For some unknown reason, a lot of you have been emailing or calling me to ask my opinion on the new paradigm of “government reduction” in regards to the VA. Everyone wants to know how our new VA Secretary, the Honorable Doug Collins, is going to behave and the possibility he will destroy the Department of Veterans Affairs as we know it.

First, and foremost, I’d begin with “Do I look like that cartoon dog called Mr. Know-it-all? Do I emit some aura of prescience around my noggin?” Of course not. What the hey? I graduated 59th in a class of 64 from Vermont Academy in ’69. My biggest claim to fame was my deflection shooting of Officer Rohrbach’s unmarked car with an egg and trying to outrun him and his buddies four days after I graduated. As you can see, that resulted in a change of college plans and an emergency plea for a waiver to enter the USAF before the Hampton, Virginia Draft Board sent me the Lotto news.

To me, this whole VA gig was, and still is, a nonstop, full-blown car wreck (see below) from Day One. Who dreamed up all those suspense dates that went off like a short-fused M 26? Considering the VA was ostensibly a nonadversarial, Veteran friendly outfit plagiarizing Abe Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (For he who hath borne the Battle), I thought it was waaaay overdue for some updates… like electronic records. I had to wait about twenty three years more for that miracle to occur.

I’ve been playing VA poker since the modern inception of the VA in 1989. I’ve litigated my own claims under Secretaries Derwinski, Brown, Nicholson, Peake, General Shinseki, Gibson,  McDonald, Snyder, Shulkin, Wilkie, O’Rourke, Tran and McDonough. Oddly enough, in all that time, none of them have sought me out to seek counsel. What I can say is as many times as I’ve denigrated Secretary McDonough in my blog posts, he’s always responded to my emails and cut the Gordian Knots of the Veterans I represent.

So, from that miniscule viewpoint, I’m a satisfied, happy camper. As for Secretary Collins? I confess. I sent him an email last week over the intractably long period my good friend Calvin has waited patiently (10/31/2023) for some semblance of finality. Eighteen c&p examinations should be sufficient to ferret out anything he doesn’t suffer from related to service. Our new Secretary promptly announced the bozos down at the 317 DROC have until  COB (close of business) 10 March 2025 to resolve this paradox.

Far too many Veterans take this new administration personally and fear for their privacy. Secretary Collins is not going to go snooping in your records in a dumpster dive attempt to reduce you. Actually, nobody at VA does this. They have a computer that looks at your records automatically to determine if your knee got better or your loss of lower extremity below the knee grew back. On the other hand, if you’re TDIU and get a neighborhood paper route, your income gets reported to the SSA and the IRS. Well, duh? And yes, VA gets a feed from SSA and will send you a friendly reminder about that being a Bozo No-No if you want to keep the IU.

Think of VA as an auto insurance outfit. You come to them with a fender bender -or a total- and ask for a settlement. VA is naturally going to low ball you and provide an Earl Scheib $99.95 paint job with lumpy bondo.  Most Veterans have to go back a few times and demand it be fixed properly. One thing is certain. Whatever they do initially is not going to leave you all warm and fuzzy feeling.  Unless your disabilities are so severe it’s undebatable, you’re going to spend some time getting your due. We’re talking third world medicine at VAMCs.

Each and every VA Secretary we- you and I- have litigated under since 1989 seems to feel he has to defend the VA’s purse strings. At least that’s the way it seems. Some feel there aren’t many Appeals that moved the needle since the inception of the Court. I strongly disagree. From just the limited standpoint of SMC, every case a Secretary has argued has been a lost cause. In the course of the last thirty six years, we’ve made tremendous strides in how VA views our  evidence… or doesn’t. The gomers at the OGC are the impediment. They’ll defend an adversarial presumption of soundness decision at the drop of a hat and lose every time.

However, with the advent of VBMS, finding error has never been easier. What’s more, with AI and Optical Scan Resolution (OCR), discovering it is a snap. Codicil Number 1 to that is to know what you’re looking for. Codicil Number 2 is the presumption you’re wise to the ways of VA and have access to VBMS. Otherwise, you might as well be asking your auto mechanic what he thinks you’re chances are on getting 70 for PTSD. “Well, dude. I looked it up in the Chilton’s Guide for ’62 Ramblers and I’d say you gotta shot at it.”

