A new report from an internal government watchdog has confirmed that a blunder by former President Joe Biden and his administration caused severe issues with the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) budget.
According to JustTheNews, a “dramatic” attempt by Biden to bail out the VA last year was caused by “bureaucratic bungling.”
The blunder was exposed in a bombshell report released by the VA’s inspector general.
The screw-up that nearly wrecked the important government agency was caused after Congress appropriated money that the agency didn’t need.
The money, which was granted in the form of emergency requests near the end of Biden’s term, was left unspent thanks to bureaucratic red tape and errors, the report noted.
The inspector general published the eye-raising report.
The report details how the VA was on the brink of a monetary crisis because of the situation created by the Biden administration.
The outlet noted:
“The Biden administration faced several self-inflicted accounting problems at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on the eve of the new admin, leading to emergency spending requests, one of which exceeded actual needs and raising the ire of Congress.”
It was also noted that “a $2.9 billion supplemental request went unused because the agency failed to account for ‘prior-year recoveries’ in its budget planning.
Had those shortcomings been discovered in time, as they should have been, the VA would likely not have experienced the crisis it was subject to under the Biden administration.
“Had the realized prior-year recoveries been included in the calculations throughout the year, the monthly funding status reports would have shown a reduced risk of a shortfall by the end of the fiscal year,” the IG concluded in its report.
JustTheNews added:
“House Republicans passed a supplemental funding bill to meet the agency’s request, but required the then-VA Secretary Denis McDonough to review the agency’s accounting practices to prevent unprojected shortfalls from recurring.”
The House Committee on Veterans Affairs was presumably stunned to learn that the agency did not need the funds.
This was admitted to the committee by the VA in a hearing on the topic.
VA Secretary Doug Collins described the situation as a type of “extortion” right before the government was on the verge of shutting down.
Collins promised that, under his leadership, that won’t happen.
“It’s just a very, a department that is so bureaucratically bogged down that it has trouble doing its main mission, and that is taking care of veterans, and that’s why we’re actually working very hard to streamline processes, to get better help in place, and to have budgets and numbers that we can be accurate,” Collins said.
Hopefully, the Trump administration will get the VA situation under control and ultimately make it more accessible and a better tool for our deserving veterans.
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