GI Bill checks on time – finally

Well, DVA Secretary Shinseki kept his word and started cutting checks for the new GI Bill today. This report from the American Legion in DC;

“What are all these people doing here?” asked a befuddled worker, struggling through an unusually tightly packed front entrance to her Eye Street office building in downtown Washington, DC this morning. The colleague she queried was equally baffled. A young woman in the hundred–plus person crowd of unfamiliar faces gave them a clue, “We’re here to pick up our checks.”

The checks to which the young lady referred are the Department of Veterans Affairs G.I. Bill emergency relief payments, designed to help unshoulder the burdens faced by many young veterans and their families suffering hardships due to late VA payments of their newly won educational benefits. Through the VA website and from news stories generated by The American Legion and others, members of the rapidly lengthening Eye Street queue had gotten the word. VA Secretary Shinseki had read the news stories of college-enrolled veterans’ hardships and done the right thing.

When asked how the hiccup in the issuance of benefits checks had impacted her family, the young woman smiled thinly at her husband, gazed down at her stroller-bound infant, shook her head slowly and said, ”Wow! We’ve had to borrow money and shuffle bills — a lot of bills — around. It’s been really, really rough.”

“And where are you from?”

“Virginia Beach. We left at four this morning, but it was really worth the trip.”

Yes, yes, the VA came through – but it’s the same thing they could have done a month ago without any prodding. Just to be clear, I think the preparations for this should have been started a year ago when President Bush signed the bill. But Democrats were bound and determined to get this bill passed with all of it’s faults, they should have stepped up and got ready to process these folks’ paperwork on time.

I commend all of the VSOs for getting this stop-gap in place, but they’d better be prepared to put needles down on the DVA every month because you can expect them (the VA) to begin resting on their laurels this weekend.

Category: Breaking News, Support the troops