Vets panel chairman: protect benefits, cut fat
By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Mar 2, 2011 5:16:00 EST
The new Republican chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee pledged Tuesday to protect benefits and services for veterans. But Rep. Jeff Miller, a five-term congressman representing a Florida Panhandle congressional district that includes Naval Air Station Pensacola and Eglin Air Force Base, said that’s not the same as promising not to cut the Veterans Affairs Department budget.
In an interview, Miller pledged that certain things are not on the table. “It is not my intent to cut benefits,” he said, but added: “There is fat in the VA budget. I am tasked with trying to find it.”
Miller said he has asked military and veterans groups to help him find places where VA is wasting money, but so far has not heard specifics.
It remains uncertain if cuts identified by Miller could be shifted to other veterans programs or would be eliminated from the VA budget in the name of deficit reduction.
Miller said he hopes to work with veterans groups to come up with a plan for reducing the ever-growing backlog of pending disability claims. “Throwing money and bodies at it, obviously, is not solving the problem,” he said. “I don’t think any one institution has the answer, but collectively, we have to solve the problem. There are too many disabled veterans out there caught in the system. We have people who are in need of their compensation, and two years of waiting may be too long.”
VA officials have been promising that the claims backlog will begin dropping in 2012 but, for the moment, the problem seems to be getting worse. About 787,500 claims are pending today, 23,000 more than at the start of 2011, according to the VA’s Feb. 28 workload report.
Over 361,000 of those claims have been pending for more than 125 days — 61,000 more long-delayed claims than were pending at the start of the year.