As for Secretary Collins, I firmly believe he wants the best for us all. I’m also aware that he takes orders from on high. He is also limited by what Congress permits. With the demise of Chevron/Auer deference, our odds went astronomically higher. The major impediment now is an outdated How-to-Rate Manual. Face it. The M 21 is woefully deficient either in the way it’s interpreted or how it’s applied. Secretary Collins has the ability to fix that. Innumerable Secretaries who preceded him haven’t even attempted it. In spite of the clear M 21 mandate of “If…, then…, we still see VA make world class bonehead decisions.

The advent of the AMA should, by rights, have cured all this insanity but only made it worse.  Either we used the wrong form to file or we forgot to ask for a Williams Waiver. Filing for anything requires a Sherpa but it was all supposed to be so much easier…. Now we have illogical denials for a&a based on some nebulous denial logic followed by

Favorable Findings:

 You need Aid and Attendance of another for your disabilities.

Your efolder is rife with proof of service in Vietnam but you get denied for SC for Parkie’s because… your service records failed to show service on, or in the territorial waters of the Republic of Vietnam. Two years and some change later, the BVA contradicts that and grants. Your surviving spouse gets the low ball treatment on the accrued claim and it begins anew with another Appeal. Newsflash. This ain’t no way to run a railroad. Yet it’s been that way since the War of 1812.

In conclusion, I see one thing no one else sees. In government, they come up with some new regulation or benefit. Take the PACT Act. When Congress passed that abortion, VA promptly hired about 80,000 more employees-some of them Vets- to speed up the process. The PACT wave has swept through the system and is now manageable.  But did VA say thanks and give them all an attaboy and a pink slip? Oh hell no. They want to keep them all on even if it means paying them $60 K a year + bennies to arrange paperclips all facing the same way and keeping the pencils sharpened. Guess who suffers? Yep. You the Vet because the budget is going to force them to short sheet the Vet to pay the paperclip boys and girls.

Now, let’s carry that over to the VAMCs. Instead of hiring a shit ton of psychiatrists, psychologists, MDs and Nurses of all flavors, they have a top-heavy cadre of bedpan changers, patient advocates and God only knows who else struggling to look busy. The VA cops all attended the Third Reich’s SS Basic Training classes and are totally unsupervised. We’re spending untold sums on FTCA claims to settle that one alone.

VA also has Major Depressive Disorder/PTSD Workshops and pays untold numbers of unskilled Mental Health personnel to supervise Tuesday night Kumbaya circles where you relive your “experiences” and talk it out with your buddies. How cool is that? From personal experience, I can tell you the very last thing any Combat Vet wants to relive is what got him into this predicament. They should be teaching Vets how to suppress these thoughts and pass the Thorazine please. These Vets need psychologists, not bedpan changers cum pseudo psychologists. Don’t get me started on Tennessee VAMC employee Group orgies to explore your sexuality.

Frankly, politics should never be a part of this business. VAMC employees are there to help you. By rights, they should be hired based on their capabilities to do the job. Far  too often, it appears obvious they have “connections” via a relative or friend that ensures hiring. What probably bugged me most during  my own brief four-year experience with VA medical was the holier-than-thou attitude and indifference of many frontline “greeters”. I’ve had them continue to gaze at their cell phones texting for minutes while I stood before them waiting. They knew I was there. They could also see the line behind me but it didn’t faze them one bit.

I’ve listened to hundreds of Vets who are tickled pink just to get VA medical- even if it entails waiting six months for a CT or an MRI. How many times did I schedule an appointment for 0745 due to my incontinence and then sit in the waiting room for several hours for my name to be called. I’m sure somewhere across the VA’s fruited plains there are VAMCs where doctors and nurses are more plentiful than the grass on the lawn out front. I’m sure they all run right on time, too. It’s just that I’ve never seen it.

In closing, I’d ask all of you Veterans to give the FNG some slack while he feels his way into this job. If it took you two hours to get in to see the doctor (or PA-C) before Secretary Collins took the oath, don’t expect it to get better soon. They’ve had decades to fix it and they haven’t. That tells me that no matter how many bodies you hire, the service is not going to improve unless you change the general attitude, the lassitude and the utter indifference to our plight.