When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color. The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.
See this page in the PDF
Department of Veterans Affairs
approaches and technology tools that currently exist in the private sector could be employed to improve existing VBA activities.
This problem is most pronounced in the disability claims process, which needs more and better management attention focused on streamlining the procedures involved in processing claims and administering benefits. The VA must improve timeliness of claim adjudication and benefits delivery: Veterans want the VBA to provide timely responses to requests for benefits support, render empathetic customer service and understandable explanations of those benefits, and deliver those benefits without frustrating delays (weeks, not months).
• Identify performance targets for benefits, report publicly on actual performance each quarter, and use these metrics to drive consistent improvement.
• Develop anew pilot “Express 30” commitment for a veteran’s first fully developed disability compensation claim and organize the VBA to complete the first claim in 30 days.
• Hire more private companies to perform disability medical examinations. Delays in completing the examinations could be eliminated with more external capacity.
• Increase automation. Hiring additional staff to process claims is costly, is inflexible, and has yielded mixed results. Attempting to change laws and regulations simply to adjudicate claims would be a herculean effort given their complexity. The best way to provide benefits faster and more accurately is by using technology to perform most of the work. Technology currently exists in the private sector, but the VBA lacks the expertise to use it. This would be more of an organizational challenge than a technology hurdle.
• Reduce improper payment and fraud. About $500 million is improperly paid out each year. Better tools, training, and management could reduce this substantially, but rule changes at the departmental level would be needed.
Budget
The VA’s Schedule for Rating Disabilities (VASRD) has assigned disability ratings to a growing number of health conditions over time; some are tenuously related or wholly unrelated to military service. The further growth in presumptive service-connected medical conditions pursued by Congress and Veteran Service Organizations, begun with Agent Orange and most recently for Burn Pits/Airborne