House subcommittee wants VA to put more of a spotlight on its veteran employment program

Members of a House subcommittee tasked with ensuring more economic options for veterans leaving the military pressed Veterans Affairs Department officials on Friday to better highlight a program designed to provide education and training to obtain new careers. 

In a field hearing held at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, the chair and ranking member of the House Veterans Committee’s subcommittee on economic opportunity called for VA officials to find ways to better utilize and potentially expand the use of the Veteran Readiness and Employment program.

“I got a readout of the VA’s annual Military-Civilian Transition Summit and one thing that concerned me was that very little, at least as I understand, was discussed about the Veteran Readiness and Employment, or VR&E, program,” said ranking member Mike Levin, discussing a July event hosted by the VA’s Outreach, Transition and Economic Development office to improve service members’ transition experience to civilian life. 

“This has been an underutilized program for my five-plus years in the Congress, and I’ve been trying to figure out why that is and how we can improve. I think the role that the program plays with service members transitioning out of the military due to an illness or injury is incredibly important.”

VR&E serves service members and veterans with service-connected disabilities and employment barriers by providing them with resources like counseling, rehabilitation, job search, self-employment development, skills assessment, career guidance and other services. 

But making sure those veterans are aware of their eligibility for those services has been a concern of several members of Congress. Reps. Colin Allred, D-Texas, and Byron Donalds, R-Fla., introduced legislation in May that would require the VA to “regularly promote” the VR&E program and make information about it more publicly accessible to veterans. 

When asked by Levin whether the program was being utilized effectively at its current rate, VR&E executive director Nick Pamperin said that VR&E had record growth recently and was up more than 45% in applications and 38% in membership. 

“We’re at over 160,000 veterans within our program,” he said. “In my two-and-half years in this program, when I first came on board, we were hovering at 117,000 or 120,000, and I think as part of outreach, as part of the PACT Act, as part of all of the efforts that we’ve made, we’ve seen tremendous growth.”

But Levin pressed for more insight on how many veterans would be eligible for VR&E services overall, something that Pamperin said that he would have to track down since the program requires veterans to have both a service-connected disability and employment barriers to qualify before being seen by a VA counselor to approve them.

“What I’ve heard is it’s a lot, several hundred thousand that could potentially take advantage of that program,” said Levin. “It sounds like things are improving, but what else can you do differently? What creative ideas or suggestions do you have?”

Melissa Cohen, VA’s executive director for outreach, transition and economic development — overseeing the department’s Transition Assistance Program that helps service members shift to civilian life — said VA is taking steps like partnering with the Labor Department on off-base transition training, scheduling Solid Start program calls in advance to provide services to newly separated service members and using QR codes during TAP courses to schedule benefit advisor appointments.

However, one challenge VA is facing is being able to recruit enough counselors to be able to see veterans for their various in-demand assistance programs, including the VetSuccess on Campus program that provides on-campus benefits for veterans and qualified dependents and whose counselors are tasked with large regions.

“We unfortunately have been constrained by who we are allowed to hire for a VSOC,” said Pamperin. “Right now, due to our record growth, our first priority is to ensure that veterans see a counselor. We do have that legislative requirement, one counselor per 125 veterans. We recently added 342 [full-time employees] to the VR&E program this year alone just to maintain that ratio.”

He added that because VA is statutorily required to hire specialized masters-educated counselors, recruitment is often difficult and priority-directed to meet the growth within VR&E. 

Subcommittee chair Derrick Van Orden, R-Wisc., called the counselor information helpful feedback for Congress to act on, but called on VA to have more awareness of how many veterans could benefit from the VR&E program.

“You can’t tell me how much money you need for x amount of staff persons if you don’t know how many staff persons you need because you don’t know how many veterans need to be serviced,” he said. “So until you have an actual survey, until you have a census of the amount of veterans that are currently enrolled, the amount of veterans that could potentially be enrolled, you cannot reasonably ask us for the appropriate amount of money; which it’s our job to write the budget to give you the money; if you don’t have the data points required.”