White House supports Shinseki
Our buddy Ward Carroll writes at Military.com that the White House expressed their support for Ric Shinseki’s plan to clear the blacklog of claims at the Veterans’ Affairs Department;
“The president views this as national problem,” White House chief of staff Denis McDonough said during a roundtable he hosted along with Secretary Shinseki for a number of national media organizations….
Oh, great. We’re screwed now. The president viewed healthcare, unemployment, and the economy as national problems, too, and it’s only gotten worse since he “focused” on those problems.
McDonough stated that the president’s support of veterans is primarily manifest in his 2014 budget priorities that were just released, specifically the plus-up of the Veterans Benefits Administration funding to $2.5 billion, an increase of 13.6 percent.
Yeah, that’ll fix the problem – throw more money at a broken system. They’ve been increasing the funding at the VA for four years and nothing has changed. I appreciate the sentiment, but when the DVA is spending the money on millions-of-dollars conventions and training programs that turn into Roman orgies, maybe more money isn’t the solution anymore. And I think I found the problem;
“In this job I get to take care of kids I went to war with 40 years ago in a place called Vietnam,” [Shinseki] said. “I get to take care of those kids we deployed when I was service chief. I get to take care of the great giants, those veterans of World War 2 who saved the world and those who saved a country in the ‘50s and who raised me in the profession. For those reasons, when the president offered me the opportunity I took it, and I haven’t really thought much more about it.”
Maybe Shinseki should think about it occasionally – not just when someone is holding his feet to the fire. Shinseki is good at taking blame, but that isn’t turning into results. He makes pretty speeches and touches on all the key subjects when he talks to the public, but he’s just an incompetent boob with no leadership skills. No one on his staff knows how to manage their assets properly and lead their subordinates. The VA needs a housecleaning, personnel-wise, and Shinseki doesn’t have the cojones to do that. So the house-cleaning needs to begin at the very top.
Category: Veterans Issues, Veterans' Affairs Department
I guess Shineski wants to clear the back logs from WWII and Vietnam. 18 months and waiting, I havent even gotten a monthly letter telling me they are working on it in a long time I was getting them every month for the first year. I guess they gave up and put me in a pile some where.
Will I get a new hat?
It’s nothing a switch to berets won’t fix.
Barack the Destroyer. Wherever he goes chaos follows.
In a variation of a Nazi tactic, DON’T start at the top. Instead, take every 10th employee and fire him or her. Wait three months. If claims processing hasn’t skyrocketed, go to step three. Identify a village–um, office–that is a particularly poor performer and fire everyone in the office. (Yeah, I know. But I can dream, can’t I?)
There is no step two! This is Federal work I’m talking about.
Incompetent people hired by incompetent people. Ah, the Peter Principle is alive and well and screwing up the VA but good.
Have we ever had an administration more dedicated to spitting on Veterans than B. Hussein 0bama & Co. have been?
I’ll bet that if everyone in the VA is required to wear berets that their morale will improve and everything will be just as great as when he did it to the Army.
When your boss gives you a vote of confidence, you need to start looking for a new job. Tea leaves say Shinseki gets gently nudged out not to long from now to spend more time with the family and pursue other opportunities. WH will just nominate another in over his head technocrat and then rinse and repeat.
With friends like these (BHO et al), who needs enemies??
PLEASE do us a favor, you can best help us by NOT helping us!
Well. Isn’t that just dandy. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Or something.
In case anyone’s wondering, the latest Obama budget proposes to tax retirement accounts. The definition of rich has been defined as low at $70,000/year.
As for those kids he went to war with 40 years ago – their grandchildren need help today.
Throw billions of dollars into an incompetent system and its still incompetent. Put a few true leaders in positions where they can streamline the procedures and get rid of the lazy, corrupt and apathetic and things may change. It took me 23 months to get my claim through, even though it was slam bang.
Big clue bat here. There is such a thing as a .pdf file, and there are boatloads of law firms in Washington, D.C. that fully capable of processing a railroad car full of documents, or using services to do this task. This is known technology. I understand that that the VA is big, but dammit all, simply using .pdf format is really not that difficult.
There is no excuse for the VA to be unable to handle documents. The whole rest of the civilians population in the US can do it.
There is no need for some sort of customized database, or conversion programs.
Finally got my hearing on my disability claim in July of this year. Only five years after filing an appeal, way to go VA!
@15 im glad im not the only one who see adobes OCR as a way to fix this, wanna incorporate and sell the idea? 🙂
Hey, maybe the VA will finally get to his claim about losing half a foot.
Because throwing more money at our education system and welfare benefits has worked wonders.
Remember if your not part of the solution, there’s plenty of money to be given to your political cronies and campaign donors to prolong the problem.
-Ish
Being a combat wounded veteran himself, you’d think Shinseki would move heaven and earth to make the claims process workable. He either is completely incompetent, a useless figurehead, doesn’t care or all of the above. My vote is “all of the above”.
A more accurate headline would be “White House Views Vets’ Claims as ‘National Problem'”.
All he’d need do then would be to “executive order” them away, as he has “legislated” other issues into oblivion.
From my experience the bastards don’t even have the decency to answer their help line
I simply extra up your RSS feed to my MSN News Reader.