The men and women who’ve defended our nation should not have the veterans benefits they earned threatened by fiscal mismanagement.
That’s why Republican lawmakers introduced a supplemental appropriations bill to provide an additional $2.9 billion to cover shortfalls in the Department of Veterans Affairs’ budget for fiscal year 2024.
However, this supplemental spending bill shouldn’t have been necessary and lawmakers need to act now to prevent cuts to military veterans’ services in fiscal year 2025. Fortunately, there’s some low-hanging fruit they can, and should, grab.
But first, a little context behind these surprise shortfalls.
In March, the Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Veterans Affairs submitted its budget request for fiscal 2025, which begins Oct. 1.
Just four months later, in July, chief financial officers from the VA informed lawmakers that their fiscal 2025 budget was already on track to come up short by $12 billion and that the agency was about $3 billion short of meeting expenses for fiscal 2024. The VA’s unexpected announcement of record shortfalls prompted stern rebukes from lawmakers.
Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, called out the VA for “horrendous, top-to-bottom mismanagement.” In a letter to VA Secretary Denis McDonough, Bost wrote:
Not only have your chief financial officers thrown out the dollar amounts requested for many key accounts, they have abandoned many of the estimates and projections that underpinned their budget. This is not just fiscal mismanagement; it is strategic whiplash.
Bost questioned how the VA could have defended its proposed 10,000 reduction in workforce months earlier, when it declared that the agency “has the nationwide staffing level to accomplish the important objective” of providing veterans’ care but then proceeded to hire 22,000 new employees.
Bost also asked why the VA didn’t include in its budget the financial impact of its own rulemaking actions regarding a law called the PACT Act. Congress passed the PACT Act in 2022 to expand and improve benefits for veterans (and their families) who were exposed to toxic substances.
The VA’s implementation of the PACT Act has come under bipartisan scrutiny after the department’s inspector general found that the VA improperly awarded $10.8 million in PACT Act funds to senior executives in the VA’s central office.
Eight Republican senators homed in on the VA’s implementation of the PACT Act in a similarly critical letter to McDonough. The senators argued that the VA failed to follow Congress’ intent and “completely ignore[ed] statutory requirements” by immediately processing benefits that were supposed to be phased in over eight years.
The VA’s website actually boasts of this violation, proclaiming: “And starting March 5, 2024, we’re expanding VA health care to millions of veterans—years earlier than called for by the PACT Act.”
The senators chastised VA management, telling McDonough: “Your active disregard for the law directly impacts veterans and threatens to put their promised benefits … at risk.”
At a time when veteran suicide rates—already 1.6 times that of the general public—continue to climb, veterans can’t afford to have the VA’s resources wasted on reckless mismanagement.
Although fixing current and future budget shortfalls requires sound fiscal planning and adherence to the law, an abundance of inefficiencies and flawed practices create many opportunities to substitute wasteful spending for things that actually benefit veterans.
A first step toward ensuring VA funds only go to veterans’ services is to end the practice of “official time,” whereby agency employees receive their full salaries and benefits when working for their union instead of serving veterans.
One of the Biden-Harris administration’s first actions in office was to remove the Trump-Pence administration’s limits on official time and to allow VA and other federal employees to spend up to 100% of their time working for their union.
The Biden-Harris administration has failed to report the amount of time and resources that VA employees spend on union activities. However, they likely meet or exceed Obama-era levels, which included hundreds of employees spending more than 1 million hours per year working for their union instead of treating veterans.
Proposed legislation called the No Union Time on the Taxpayer’s Dime Act, sponsored by Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, would end the practice of official time.
With the Department of Veterans Affairs pointing to rising compensation costs as a source of its budget shortfalls, not paying people VA salaries when they aren’t serving veterans should be a no-brainer.
Another logical way to improve veterans’ well-being is by reducing improper payments, which are payments the VA sends to the wrong people or in the wrong amount.
In fiscal 2023, the VA issued $3 billion in improper payments. Over the past three years, such improper payments exceeded $10 billion. In long-term services and support, $2 of every $5 spent by the VA in fiscal 2023—$1.4 billion in total—was an improper payment.
Virtually none of those improper payments are recouped, and when the VA spends money on services that weren’t actually delivered to veterans, that directly takes away from the agency’s ability to meet veterans’ needs.
Reducing improper payments requires greater accountability and responsibility from management. This includes verifying that recipients of VA dollars are who they say they are, and that they’re eligible for the benefits they claim. It also means verifying that services billed to the VA by providers are within the law and that the care actually is delivered to veterans.
As the VA’s projected $12 billion shortfall for fiscal 2025 makes clear, Congress needs to act to protect veterans from unwarranted benefit cuts.
Easy first steps would be to require that VA funds go to veterans by eliminating the practice of paying government employees to work for their union instead of serving veterans, and to reduce improper payments that subtract from benefits available to veterans.
