priority at this time. Which I suppose in context is understandable. For now.

The more than 300 pages of emails, obtained by Freedom of Information Act request, show the outsized influence of Ike Perlmutter, Marc Sherman and Bruce Moskowitz. None of the men have ever worked for the government, nor do they have any specific expertise on the policies they were allowed to shape at one of the largest agencies in the U.S. government. Their main qualification for the unprecedented arrangement was that they were the president’s paying customers as members of Mar-a-Lago, which he continues to own and profit from in office. 

Despite misgivings, career VA employees were obligated to waste taxpayer time and resources to respond to the trio of Mar-a-Lago members—purely because of their connections to Trump. “They are coming from POTUS friend/doctor,” reads one response to a frustrated official, saying that the career official would need to “handle sensitively and with facts.” Many of the VA employees’ frustrations had to do with the trio’s intervention into a VA information technology project; the emails provide hard evidence of what was previously only reported as anonymous sources within the department in a Politico story. - CREW

Also:

Top officials of the Department of Veterans Affairs declined to step in to try to exempt veterans and their families from a new immigration rule that would make it far easier to deny green cards to low-income immigrants, according to documents obtained by ProPublica under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The Department of Defense, on the other hand, worked throughout 2018 to minimize the new policy’s impact on military families. - ProPublica

Trump seems to have gotten away from targeting veterans' earned benefits, for now

- When I searched recent news for “Mar-a-Lago Trio” just now, the most recent thing there was from February, when a House committee started investigating. Whether that means that Trump really has ditched those despicable greedheads (though certainly no more despicable than himself), I don’t know.

- However, an effort at some privatization is continuing. It’s a gray area, of course - it’s hard to argue that an elderly veteran who lives six or eight hours from the nearest VA facility shouldn’t be able to go to a closer clinic or hospital, instead. But the expansion of that needs to be carefully monitored for abuse by profiteers, and additional efforts at privatization need to be crushed, and I don’t know that either will happen. Not as long as Republicans are in charge, anyway.

- A recent poll shows that a majority of veterans agree with a majority of Americans that US involvement in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria hasn't been worth it. How questions are worded means everything in polling like this, and for a majority of veterans to admit, even anonymously to a pollster, that sacrifices made by fellow military personnel, including those who were killed, weren’t worth it, is very notable.

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.