During the 2008 election, Barack Obama courted veterans as a voting bloc. We've documented 14 campaign promises Obama made to them, from putting more money into U.S. Veterans Affairs to expanding housing vouchers for homeless veterans.
One such pledge was to reduce the benefits claims backlog.
The Veterans Benefits Administration, one of three branches of Veterans Affairs, reviews and grants requests for veterans to receive financial compensation, home loans, college tuition assistance and more through the federal government.
In a campaign document outlining his positions on veterans issues, Obama said he would reduce the backlog by hiring more staff to process benefits requests; he also pledged to convene the nation's veterans groups, employees and managers to improve the training those claims processors receive.
The process of reviewing claims has been the subject of repeated government oversight reports, which inevitably cite long lag times and avoidable errors in rating claims. (Beyond deciding whether a veteran qualifies for a benefit, the processor must assign a rating that determines how big the benefit would be.)
The backlog refers to benefit requests that go unaddressed by a government office within 125 days. Although the Veterans Benefits Administration oversees an array of benefits, the backlog is shorthand for the bureaucratic bottleneck of claims for disability compensation, pensions and compensation for surviving spouses or children of veterans who die because of their military service.
The backlog nearly doubled from roughly 36 percent in summer 2010 to 65 percent in June 2012. In that sense, Obama has failed. The backlog grew after he took office.
Some context though: In the past four years, Veterans Affairs hired more than 2,500 new staff to rate claims and shortened the average time to process a claim by 16 percent since 2008. The backlog worsened because the expanded staff didn't keep pace with increased demand. A decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, new benefits made available to veterans and more medical conditions per veteran have resulted a dramatic increase in claims. The number of claims jumped from 888,000 in 2008 to 1.4 million in 2011.
Obama also promised improved training for staff that review claims. We found instances in 2010 and 2011 when the Veterans Benefits Administration revised its training program. Staff who received the new training seem to work quicker — a July report from the administration said students of the new program finished more claims per day — and with better accuracy — compared with students of the older training model.
We did not find evidence of Obama convening a formal summit with the leaders of veterans groups to establish a new training and management model. However, the Veterans for Foreign Wars informed us that monthly meetings between the executive directors of six national veterans groups do occur, as do regular meetings between those groups and the under secretary for benefits at Veterans Affairs.
The progress on this promise is a mixed bag. Although he made modest improvements, he failed to keep up with the surge of applications. On the most important measurement of this promise — the claims backlog — things are worse. We rate this a Promise Broken.