I tried to diary this yesterday and I ended up making a mess out of the diary and it would not let me edit it to where it was readable so I added the link here where I had it clearly legible and all the links worked
http://www.outsidethebeltway.org/...
I apologize to all the readers and hopefully by doing it in word and copying and pasting it to the diary it will work better. Please forgive me, but this is a very important subject and shows how the Republicans continue to attempt to lie their way out of messes, instead of just saying, here it is we are sorry. They try and mitigate it and lay the blame elsewhere. Something here smells and it is not just an employee taking some work home he wasn't supposed to.
This data is from the Department of Justice Web Site, a list of frequently asked questions concerning the data loss by the Veteran Affairs Department on May 3rd when the data was stolen from the VA employee's home.
http://www.firstgov.gov/...
What the questions do not answer is why the employee had been taking this work home for the past few years and what type of data project was he working on in his off duty hours, that he could not do while at work? Most employee's are hourly paid government workers, unlike the Assistant Secretary who resigned who was a republican political appointee, "another "heck of a job Brownie" types. Here is his biography from White House Council on Aging:
http://www.whcoa.gov/...
The White House 2005 Conference on Aging gave Mr. McLendon a special place on the President's web sites. The description below would indicate that Mr. McLendon is an "insider" neoconservative Republican who has climbed from agency to agency without any real expertise or accomplishment. He appears to be another "heckava job, Brownie" crony who was intimately involved in ways to "trim" rightful veterans' benefits.
Mr. McLendon is the founder of McLendon & Associates, a management consulting and public policy firm that provides a range of services to a diverse portfolio of state and local government, Federal agency, and private sector clients engaged in the health services, long term care, disability, aging and social service delivery, and information technology arenas. Mr. McLendon has also worked extensively in the international environment for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Defense on a number of social service, pension and unemployment, resource and financial management, and strategic planning reform projects. Mr. McLendon has also served as a consultant and advisor for the National Academy of Public Administration, Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia, the Institute for Defense Analyses, and other organizations.
In December 2003, Mr. McLendon was appointed as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in the Department of Veterans Affairs. In this position, Mr. McLendon exercises broad responsibilities including policy analysis of disability, long term care, the aging veteran population, and service delivery strategies.
Mr. McLendon was to be the featured VA speaker for Memorial Day in Wisconsin as announced on May 2, 2006. See: http://dva.state.wi.us/...
A press release from Rep Steve Buyer (R-IN) gives even more insight into Mr. McLendon's VA concerns. See: http://veterans.house.gov/... where the testimony was about "ways to achieve closer integration between the Department's VR&E program and the Department of Labor's Veterans Employment and Training Service". That translates into "vets get make-work jobs, not benefits."
Mr. McLendon's position in the VA "organization is found at http://www1.va.gov/... and at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/... .
A 2004 VA study in which Mr. McLendon was involved as a task force member was entitled "VA Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment Task Force". Page 170 (numbered page 162) says it all: "Twenty-first Century views of disabilities have shifted from the negative aspects of disabilities to a focus on the abilities of persons with disabilities with a rapid return-to-work strategy" or more accurately "vets get make-work jobs, not benefits." See http://www1.va.gov/...
A Google search of "Michael H. McLendon" shows that he is a charter sponsor of the Air Force Memorial Foundation with a rank of Lieuntenant Colonel. See: http://www.airforcememorial.org/... . Members of his family may also be listed as sponsors.
Thanks to the Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/... we know the individual who had the hard drive stolen from his home with data about approximately 19 to 26 million veterans was a 60 year old GS-14 working as an IT specialist at VA. It is quite odd that McLendon was forced to resign before the IT specialist who had illegal possession of the data outside of the VA. Whoever heard of a 60 year old, GS-14 IT specialist? This GS-14 is probably playing some powerful cards on some powerful VA personalities.
Now why would a career government employee who was just a few years away from retirement risk his entire life's work on an illegal work at home project? Who was the beneficiary of his off duty computations, and what were they?
We can see what the Political appointee was doing, he was doing what he was sent there for, to reduce the cost to the federal government of disabled veterans by returning them to the work force in some manner, low paying positions or not, it did not matter, just get them off the unemplyable roles and back into the employable status.
This appears to go hand in hand with Senator Larry Craig's mis-understanding of the two terms unemployed and unemployable. He refuses to comprehend that some veterans just are not employable due to their service related problems, i.e PTSD veterans rated 70% TDIU are considered unemployable due to theiur inability to meet deadlines under stress, inability to work well with others, irritability to customers and co-workers, hypervigilance, etc, conditions which tend to make them career employee's anywhere. They have usually been fired from a long list of positions, over the years.
Yes, there are unemployed veterans who can and do make use of the Vocational Rehabilitation training available thru the VA's Voc-Rehab program, schooling, job training, resume assistance and job placement assistance.
Many veterans like myself would love to return to work, but the physical and mental problems I suffer from make that an impossibility, if I could physically return to work, I doubt if the Postal Service would want me back due to the PTSD factors. I use to make 70,000 a year with overtime, I am on Social Security Disability due to cardiovascular problems that are not repairable, I am on the seven year review plan, which means that Social Security feels that my medical condition will not improve, and the only medical problem they are aware of is heart related.
So many assumptions of the committee's are misguided, no matter how well intentioned. Yes, people need to feel useful, but will I feel more useful to my family by receiving the veteran benefits I earned thru my disability at the rate of 2393 a month, or at a minimum wage paying job earning 840.00 dollars a month? I don't need to be a math genius to figure that one out, can the VA find a way to make me whole, so that I can return to the job I was making 70,000 a year at before I became injured due to service related problems? No, then I suggest you leave the system the way it is designed to compensate the veterans for their loss of earning potential, compensation for being injured, loss of a higher paid retirement if they had been able to be employed until 67 or 70 years of age.
Are there problems in the VA Compensation program, yes, of course there is, awarding a man 79 years of age TDIU because he is unemployable is ludicrous, should the commission decide that no one over the age of 62 will be granted TDIU status, most veterans and their advocates would understand that position.
The corrections to the program, need to be that corrections, not pure butchery, slash and burn, like President Reagan did in the 1980's, it took over ten years for mentally challeneged to get their SSI and benefits straightened out.
At a time when the republican party is making tax cuts the the ultra rich, how can the republican party, even seriously consider cutting disabled veterans benefits? This is the "Compasionate Conservatism" that you portrayed in the 2004 election?
This data loss appears to not have just been the veterans discharged since 1975 as Attorney General Gonzalez and Secretary Nicholson portrayed at the press conference and at the hearings in Congress and the Senate.
According to the 2000 American census of the 208.1 million Americans over age 18, that 26.4 million were veterans, this included veterans from WW1, WW2, Korean War, Vietnam, the Cold War era (peacetime) up to the year 1999. This would indicate that in reality the VA lost the data on every living veteran in America, a lot more damaging than the Federal Government has portrayed so far, in it's statements, why the downplaying of the full extent of the breach? http://www.census.gov/...
What was the analyst working on when the data was stolen?