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For well over a year, COVID-related lockdowns crushed small business, whipped the working class and stymied student education. And now, confronted by a renewed Taliban offensive, Afghanistan's government has collapsed, enabling the Taliban to re-take the country after our veterans sacrificed so much over the past 20 years to prop it up.
It's a 1-2 punch that hurts our veterans more than most realize.
In particular, claims for disability benefits have surged. Thanks in large part to the dreadful combo of COVID shuttering and the Afghanistan War, federal records show that 583,904 claims for disability compensation and benefits are now pending with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). A disturbingly high 185,600 of these claims are considered backlogged, that is they have gone more than 125 days without action, skyrocketing past pre-COVID statistics. Veterans are being left behind and necessary reforms to the existing flawed system must put them first.
How did this happen? The VA is one of the largest and most complex agencies in the U.S. government, employing over 412,000 people. A key VA subcomponent, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), is America's biggest integrated health care system, overseeing 1,293 health care facilities, including 171 VA medical centers and 1,112 outpatient sites. Unfortunately, despite the vast resources at its disposal, the VA has not always been able to meet the expectations of veterans.
In 2014, the VA was rocked by a major scandal as officials falsified records at a medical center in Phoenix, hiding the amount of time that veterans had to wait for medical appointments. Some 1,700 veterans were reportedly kept on "secret" waiting lists, with scheduling times averaging 115 days for an initial primary care appointment. It took years of congressional engagement, intense media scrutiny and diligent work by staff at the VA to begin to overcome these problems.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, along with the lockdowns. Much of the work at the National Personnel Records Center at the National Archives and Records Administration, the team that helps with processing veteran disability claims, temporarily stopped. Ninety percent of the staff were reportedly sent home. Government workers fell far behind in processing claims of veterans, many of whom were suddenly out of work due to the lockdowns. The disability claims backlog tripled. Over a year later, the VA has yet to fully climb out of this hole.
And it will likely get worse. Starting from such a deficit, any significant number of additional new claims, or bureaucratic changes that slow down claims processing, risks further stressing the system.
New claims can and will arise from a variety of sources, like toxic burn pits in Afghanistan and Iraq. Also, legislation that went into effect in 2020 is expected to result in new disability claims associated with Agent Orange or Blue Water Navy herbicide exposure from the Vietnam era.
With this in mind, Congress must take a hard look at any proposals that would inadvertently add to the bureaucratic backlog that already exists.
Currently, there are four avenues through which veterans can file claims: Veteran Service Organizations largely staffed by volunteers, accredited attorneys working on a fee for service model, private consulting agents working on a contingency basis and veterans themselves filing claims. Any well-meaning attempts at reform that eliminate or restrict these options risks hurt veterans by limiting their choices, adding more red tape and further backlogging the system.
The approaching 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks provide clarity on the scope of the issues at stake. This year marks both an ending and a beginning.
On the one hand, a generation of warfare is ending. Despite many years of effort under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the government of Afghanistan has been overthrown and U.S. forces have withdrawn. Meanwhile, Congress is debating a "public and official ending of the Iraq War," by repealing the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). While our veterans can be proud that their efforts prevented additional major terrorist attacks for two decades, we are clearly at the end of an era.
On the other hand, our collective responsibility to a new generation of veterans is just beginning. Twenty years of war have produced the greatest number of veterans since the Vietnam era, placing additional stress on an already strained Veterans Affairs system.
Our veterans deserve a system that is accessible, easy to navigate and provides multiple options that allow them to achieve the best possible outcome. This is the least we can do to provide a thank you for their service and enable them to achieve the disability rating for which they are medically, legally and ethically eligible. Only by doing so will we enable the VA to appropriately fulfill its mission "to care for him who shall have borne the battle."
Matthew Kenney served two tours at the Pentagon, performing the duties of the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs and on the secretary of defense speechwriter team. He is a former research director in the senate majority leader's office.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
