Oversight: Path of Purpose: Restoring the VA VR&E Program to Effectively Serve Veterans
House Veterans' Affairs Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity
2025-07-16
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Source: Congress.gov
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The subcommittee will come to order. I want to thank everyone for being here today to discuss the Veterans Readiness and Employment Program, or VRNE. The purpose of this program is to assist veterans and service members who have service-connected disabilities with on-the-job training, education, and skills they need in order to obtain meaningful employment to live full, independent lives. When this program is appropriately administered, VRNE is more than just a benefits program. It's also a vital first step for disabled veterans to become more financially independent and give back to their community and achieve their own American dream. I used VRNE to go to law school at the age of 50, and it led me to Congress, so maybe we should cancel this program. That's a joke. Seriously, this job, right? Yeah, he got it. He's the only guy that got it. So unfortunately, VRNE has been at a crossroads for several years, and unfortunately, it's been abused by a lot of folks. And I'm very thankful that over this last year, our team has been able to investigate some of these potential fraud, waste, and abuse cases. And it includes site visits to Detroit, Muskogee, Buffalo, Baltimore, and just last week, the folks got back from San Diego. And what they found is truly disturbing. We're now seeing an unprecedented increase in wait times and an increased burden on counselors with higher caseloads. There's got to be a better balance of priorities in the program to make sure that veterans get what they need, while also ensuring that the VA is a responsible steward of the taxpayers investment. And I found that this is a responsibility that VA has a profound and constant inability to perform the oversight function. But I'm also gonna point the finger this way. We have an oversight responsibility. You have an oversight responsibility. And I think both sides of this fence have not been meeting that. Finally, my staff has also seen some data that veterans have been in this program for over 20 years.
And many veterans are using more than $250,000 in benefit payments. One veteran in Boston spent over $350,000 in 18 months. Another veteran in Los Angeles has spent $895,000 in six years and is still in rehab to employment phase of the program. If anyone's concerned about funding for veterans, they need to be concerned about what's going on in this program also. In cases like this, are a direct result of VA granting entitlement extensions past the 48-month limit mandated by law for VR&E recipients, while over 99% of the time are not doing their due diligence on the program. In fact, the VA committee last month found out that since fiscal year 2024, 62,355 extensions were approved, while just 59 requests for extensions were denied. And that's statistically impossible for that to be a functioning number. Uh, it's just absurd. I'm looking forward to hearing from the V about the real life examples that constitute granting a waiver on paper. Bureaucrats may just be completing a check in the box exercise instead of completing a thorough review. Additionally, we heard numerous concerns about long wait times. The current wait time for a veteran to be seen by a counseling in San Diego, Oakland and Albuquerque is over a hundred days. And 40% of regional offices take over 60 days for a veteran to meet a counselor for an initial evaluation above the VA goals of a 60 day maximum wait time. A month is too long making a veteran put their lives on hold for nearly a year before even being seen by a counselor is ridiculous and has a negative impact on not only their lives but their entire families. And finally, we found that 45% of participants within the VR&E program have successfully completed the program and subsequently reentered it. That means that nearly half of the VR&E participants complete a program successfully only to return to the program. I understand the need for the veteran whose disability worsens or reenters the program with the goal of becoming gainfully employed again.
However, 45% of individuals using a jobs program more than once is a failure. This will not stand on my watch any longer. We've also heard from VRNE Executive Director himself that many veterans are retiring from their jobs and applying for VRNE to receive a substance allowance to supplement their income until they're able to receive retirement benefits and Social Security. So in essence, some people are retiring from a job and then entering this program for a period of time to carry them into the age when they're eligible for Social Security. That's not what this program was designed for. The VA knows that there's abuse in this program, yet again, I hear, until I hear otherwise, VA is not working to fix the holes in the system, period. And we can't ignore this because we can't let this program fail. Finally, I recognize VR&E's latest IT project, the Readiness Employment System, or RES, was launched as a pilot in 2024, and earlier reports showed that the program has been received very well. I know that VA states they're finally on the right path with the new case management system.
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