August 21, 2009 by admin.

By Bob Brewin 08/20/2009

The Veterans Affairs Department has received only a fraction of the enrollment claims it expects from veterans planning to attend classes this fall under the 2008 GI bill, and is bracing for an onslaught as the school year approaches.

As of this week, VA had received 13,000 enrollment claims from colleges and universities, and had approved 4,100 of those for payment, said Keith Wilson, director of the agency’s Education Service. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, he told Nextgov. The agency anticipates as many as 328,000 claims, he said.

Enrollment claims are the last step in the process of recouping education benefits under the post-9/11 GI bill. Starting in May, veterans could apply for a certificate of eligibility from VA showing they were entitled to benefits. To date, the agency has approved 136,000 out of 193,000 applications received, leaving 57,000 unprocessed, Wilson said.

The majority of those pending were received in the past 30 days, and Wilson said VA has been receiving 3,600 claims daily.

Once veterans receive their stamp of approval, they provide it to the college or university they plan to attend. The schools then report enrollment information to VA, which, under the post-9/11 GI bill, makes a direct payment to the schools for tuition and fees, and a separate stipend payment of about $1,200 to the veterans. That stipend can be used for books and housing.

Asked to explain the disparity between the low number of enrollment claims — 13,000 — and projections that 328,000 veterans plan to attend school this fall using the post-9/11 GI bill, Wilson said many colleges did not set tuition rates until late July, and hence experienced delays in submitting enrollment forms.

“The busy time for us is August and September,” he said, adding he is confident VA can get through pending claims in time to make payments for the fall semester. “That’s why we hired 750 more claims examiners,” he said.

But, Johann Sprenger, coordinator of veterans services at the University of Nevada Reno, said VA’s state representative for Nevada told him the department was 60 days behind in processing. Sprenger suggested veterans could speed up processing by submitting an application for a certificate of eligibility along with an application for benefits.

According to VA’s Web site the average processing time for education claims at four regional centers is 56 days. Steve Westerfeld, a VA spokesman, said that statistic is for all education benefit claims, including those under the Montgomery GI bill, Reserve Educational Assistance Program, and Survivors’ and Dependents’ Educational Assistance Program, in addition to the 2008 GI bill. It typically takes 30 days to process claims for education benefits under the new GI bill, he said.

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August 19, 2009 by admin.

By Allan Holmes   08/18/09 12:02 pm ET

Yesterday at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Phoenix, Ariz., President Obama called for a new reform effort in the Veterans Affairs Department. He said VA should harness the best computer system to cut red tape, reduce the backlog of claims, slash wait times and deliver benefits sooner.

The president directed Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients and Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra to work with VA Secretary Eric Shinseki and the department’s employees to come up with the best ideas to meet those goals and then make them happen.

I have a more modest suggestion for VA today: Get real about the backlog of pending post 9/11 GI bill education benefits claims. The Aug. 17 Monday Morning Report from the Veterans Benefits Administration showed 211,251 education claims pending, which my friends on the Hill say are is backlog of all unprocessed GI bill claims.

That’s an increase of 19,863 pending claims since last week, a 9 percent jump, with school slated to start in about two weeks.

VA told me last week that I should not take these numbers in the Monday Morning Report at face value but has yet to explain why, although I have repeatedly asked for an explanation.

Meanwhile I’m told by a reliable source that VA has paid less than 5,000 education claims for the fall semester, with some 328,000 vets expected to enter school under the post-9/11 GI bill.

If this is true, VA — and Obama — face an impending disaster when college and veterans around the country don’t receive their promised benefits.

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August 14, 2009 by admin.

By Bob Brewin 08/13/2009

The Veterans Affairs Department has a backlog of nearly 200,000 education benefits claims from veterans just three weeks before universities and colleges start classes for the fall, and it is unlikely VA can process the applications in time, a knowledgeable congressional source said.

Hundreds of thousands of veterans have filed for education benefits established by the 2008 GI bill, formerly called the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act, which greatly expanded the benefits the government gives veterans for college education. For example, the bill hikes payments for tuition from $1,300 a month to a payment that is pegged at the highest tuition at a public university in a veteran’s state of residence, which for Massachusetts would be $10,232. The bill includes monthly living expenses of $1,100 to $1,200.

VA has been overwhelmed with claims and the backlog means “schools are going to get paid late,” said the congressional source who declined to be identified. Colleges and universities basically have two choices: decline to enroll veterans for the fall semester, which would cause bad publicity, or carry the veterans until VA payments arrive, according to the source. The situation is “not pretty, and it’s going to get uglier,” the source said.

