It's been a great year for the Center so far: we were honored at the White House Correspondents Dinner, our investigative coverage of the financial industry was brought back to life, weaddedabunchofnewfacestoourstaff and our friends at ICIJ made a huge splash internationally with the release of the "Secrecy for Sale" project on offshore tax havens (more on that story below). 

Amid all the excitement, we wanted to pause and reflect on a few of 2013's important investigations, and give you the opportunity to discover them once again. Below we've compiled selections of our most meaningful accountability journalism over the past year:

1. 'Deficit hawks' keep costly nuclear plant alive

Deep within this story is a tale of Former Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., leaving Congress, and becoming president of the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. A week later, an article titled “Mixed Oxide Fuel Facility in South Carolina Needs Congress’s Support” appeared on the Heritage website. Coincidence or not, DeMint is not the only fiscal conservative who has quietly backed the over-budget, mismanaged Mixed Oxide fuel plant. Keep reading

2. Minority Media org begins taking sizable industry donations, and siding with industry

The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, a group that historically opposed media industry consolidation, shocked critics when it published a study that said the cross-platform ownership ban should be relaxed. Meanwhile, the group had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from media titans like CBS, News Corp. and Clear Channel Communications since 2010. Keep reading

3. Expelled California students left to teach themselves

In California, public school students who are expelled must still be offered an education — it's state law. But for children living in rural areas, lengthy commutes can rule out their county-based, alternative classroom option. The last choice is independent study, a curious choice for students who may have already been struggling to keep grades up in a normal classroom. Keep reading

4. Once-gushing streams sucked dry by "brutally efficient" coal mining

Six streams have suffered irreparable damage due to a coal mine that snakes beneath 144 square miles of Pennsylvania terrain. In 2005, a 62-acre lake turned into a grassy meadow after a massive longwall mining machine cracked its dam. The energy company responsible has been tasked with "restoring" the streams — it's doing so by injecting the stream bed with grout, and pumping water into the water channel. Keep reading

5. Mystery group easily outspent, and likely sunk, judicial candidate

Ed Sheehy was favored to win a seat on the Montana Supreme Court last year, until a social welfare nonprofit outspent him and launched an attack ad campaign slamming him for his actions as a public defender of a murderer. Who paid for the attack? A group called "Montana Growth Network," and the name is just about all that election records revealed. Thirty-five states, including Montana, have campaign finance laws that are more relaxed than federal election laws (Oh, and we graded each state). Keep reading

6. “It’s like a zombie, you just keep killing it and it keeps coming back again”

That's what a health policy expert had to say about the effort by health insurance agents and brokers to pass laws limiting the reach of state exchange "navigators." Along with the creation of online marketplaces, Obamacare planned for trained navigators to act as guides for these new insurance portals. But insurance agents felt this tread too closely on their industry, and as a result of a extensive campaign, navigator laws are on the books in 16 states. Keep reading

7. Rare glimpse into the origins of dark money

At the request of an unnamed shareholder, tobacco company Reynolds American publicly revealed donations to anti-tax nonprofit Americans for Tax Reform, and Koch-backed nonprofit Americans for Prosperity, among others. As tax-exempt, social welfare nonprofits, these groups don't normally disclose where their money comes from. Keep reading

8. Corporations and conservative foundations are top sponsors of judicial junkets

About 185 federal judges attended more than 100 judicial education seminars sponsored by conservative foundations (such as the Koch Foundation and The Searle Freedom Trust) and multinational corporations (such as ExxonMobil Corp., Shell Oil Co., and Pfizer) over a 4 1/2-year period. We identified instances where judges who attended seminars underwritten by certain firms and trade groups later issued rulings in the funders' favor. Keep reading

9. What’s stopping the Air Force from killing a drone program it can’t afford?

A major defense contractor used campaign donations and insider access on Capitol Hill to defy the Air Force and keep the troubled Global Hawk Block 30 drone aloft at a cost to taxpayers of billions of dollars.Keep reading

10. Secrets of the offshore tax haven world revealed

How the mega-rich use complex offshore structures to own mansions, yachts, art masterpieces, and other assets, while gaining tax advantages and remaining anonymous. Keep reading
You can search the database of names of offshore entity owners, too.

