As Jim said, we have a situation of successive governments coming in and immediately running to the bureaucrats. I use the word “bureaucrats” in not the most pleasant of meanings, the definition of “bureaucrat” being someone who puts process over people. Unfortunately, what we have in Veterans Affairs, by their own admission, their own research, is a department of 3,000 employees, fo whom just over 100 had military service.
On top of that, how many of those bureaucrats have actually had any experience whatsoever in disability or rehabilitation? How many program managers or policy advisers have actually worked in those fields to understand what they are creating?
They are creating programs for fiscal convenience and not for addressing the needs of veterans. That's why we see a continual battle over successive governments. The only way we're going to do that is if we have a massive cultural change at Veterans Affairs such that we employ expertise, we employ veterans, and we actually go to the veterans in need and ask them to design a program in concert with government.