Free Republic

The White House said Friday it is proposing a 13.6 percent increase in funding for the handling of veterans benefits, an effort to reduce the Veterans Affairs Department’s massive backlog of disability claims. ~snip~ The number of pending claims filed by veterans seeking compensation stood this month at 885,000, 70 percent of which have been pending for more than 125 days. Veterans can wait a year or more for a decision at particularly overloaded regional offices, among them Baltimore...

The Democrat habit of appointing “good Democrats” to positions without regard for the required administrative skills it calls for is hurting almost 900,000 disabled veterans. The incompetence of Barack Obama’s Veterans Affairs Department has created a bureaucratic nightmare in which more than 65% of its disability claims sit on someone’s desk for more than 125 days. More than this 16% of the cases that are brought to resolution are done so in error according to veterans’ advocate groups’ testimony to the House Veterans Affairs Committee last week. The V.A is totally underprepared for the predictable increase in disability claims stepped...