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Ben Carson quickly became a tea party favorite following his criticism of some of President Barack Obama’s policies during a National Prayer Breakfast speech earlier this year. Some conservatives even called on him to run for president.

Now the retired neurosurgeon and Medal of Freedom winner has a new super PAC urging him to do just that.

The “National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee” recently registered with the Federal Election Commission and launched a website to go along with its formation — RunBenRun.org.

The site lists “9 things you can do today to help us draft Ben Carson for president” including praying, signing a petition and, of course, donating.

The committee’s website also lists John Philip Sousa IV, the great-grandson of the composer of “Stars and Stripes Forever,” as its national chairman.

Sousa also formed a California-based political action committee in January 2012 to back Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s re-election bid. Arpaio was the target of a failed recall attempt this year for allegedly profiling Latinos as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration.  

Meanwhile, the group’s treasurer, Winston-Salem, N.C., resident Vernon Robinson, has run three unsuccessful congressional campaigns in North Carolina during the past decade.

The National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee is hardly the first super PAC to form this year urging someone to run for the White House.

In January, supporters of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton created the Ready for Hillary super PAC, which has raised $1.25 million and counting this year.

Super PACs may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to support or attack a federal political candidate (or potential candidate), but are prohibited from directly coordinating with them.

Carson, a former John Hopkins University neurosurgeon, spoke out against liberal health care and tax policies during his National Prayer Breakfast address, and warned that “the PC [politically correct] police are out in force at all times.” Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were in attendance.

The day after the speech, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed titled “Ben Carson for President.”

A representative for the new super PAC couldn’t immediately be reached for comment today.

(Update, Aug. 22, 12:53 p.m.: Robinson explained that he helped start the super PAC because he believes Carson is the best candidate to defeat Clinton in 2016 — should she be the Democratic nominee — in part because of his “Reagan-esque ability to communicate his views.” He said the super PAC has already begun to receive donations — though he would not say how many — and send mailers to voters across the country promoting Carson.) 

When asked about a potential 2016 White House bid in February by Fox News host Sean Hannity, Carson said, “If the Lord grabbed me by the collar and made me do it, I would. It’s not my intention.”

The Center for Public Integrity is pleased to be partnering once again with News 21, the annual student journalist investigative reporting project that launches this year’s effort on Sunday.  

After previously focusing on transportation safety, voter suppression and food safety, about two dozen top students from 12 universities are investigating a variety of issues facing returning veterans, the nearly 2 million young men and women who have served the country in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade of war since 9/11. 

The “struggles and blinding bureaucracy confronting returning veterans” that News 21 portrays in detail have been researched and reported during the past eight months.  

Titled  “Back Home: The Challenges Facing Post-9/11 Veterans Returning from the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,”  this series of in-depth online reports will be published by the Center for Public Integrity and other  partners beginning early Sunday morning, Aug. 25 . You can find these daily reports at on the Center for Public Integrity's website as well as the News 21 website. News 21 is based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Former Washington Post Editor Leonard Downie leads this investigative project, assisted by Jacquee Petchel, the former investigations editor at both the Miami Herald and the Houston Chronicle.  

Our first story will show how the country and the government are still largely ill-prepared to meet veterans’ needs for health care, housing, education and employment, much less evaluations and assistance for any disabilities. This overview will show that even though Republican and Democratic administrations, as well as the Congress, have mandated that these needs be addressed, veterans are still experiencing unfulfilled promises and lack of accountability.

We will publish about a dozen of the News 21 reports, rolling them out one a day starting Sunday. And the series will feature numerous multi-media presentations, including an opening animated graphic illustrating the key characteristics of today’s post-9/11 vets.

On Monday, we will publish an investigation of the multiple backlogs facing returning veterans, highlighting the bureaucratic failures of the Department of Veterans Affairs to process disability and assistance claims in a timely fashion, though there has been a bit of progress recently. We will include an interactive graphic that compares wait-time for a benefits claim in different cities and regions of the country.

