Roger That: VA warns that budget shortfall will close clinics, delay appointments

Federal lawmakers are accusing Veterans Affairs Department officials of creating and concealing an almost $3 billion budget hole that threatens health care for millions.

In response, VA officials are warning that without a funding shift by Aug. 1, the department will begin closing clinics, canceling private-care appointments and furloughing staff due to a shortage of usable funds in the fiscal 2015 budget, according to Military Times.

The VA proposes moving about $3 billion from the new Choice Card program approved by Congress last summer to cover shortfalls in other, separately funded private-care programs — the reason for the shortfall.

On Wednesday, VA Secretary Bob McDonald touted that plan to members of the House Veterans Affairs Committee as a commonsense move that must be completed quickly.

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The Defense Department on Thursday came out squarely against giving weapons to every service member on a domestic military installation despite a growing clamor in Congress for such a step in the wake of the Tennessee shooting rampage, according to a story Thursday by the McClatchy Newspapers Washington, D.C. bureau.

Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said Defense Secretary Ash Carter is awaiting recommendations from the five military services on fortifying their recruiting centers and domestic bases following the July 15 assault that left six people dead – four Marines, a Navy corpsman and the shooter, Kuwait-born Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez – at a naval reserve center in Chattanooga.

“We do not support arming all military personnel for a variety of reasons,” Davis told reporters at the Pentagon. “(There are) safety concerns, the prohibitive cost for use-of-force and weapons training, qualification costs as well as compliance with multiple weapons-training laws.”

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The Air Force plans to announce a $70 billion contract award for the new stealthy long-range bomber aircraft in September. The Air Force must choose between giving Lockheed Martin — which is doing the design work for the Boeing-Lockheed team — almost all of the country’s advanced stealth design work. Or it could maintain the status quo, in which the entire stealth bomber fleet is made by Northrop Grumman, according to the blog BreakingDefense.

The contract award for the aircraft was initially expected to arrive earlier this summer. In fact, this new timeline comes on the heels of a series of delays for the award. The Pentagon plans to order about 100 of the new planes at a cost of $550 million apiece, plus another $20 billion for research and development.

The new Long Range Strike Bomber, or LRS-B, is slated to fly alongside and ultimately replace the existing B-2 bomber.

Senior Air Force officials have said that taking extra time at the front end of the process to make sure the selection is the right one will ultimately save much more time and money throughout the longer-term acquisition process. The service plans to field the new bomber by the mid-2020s.

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Psychological surveys suggest that some 271,000 veterans of the Vietnam War may still have full post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. And for many vets, the PTSD symptoms are only getting worse with time, according to a story in Smithsonian Magazine.

About 11 percent of Vietnam veterans, over a 40-year period, continue to suffer from clinically important PTSD symptoms, either having the full diagnosis or very strong features of the diagnosis that interfere with function, says study author Charles Marmar, director of The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Veterans Center at the NYU Langone Medical Center.

The latest study follows up on participants in the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study conducted in the 1980s. According to Marmar, who co-authored the original report, the work serves a dual purpose in assessing the long-term affects of wartime trauma: “We owe it to the Vietnam generation, it's an amazing sacrifice that they made," he says. “But it’s also the path ahead for the Iraq and Afghanistan generation, and we have to do better than we did for Vietnam.”

This story was originally published July 23, 2015 at 10:56 AM with the headline "Roger That: VA warns that budget shortfall will close clinics, delay appointments."