We have to do better. There's no question about it. Wait times are bigger. What's interesting, though, is that the number of actual veterans being processed is bigger as well. As I said in my opening statement, we've seen a 32% increase since 2015 in applications, and 60% of those, very interestingly, are for the first time. We know that many of these are veterans who, frankly, had given up on the system. They had given up on a culture that had consistently said no to them. Now it's a culture that more consistently says yes.
We have a large number of people who have come on board looking for services. As the general keeps reminding me, that is a good thing, and indeed it is, because it means that more people are putting up their hands and asking for help. The $42 million we got in the last budget is meant to help us play catch-up.
One of the significant problems we have—we are literally hiring people as fast as we possibly can through the system we have in the federal government—is finding the qualified people. It's easy to lose them. It's easy to fire them. It is far harder to gain them back. A lot of these people are in demand. They're bilingual and they have very specific training for the task. Hiring them back has taken more time than we had hoped.