VA smothered in congressional love

The panting and sudden movement woke me out of a sound sleep. I knew that sound. Suddenly, I felt hot breath on my face and a wet nudge on my neck.

A neighbor’s dog — a lively, 90-pound mutt whose name ought to be Spot — had bounded upstairs and onto the bed, like he owned the place. He’d escaped his own fenced yard, and my wife found him literally barking up a tree in our front yard. Sound sleepers, no one had answered their door or telephone. So we took in Toby, who spent the night with us.

More than spent the night — he took over the bed, squirming in close and generally showing love for not having had to spend the night outside with the squirrels and deer.

Toby was to us as the House Veterans Affairs Committee was to the Veterans Affairs Department yesterday.

The committee hugged VA, showering it with love. Secretary David Shulkin might be wiping his cheek and saying to himself, “Down boy!”

Specifically, the committee approved no less than 11 bills yesterday.  They would:

• End the 15-year deadline for veterans to use their GI Bill education benefits. The committee nicknames this one the “Forever GI” bill.
• Put into law the benefit of mental health hotlines and other services for veterans with other than honorable discharges with combat experience.
• Kick up the status of VA podiatrists with more pay and promotion opportunities.
• Push the General Services Administration to get more veteran-owned companies onto its strategic sourcing initiative contracts.
• Codify and make permanent VA’s test program for providing child care for veterans getting heavy care at a VA hospital.
• Require VA to establish a physician assistants training and hiring program for veterans.
• Help military married couples get around tax rules related to where they live.
• Extract yearly, detailed reports to Congress covering which VA executives got performance bonuses.
• Direct VA procurement staff to tighten up how they calculate annual savings from competitive buys.
• Tighten up rules against big-company use of veteran-owned businesses simply for passing through the work — but retaining the profits.
• Have the VA secretary personally approve senior executive relocations and report annually on them to Congress.

You might say the committee is helping VA head to toe.

I guess most of it is decent legislation, accomplished in a mostly bipartisan manner. It shows what Congress is capable of. These bills still need clearance by the full House, and the Senate must match the work before any of it becomes law. Chances are good it will happen.

The bills also reflect the basic characteristic of Congress. It’s relatively efficient when dealing with discrete problems in a single agency. But the greater the scope the less effective it becomes. Thus the federal government operating budget, unsustainable entitlement costs, military strategy, health insurance policy, and tax policy linger or go haphazardly addressed year after year.

It’s as if, in VA, Congress found a broken window. Legislatively, it’s sent in carpenters, glaziers, insulators, paint-and-caulkers, and decorators. But the building is on fire.

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