Look for a new “Back Home” report each day as this investigation unfolds, telling the individual stories of veterans, and the larger story of systemic failures.  News 21 is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Hearst Foundations, the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, Women & Philanthropy at ASU and the Peter Kiewit Foundation. 

Congratulations to this year’s student journalists and to Len Downie and his team at ASU for an excellent project on a critical topic.

Until next week,
Bill

A powerful political action committee may have paid for a $15,000 poll at the request of the scandal-plagued campaign of Washington D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, an action that could have violated rules limiting campaign contributions or coordination between candidates and campaigns.

According to emails obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, among those involved in the back-and-forth discussion about the poll was a former high-level Gray political consultant named top spokesman for the Democratic National Committee last week.

The emails come to light just as a two-year federal investigation into the efforts by Gray campaign officials to avoid city campaign finance laws accelerates.

On June 12, 2010 Sam Brooks, a senior campaign aide, sought help from David Julyan, a lobbyist who runs BUD’S PAC, an independent political action committee funded largely by local parking garage, real estate and construction interests.

Brooks, in an email to Julyan, said “if we did a Poll, specific to the Mayor’s race it could be *very* helpful” to Gray’s campaign, according to the exchange.

“Just thinking of ways the PAC could help…” he continued. Brooks and Julyan, public records show, started a consulting company in 2009 that had been paid by BUD’S PAC for polling in the past. “Feel free to totally ignore this and not hurt my feelings. … I know it ain’t my PAC, it ain’t my money, but just throwing this out there,” Brooks wrote.

On Aug. 1, Brooks emailed Mo Elleithee, a top communications strategist for the Gray campaign: “Hey man — If you had 3 questions, what would they be?”

Brooks told the Center that by this time, he was no longer a part of the campaign.

Elleithee is a well-known Democratic campaign operative who has worked on several federal campaigns and was named as the DNC’s communications director last week. He’s taking a leave of absence from his political firm, Hilltop Public Solutions.

In an Aug. 2 email, Julyan asked Brooks to call him at his house “to discuss poll.” The email also included suggested questions for the poll.  Brooks responded by email, expressing frustration he hadn’t yet heard from the Gray campaign.

“Hey man, I’m *still* waiting for Gray folks to get back to me re: proposed questions,” Brooks wrote to Julyan. “Just waiting for the Gray Qs and will get to you then.”

On Aug. 3, at 2:12 a.m., Elleithee responded to Brooks: “Will get this to you in the morning.”

Five hours later, Brooks wrote to Julyan: “Got an email from the Fenty dude at 232am today saying he'd have it to me this morning. I said he's got until 9am and then it's gotta be locked.”

The reference to then-Mayor Adrian Fenty, Gray’s opponent, may have been an error.

The emails obtained by the Center do not contain any questions submitted by Elleithee.

D.C. campaign finance law prohibits independent PACs from coordinating election activity with campaigns, according to Wesley Williams, a spokesman for the D.C. Office of Campaign Finance. This includes polling if a poll's questions "are designed to advocate the election or defeat of a candidate."

If an outside group, like BUD'S PAC, solicited and used questions suggested by a campaign for a poll and then privately shared the results with the campaign, it could be a form of a campaign contribution, Williams says. He added that the Gray campaign is currently under investigation and he could not comment on any specifics regarding that campaign.

Just agreeing to coordinate expenditures with an independent PAC can be considered a violation of the law, says Don Dinan, an attorney who has represented several D.C. politicians on campaign finance issues.

The poll commissioned by BUD’S PAC was conducted from Aug. 4 through Aug. 9. The 24-question poll contained several questions about potential political liabilities of both Gray and Fenty. It included questions about associates of Fenty who had been the subject of negative media attention. The poll also asked about other city politicians not involved in the mayor’s race.

A small portion of the poll’s results showing Gray in the lead was later leaked to media outlets, though the full poll was never made public.

BUD’S PAC’s campaign finance records show that it paid the company started by Julyan and Brooks $15,000 for a poll on July 30. Julyan told the Center that he did not profit from the poll, that “the cost of the poll was considerably less than "market rate" and included the fee paid to the company that made the calls.”

