Rather than being a bright spot of honoring military service, the VA is an even worse than normal illustration of the federal government’s modus operandi.
We’re used to hearing about government programs with ballooning budgets, especially ones that care for the elderly. We have more elderly people than in the past, so it makes sense that costs for programs such as Medicare would increase over time, even if they increase much too fast.
But as Rebecca Burgess points out in her piece for the latest print issue of National Review, the Department of Veterans Affairs is different. Its budget has increased at an astonishing rate, and it is charged with the care of a shrinking population.
The number of veterans in the U.S. has declined over time. No U.S. wars have involved so many servicemen as World War II, and as the generation who served in that war dies, the total number of veterans has shrunk.
The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that the total veteran population declined by 26.3 percent between 2000 and 2020. And it projects that the veteran population will continue to decline each year. It estimates there are 17.9 million veterans this year and will be 11.9 million in 2050.
Yet the budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs has soared. In fiscal year 2001, the department’s budget was $49 billion. The department’s budget request for fiscal year 2025 is for $369 billion. (For perspective, the Department of State’s budget is $58 billion.) That would be a 653 percent increase to the VA budget so far this century. That’s the fastest increase of any federal department in that time span.
Over half of the department’s budget is mandatory spending, meaning that Congress does not vote on it each year, and it increases on autopilot. A large and growing proportion of the total federal budget is consumed by mandatory spending and interest payments, which are outside the ordinary budgeting process.
In 2001, the Department of Veterans Affairs had 207,000 employees. In 2023, it had 437,000. The department’s workforce has more than doubled this century while its budget has more than sextupled and the population it exists to serve has declined.
About four-fifths of the VA workforce is unionized. American Federation of Government Employees national president Everett Kelley called the agreement his union has with the VA “the very best union contract in the entire federal government” in 2023. “At [the Veterans Health Administration], fiscal 2022 broke all hiring records: 48,500 new clinical and administrative staff, 5,000 more than were hired in 2021,” Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough told Government Executive. “And now in [fiscal 2023], we’re at the fastest workforce growth in 15 years. . . . We’ve done all this together—AFGE and VA working together, listening to each other.” This is no doubt part of President Biden’s promise to lead the most pro-union administration in American history.
Maybe the VA was underfunded before and needed more money and workers to better serve veterans. Burgess points out that the VA has been given additional tasks by several new laws, which would be expected to grow costs. But the sheer rates of increase in spending and employees paired with the decline in the number of veterans speaks to yet another case of bureaucracy growing out of control — and a warning of what health care provided by the federal government looks like in practice.
We know that despite these massive increases, results for veterans have not been good. Burgess writes, “Since 2001, the level of veteran suicides has always fluctuated within a range of 800, meaning that in 20 years there has essentially been no change. And despite the ever-increasing funding meant to reduce veteran homelessness, that also has recently risen.” She also notes, “Only 0.1 percent of veterans receiving disability benefits for mental disorders report an improvement in their condition and have their benefits accordingly reduced over time.”
Burgess describes how veterans face perverse incentives to convince VA evaluators that they are disabled. “The VA rates disability in increments of ten percentage points to designate the severity of a particular health problem and its impact on the veteran’s ability to work and perform daily activities; each problem is rated separately, and the separate ratings are added up,” she writes. A higher rating commands higher benefits, and a greater number of conditions have been added to the list of disabilities eligible for benefits.
The explosion in benefits payments has led to more veterans leaving the workforce. “Whereas in the 1990s American veterans were more likely than nonveterans to be in the labor force, by 2013 only three-quarters of male veterans aged 18 to 64 were in the workforce, compared with four-fifths of nonveterans of the same ages,” Burgess writes. “Decades of corresponding research proves that participation in the workforce is the main determinant of veterans’ successful transition to civilian life.” Federal policy has created incentives to not work, making that transition more difficult.
The federal government owes veterans a lot for their service to the country. One of the things it should owe them is honest and competent administration of their care and benefits. Spending ever-increasing sums of money for a bloated unionized workforce to provide substandard services to a shrinking veteran population is not what veterans deserve. Rather than being a bright spot of honoring service to the country, the VA is an even worse than normal illustration of the federal government’s modus operandi.