Top Veterans Affairs officials at a House hearing in June said the department was on schedule to process the claims by the start of classes in the fall and VA was processing claims faster than it received them.

But, a report from the Veterans Benefits Administration released on Monday showed a backlog of 191,388 education benefit claims as of Aug. 10, an increase of 16,411, or 9.4 percent, from the previous week.

The backlog has increased every week since May, when recent veterans were able to apply for the rich package of benefits available under the law.

Unprocessed claims totaled 155,216 on July 13, an increase of 5.3 percent in impending claims from the previous week. During the past month, the number of pending claims rose4.4 percent on July 23, 4.6 percent on July 27 and 3.3 percent on Aug. 3.

VA officials did not respond to questions before deadline.

The backlog includes claims for payment under the post-9/11 GI bill and the older Montgomery bill, the congressional source said, but based on VA’s own data, most pending claims are from the new GI bill. By comparison, for the second week of August 2008, VA had 47,536 educational benefits claims pending under the older GI bill, while this year it had more than four times that, reflecting the growing number of claims filed under the post-9/11 GI bill.

Keith Wilson, director of the Office of Education Service at the Veterans Benefits Administration, told a hearing of the House Veterans Affairs Economic Opportunity Subcommittee in June that VA could receive as many as 200,000 applications by the end of the summer under the new GI bill.

The bill has two payment streams: tuition and fees sent directly to the college or university, and a stipend for books and housing sent to the veteran. That means schools will feel the affects of the delayed processing first, followed by veterans because VA issues tuition payments before payments for books and housing, the congressional source said.

Universities and colleges that Nextgov contacted said they planned to make arrangements to keep veterans in school if their tuition and housing bills are not paid. Indiana University in Bloomington will “do everything to prevent financial hardship” for students who are veterans, said Margaret Baechtold, director of veterans support services at the school. That would include waiving late-payment fees and working with the on-campus housing department so veterans will be able to stay in their dorms if their stipends are delayed.

The university was late in filing for payments for tuition and fees with VA because it did not set tuition rates until late July, and officials expect that delay will cause a lag in GI bill payments, she said.

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August 14, 2009 by admin.

By Alyssa Rosenberg arosenberg@govexec.com August 12, 2009

The Office of Personnel Management has finalized a rule allowing federal agencies to hire the spouses of some military service members without requiring them to compete for jobs.

“The intended effect of this rule is to facilitate the entry of military spouses into the federal civil service as part of an effort to recruit and retain skilled and experienced members of the armed forces and to recognize and honor the service of members injured, disabled, or killed in connection with their service,” OPM director John Berry wrote in notes on the regulation, published in the Federal Register on Wednesday.

The rule allows agencies to appoint the husbands or wives of members of the armed forces to jobs without comparing them to other candidates under three conditions: if a service member is transferred to a new location permanently, becomes completely disabled during active duty (though the injuries do not have to result from combat), or dies during an active-duty assignment. If the spouse is killed during service, the widow or widower must remain unmarried before receiving an appointment.

President Bush proposed the idea of a special hiring authority for military spouses in his 2008 State of the Union address. He issued an executive order creating the authority last September, and OPM began work on the regulation in December.

Shortly after he was sworn in, President Obama ordered a review of all Bush-era regulations that had not yet been implemented. OPM has decided not to move forward with certain regulations, like one that would have eliminated a requirement that federal employees serve a year in certain pay grades before they became eligible for promotions. But Berry has said one of his priorities is to guarantee and strengthen protections for veterans in the hiring process.

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Les Melnyk said a large number of military spouses could be eligible for appointments under the hiring authority. About half of all service members are married, he said, and about a third of active-duty members are transferred every year. (Some, he noted, are posted to locations, such as South Korea, where their families typically do not move with them.)

“The majority of [military spouses] do want to have a meaningful job,” Melnyk said. “This is another way to help our spouses achieve that goal,” and as a result, to improve service members’ satisfaction with their military experience.

Randy Erwin, legislative director for the National Federation of Federal Employees, said the union did not have a position on the rule. But Max Stier, president of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, praised the regulation.

“When you think of the family stresses that military service creates, the idea that we might be able to use civilian employment to make service easier seems to me to be a smart one,” he said. “I think we also have to recognize that we have to make sure it’s not sufficient to create these authorities, we have to make sure agencies really understand that they are there and are encouraged to use them.”

