Legislation Archives

I know they're real busy on the Hill right now, adding verbiage to an already incomprehensible 2,000 page-plus health care bill, but I'm appalled at the sloppy work done on the fiscal 2010 Defense appropriations bill signed by President Obama on Monday.

The final version of the bill was printed in the Congressional Record, which includes the bill's text and what looks like report language that omitted numerous tables on exactly how Congress sliced and diced a $637 billion budget.

Instead of tables that specify the exact budget for, say, a left-handed cyber gimble, the report in the Congressional Record is replete with notations on page after page that say, "Insert graphic folio."

Someone forgot to insert all the graphic folios.

That means the Senate approved expenditure of billions of dollars without any real idea of exactly what was in the Defense bill. And the president compounded the problem by signing it.

Top officials of the Veterans Affairs Department revised the figures they put out yesterday on payments the agency has made to veterans under the post-9/11 GI bill, and said that as of today, only 24,186 vets have received checks -- or roughly 12 percent of the 200,000 claims it expected to receive by the end of the summer.

Tammy Duckworth, the VA's Assistant Secretary of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs said on a call this morning that the VA has to date received enrollment certifications from schools for 27,735 veterans and has processed payments for 24,186.

Yesterday, the VA said it had paid more than 61,000 post-9/11 benefits claims totaling $50 million since August. But, Lynn Nelson, deputy director of Education Services at the VA, said those numbers were confusing, as they in some cases represented three separate payments to one veteran.

Nelson said one of the problems the VA faced with payments on the post-9/11 GI Bill today is its complexity, particularly when it comers to calculating the housing allowance, which is based on location. This requires heavy manual processing of claims until the VA installs a new automated system next year.

Duckworth acknowledged that the VA faces problems and added the department is not trying to make excuses for its performance. To handle its backlog, Duckworth said the VA has put claims examiners on overtime, including weekend shifts.

Nelson said the VA is processing post-9/11 GI Bill claims in an average of days. That's not the experience of James Martin, a Marine Iraq war veteran at Boston College Law School who said it took the VA six weeks to process his request for a certificate of eligibility and he expects it will be another six weeks before he gets a check.

Neither Duckworth nor Nelson could estimate the number of post-9/11 payment claims in the pipeline, due in part to the fact that some schools have not yet submitted claims for their students.

But, if VA wants to get a real handle on the backlog, I suggest either Duckworth or Nelson take a two-stop Metro trip from the VA headquarters on Vermont Ave. in Washington to The George Washington University.

GW student Brian Hawthorne, who served two tours as an Army medic in Iraq and is the legislative director of Student Veterans of America, said none of 400 veterans at the school have received a payment from the VA.

The VA pays tuition directly to the schools under the post-9/11 GI Bill, and a separate housing allowance and stipend - which runs $1,900 a month in DC -- directly to the veteran, with these payments due next month.

Joe Mancinik, a Navy veteran I mentor who attends GW said he faces a real financial crunch if he does not receive that stipend in time next month. Joe has taken out loans from GW and said, "I'm in fairly serious financial trouble with an overdrawn account, a late credit card payment, and the rent coming due soon."

Joe added, that anxiety about payment "is making it extremely difficult to focus on my studies. Watching the cash register screens at school show hundreds and thousands of dollars in the accounts of my peers while mine reads a few dollars, or none at all, is humiliating and terrifying."

Richard Smith, of VoteVets, told Duckworth and Nelson that he has tapped out his credit cards and has $120 in his checking account while he awaits his stipend payment next month.

He asked them what the could do for him and other similar situation if they do not get that check next moth. They did not have an answer.

In the case of Siemens Medical, the answer comes out to at least $267 million, the value of the three-year contract the Defense Department awarded the company in March for radiology systems.

That contract, as well as a whole mess of other business Siemens Medical does with the federal government, could be in jeopardy due to a deal by parent company Siemens AG and Nokia to provide Iran with Internet monitoring and blocking software.

Last week, Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said they planned to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell technology to Iran, which monitors or blocks Internet connections, from receiving U.S. government contracts. This bill would hit Siemens Medical hard.

Siemens sold $468 million worth of medical gear to the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments between 2000 and 2008, or just about a quarter of the total sales volume Siemens AG did with the federal government in the same period. (Siemens also sold $360.1 million worth of bag screening equipment to the Transportation Security Administration during the same period..)

Siemens Medical declined to comment on the Schumer/Graham bill, but steered me to a statement from the Nokia Siemens joint venture, which I used in the article, which says stuff it sells to Iran complies with European Union and United Nations network export control regulations and local laws.

The local law bit is the rub in a global economy - not just in Iran, but also in China, where U.S. companies (think of ones whose names begin with the letters C, G, or Y) go along with a repressive regime because, hey, it's good business.

Unfortunately, good business and freedom don t always mesh, but maybe Senate penalties for providing equipment or software to repressive regimes should be more widely and evenly applied.

Since the United States started operations in Iraq, a small group of military women, known as Lionesses, has provided support to combat units, and the House Armed Services Committee thinks its time they received recognition and support from both the Defense Department and the Veterans Affairs Department.

The Lionesses were initially tapped to support culturally sensitive missions men could not perform, such as body searching Iraqi women.

Their mission has since evolved to support military civilian affairs operations in Iraqi cities, with a gentler touch than their male colleagues.

These women have made a real difference in Iraq, the committee said in its report on the fiscal 2010 Defense authorization bill, but they have had a hard time gaining official recognition for their work from either Defense or VA when they leave active duty.

The committee wants Defense to establish formal procedures to document the work these women perform and consider establishing a military Lioness specialty.

They indeed have come a long way.

The $106 billion 2009 war supplemental appropriations bill passed by the Senate yesterday sure looks like a piggybank for a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with supporting troops operating in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For example there's $8 million to cover the salaries and expenses of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to investigate the causes of the financial crisis that hit the country last year. Since one word -- greed -- sums up the cause of the crisis, I don't know why this commission needs $8 million from the Defense Department budget.

The Securities and Exchange Commission grabbed $10 million from the war supplemental to investigate securities fraud, and we all know one word -- greed -- is the cause of securities fraud.

Then there's the "cash for clunkers" program, $1 billion tacked on to the war supplemental bill at the last minute to allow folks to trade in gas guzzlers for new fuel-efficient cars. This will be run through an electronic voucher program managed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The program will reimburse gas guzzler owners up to $4,500 if they buy a new fuel-efficient car.

This electronic voucher program will, in turn, enrich whatever contractor is hired to develop the system. And perhaps someday it will have a use in Afghanistan or Iraq - like if we try to eliminate gas guzzlers in those countries under a pax Americana frugalitas project.

Congress did have enough spare change after tossing all these bucks around to come up with $169.5 million in funding for a new National Security Agency data center located not at the agency HQ in Ft. Meade, Md., but at Camp Williams, Utah, a 28,000-acre base operated by the Utah National Guard located 26 mile south of Salt Lake City.

It may be real difficult to find Old Bay Seasoning in the vicinity of Camp Williams, let alone the blue crabs to use it on.