Good afternoon, committee members. It's a pleasure to be with you this afternoon. I'm going to give you a quick run-through of the five benefit programs administered by the veterans benefits administration.
Let me start by telling you that we have 57 regional offices around the country involved in providing these benefits to our 24 million veterans.
I'm going to start with the largest of our benefit programs, which is our compensation and pension program. That program has five major elements, the largest of which is the disability compensation program. Veterans who incur injury in military service, or have an injury or illness that was aggravated by military service, can apply for disability compensation. The veteran makes his or her contentions. The VA then gets involved in a very protracted process of developing medical information and other evidence to try to support the veteran's contentions.
If we are able to do so, then we award disability compensation. That compensation amount is based on the severity of the injury, and it ranges from 10% up to 100%. So a veteran who is approved for 10% disability compensation would receive $117 a month. A veteran at the 100% level would receive $2,527 per month. There is a possibility for veterans with more traumatic injuries to go to as high as $7,500.
We also have a disability pension program. This program is designed to assist veterans who have a total and permanent disability, but a disability that is not in any way related to their military service. The veterans who qualify for this must have served during a wartime period. This is a means-tested program, and we check all of a veteran's countable income in an effort to determine whether or not he or she deserves a payment under this benefit.
We then have another program that we call the dependency and indemnity compensation program, which is designed to provide monetary assistance to the survivors of a veteran who has died as a result of his or her service-connected disability. This is both for the spouse any minor children the service member may have had, and we can pay up to $1,091 a month under this program.
The fourth program is yet another pension program. This we call our death pension, which is designed to provide pension payments to the survivors of a veteran who served during a wartime period. This, like the other pension programs, is means-tested, so we look very closely at the level of income the veteran had before we make a determination.
Last year we paid disability compensation to 2.84 million veterans. We paid out $27 billion. We had 323,000 veterans in receipt of pensions and we paid almost $3 billion to those veterans.
The second benefit program that I want to talk about is our education program. Back in 1944, Congress provided us with the GI Bill, which began the education program for veterans.
Presently we have four major programs that Congress has provided for us. Each of these programs has been designed to serve a particular segment of the veterans population, based on the type of military service they had.
The largest of these programs is what we call the Montgomery GI Bill for active duty. This means that active duty service members who have served at least three years in the military and have contributed $1,200 of their own money can become vested in this program, and they can then receive 36 months of educational benefits, most of which are generally used to seek a four-year college degree.
We have a second program, the Montgomery GI Bill for the selected reserve. This is designed for those service members or veterans whose only military service was either in a reserve component of our military or the National Guard. This program does not pay as much as the active duty program, but it does pay $317 a month while that veteran is in school.
The third program is our reserve education assistance program. This is the newest of our programs, and it was designed to address the increasing incidence of our service members being called up, either from the reserves or the National Guard, to serve on active duty, either in Iraq or Afghanistan. This program allows these veterans to qualify for some amount of money very similar to what those on active duty would normally receive.
The final education program is designed to provide educational assistance to the survivors of a veteran who died as a result of a service-connected disability, or for the minor children and spouse of a veteran who was 100% service-connected disabled.
Since 1944 we have served 21 million veterans under the education program. This past year we had over half a million veterans receiving benefits and we paid out $3 billion for education.
The third benefit program is our vocational rehabilitation and employment program. This program is designed to allow disabled veterans who have an employment handicap to undergo training that the VA pays for to receive rehabilitation counselling provided by VA, with the ultimate goal of helping that disabled veteran find suitable employment. In essence, this is an employment program.
We recognize that there are a number of veterans whose disabilities are so serious they cannot reasonably be expected to qualify for employment, so we're able to provide services to them under this rehab program to help them learn to live independently.
Last year we served 89,000 veterans under this program, and we paid out $802 million.
The next program is our home loan guarantee program. This program has been with us since 1944. It is designed to allow veterans to purchase a home without the need to make a down payment. The program is structured so that the loans are actually made by private lending institutions, and VA provides a guarantee that can be as high as $104,250. That level of guarantee would allow a veteran to obtain a no-down-payment VA loan of up to $417,000. We've made a little over 18 million loans, and at present we have guarantees outstanding amounting to $209 billion.
The final program that I will talk about is the VA insurance program. The VA has a large insurance program. If it were in the private sector in the United States, it would be the fifth-largest life insurance program in our country. There are five insurance programs that we administer in VA.
The most popular and probably the best known is the service members' group life insurance. This is the insurance that those on active duty military service can take advantage of. In the event of their death, it would pay their beneficiaries up to $400,000.
When service members get out of military service they can take advantage of the second program that we administer, which is the veterans' group life insurance. This enables them to make an easy transition from one insurance program for members in active duty to an insurance program for veterans.
The newest of our insurance programs, the third one that I will talk about, is our traumatic service members' group life insurance. Our Congress gave us the authority to administer this program in 2005. The purpose of this program is to provide financial assistance to service members who have been seriously injured in combat, as well as their families, in a effort to help them meet their financial needs during the long period of recovery. So this is not technically a life insurance program, simply an insurance program that provides assistance to the veteran who is still living.
The fourth program that we administer is for veterans who have a service-connected disability. It's difficult to get insurance in the private sector if you're disabled, so the VA steps in and provides this insurance for those individuals.
Finally, we have a fifth program that is designed to provide insurance for seriously injured members of the military and the veteran community who have received a grant from the VA to build an accessible home that would be suitable for wheelchair use. In the event of that veteran's death, this insurance program would pay down the mortgage that they obtained in order to buy or build a home.
Members of the committee, that's a very quick run-through on some of the benefits in the veterans benefits administration.
At the appropriate time, I will be happy to take any questions that you might have.