Michael Mahoney, head of OPM’s staffing group, said agencies would receive training and guidance on implementing the new hiring authority, and expected they would be ready to begin using it by the time the regulation becomes effective.

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August 10, 2009 by admin.

By Bob Brewin 08/05/2009

While the Marine Corps banned the use of social networking sites on Tuesday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a budding Tweeter, strongly backed the use of the social networking site in a message he posted on Twitter.

“Obviously we need to find right balance between security and transparency,” Adm. Mike Mullen Tweeted after the Marine Corps said it would ban social networking sites. “We are working on that. But am I still going to tweet? You bet.”

Last month the Defense Department kicked off a study to determine the vulnerabilities of social networking sites and Web 2.0 technologies such as Facebook and Twitter.

Navy Capt. John Kirby, Mullen’s spokesman, said, “The chairman is committed to find a way to use social media while ensuring operational security.”

Mullen, who also has a Facebook page, believes that social network sites help Defense engage in a dialogue with audiences at home and abroad. Mullen believes “we cannot afford to ignore this way [social network sites] of communicating with people,” Kirby said.

Kirby said he expected Defense’s study on use of social networking tools and technologies to be completed within a month.

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August 10, 2009 by admin.

By Katherine McIntire Peters kpeters@govexec.com August 7, 2009

On Friday the Air Force formally established a new command dedicated to nuclear deterrence and global strike missions.

The creation of Global Strike Command, headquartered at Barksdale Air Force Base, La., is the latest and perhaps most significant step the service has taken to reassert control over its nuclear mission after a string of debacles and investigations in 2007 and 2008 revealed a significant erosion in expertise and capability within the Air Force.

“Our nuclear forces and our whole enterprise lacked clear lines of authority and responsibility,” said Air Force Secretary Michael Donley at a Pentagon briefing. “This command will bring together our strategic nuclear forces, our [intercontinental ballistic missiles] and our nuclear bomber forces under a single command.”

The new organization is one of 10 major Air Force commands and eventually will have 23,000 airmen, primarily from the 8th Air Force at Barksdale and the 20th Air Force at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. Lt. Gen. Frank Klotz, who has commanded missile units at several levels and has a background in arms control, will lead the new command.

Global Strike Command essentially re-establishes a single organization within the service accountable for all aspects of the nuclear deterrence mission with responsibility for nuclear missiles and nuclear-capable bombers. The Air Force had such an organization for decades during the Cold War in the form of Strategic Air Command. But in 1992, to focus more effectively on conventional missions and space operations, service leaders abolished the organization and moved its elements to other commands across the service.

As a Defense Science Board examination found later, “The end result is that the strategic nuclear mission was dispersed among three major commands, none of which had strategic nuclear forces or operations as a central focus or body of expertise.”

That lack of focus came to a head on Aug. 30, 2007, when a B-52 crew unknowingly flew nuclear weapons across the country. Six months later, Pentagon officials discovered military officials had mistakenly shipped nuclear missile components to Taiwan in 2006. A series of internal and external investigations revealed widespread erosion of nuclear expertise and discipline within the Air Force, prompting Defense Secretary Robert Gates to fire the Air Force secretary and chief of staff in June 2008.

“The focus of the Air Force leadership has drifted with respect to perhaps its most sensitive mission,” Gates said at the time.

Establishing a new command that would be accountable for all nuclear capabilities within the Air Force was a key recommendation of the task force Gates appointed to examine the problems and potential remedies.

Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz have focused intensely on restoring accountability for nuclear stewardship and laying the groundwork for rebuilding expertise within the service. In addition to the new command, they established a headquarters directorate for nuclear issues; a nuclear panel to advocate for resources in the service’s budget process; and an executive-level nuclear oversight board.

The Air Force also has consolidated all nuclear maintenance and sustainment activities under the Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.

“Our expectation is high for [Global Strike Command’s] focus on precision and reliability and compliance in all matters nuclear,” said Schwartz at the Pentagon briefing.

The new command will have a headquarters staff of about 900 people, including an inspector general office.

“We have made a special effort to make the inspections more demanding, more invasive, more challenging, in a sense, to assure that commanders in the field are getting good feedback on how healthy their organizations actually [are],” Schwartz said.

During the next several months the Air Force will transfer operational responsibility for all intercontinental ballistic missile forces and B-2 and B-52 bombers, which can use both nuclear and conventional ordnance, from Air Force Space Command and Air Combat Command to the new organization.

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