Where the VA is at

Trump & Co. didn't get too far with their heinous effort to open the Veterans Administration to being strip-mined for profit by the greedheads, aka "privatization." But that doesn't mean everything's cool. This is a comprehensive recent overview.

Denis McDonough, the new secretary of Veterans Affairs, is only the second nonveteran to take the helm of the VA since it became a Cabinet-level department in 1988 and only the second person whom Congress did not confirm unanimously for the post.3 He will have his work cut out for him. Not only does Secretary McDonough have to manage a large and complex organization, but he is also facing a series of unprecedented challenges—all compounded by the fact that the VA’s top leadership is in turmoil following the Trump administration, which had five deputy secretaries4 during the former president’s four-year term.

Secretary McDonough’s challenges may be placed into seven categories:

- Addressing the ballooning VA budget
- Expanding veterans’ access to disability benefits
- Reducing the veteran suicide rate
- Slowing the privatization of veterans’ health care
- Prioritizing the women and LGBTQ people who have and still serve in the military
- Rebuilding the department’s infrastructure and staffing
- Helping veterans transition into civil society - Center for American Progress

New report of VA denying care

New report, ongoing problem for many years.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has unlawfully turned away veterans with other-than-honorable discharges for decades because of flawed training and guidance that created a "cycle of misinformation," a report released (last) Thursday found.

Rather than telling veterans with other-than-honorable discharges to fill out applications for health care, sending a written denial and informing them about their options to appeal, VA staff often rejects them on the spot, the report says. While other-than-honorable discharges, commonly known as "bad paper," can preclude veterans from some VA services, that's not always the case -- particularly with mental health care...

Veterans receive other-than-honorable discharges for a host of reasons, including serious crimes. However, service members with bad paper were, in many cases, unjustly released from the military because of infractions that stemmed from mental health issues.

The Government Accountability Office found that tens of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who were separated from the military for misconduct had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury or another mental health disorder.

Service members in the LGBT community were also given other-than-honorable discharges during the days of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," a policy that barred openly gay people from military service. When the policy was in place from 1994 to 2001, more than 100,000 service members were discharged because of their LGBT status, the OUTVETS report shows. - Military.com

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