Contributions from PACs to mayoral candidates are limited to $2,000. There is no mention of any in-kind contribution related to a poll in Gray’s campaign finance filings.

Elleithee, Brooks and Julyan told the Center they did nothing wrong.

They said there was no coordination between BUD’S PAC and the Gray campaign in crafting the poll’s questions, nor were the results of the poll shared with the campaign. A spokesman for Gray said the mayor “has no knowledge” of the email messages.

Julyan, a lobbyist who Gray appointed to his transition team, says he periodically conducts private polls that are “simply used to keep a pulse on how D.C. voters feel on the issues of the day.”

Elleithee said he does not recall the circumstances surrounding his email exchange with Brooks, but says they could have been related to any number of legitimate campaign activities that Brooks was a part of.

“I wouldn’t have responded to it if I thought it had something to do with an I.E. [independent expenditure],” Elleithee said, adding: “I just don’t recall this conversation.”

Brooks said he also doesn’t remember the contents of the emails, which he says he believes were hacked from his email account for “malicious political motivations.”

Brooks said he left the campaign before August because he thought it was a “lost cause” and that he could better help get Gray elected from the outside.

Internal campaign emails, invoices and interviews with several former Gray campaign officials show that Brooks was very active in the first months of the campaign. He was described in an email by the campaign manager as part of the “Vince-Gray-for-Mayor central office field team” and praised for being “instrumental” in voter ID efforts.

Brooks’ involvement extended through June when he approached Julyan with the idea of BUD’S PAC commissioning a poll to help the mayor.

In a July 6 email, Brooks suggested to two of its fundraisers that they raise money for outside groups rather than the campaign itself.

“It’s literally amateur hour,” Brooks said of the campaign in an email to Joshua Kern and Reuben Charles. “And very candidly: I would simply stop raising money for the campaign until it proves it has a sophisticated budget based on sound strategic assumptions; otherwise, I would direct all money to independent expenditures.”

Brooks currently works for the Gray administration as a $140,000-a-year associate director at the Department of General Services.

Four people with ties to the Gray campaign have pleaded guilty to felonies in connection with the federal investigation. The latest is Vernon Hawkins, one of Gray’s closest associates, who admitted last week his role in running an alleged $650,000 off-the-books “shadow campaign.”

D.C. businessman Jeffrey Thompson, a one-time donor to BUD’s PAC, has been implicated as the financier, according sources familiar with the probe as the financier. He has not been charged with any crimes nor has Gray.

The mayor has denied any personal wrongdoing and said he was not aware of all that transpired during a chaotic six-and-a-half month campaign that led to his easy victory over Fenty in the September 2010 Democratic primary.

Fifty years ago, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., was in Washington, D.C., to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech. As the 23-year-old, then-chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis himself spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which he had helped organize.

Now the most senior member of Georgia’s congressional delegation, Lewis has been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 1987. He also currently serves as the House Democrat’s senior chief deputy whip.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, here are five money-and-politics tidbits about the Georgia Democrat and civil rights icon:

1. Lewis vocally opposed Citizens United

An advocate for human rights and civil liberties, Lewis has also been outspoken on campaign finance issues. Along with Reps. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., David Price, D-N.C., and Mike Castle, R-Del., Lewis filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in July 2009 that argued that “limitations on corporate expenditures are essential to our democracy.” The high court ultimately thought otherwise and issued its landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling in January 2010.

2. Lewis supported the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act

During the debate in the U.S. House of Representatives about stricter campaign finance rules in 2002, Lewis argued the legislation was necessary to “remove the corrupting influence of soft money from the political process.”

“Political candidates should not be up for sale to the highest bidder,” Lewis said at the time. “I did not march across the bridge at Selma on March 7, 1965, and almost lose my life to become part of a political system so corrupt that it pollutes the very idea of what we marched for.”

So-called “soft money” contributions — which were ultimately banned under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act — previously flowed to national parties in unlimited amounts from individuals, unions and corporations. The funds were not allowed to be used to expressly advocate for the election or defeat of federal candidates, but the money could be used to help get out the vote or other “party-building” activities.

3. PACs love Lewis

About 90 percent of the $107,000 that Lewis’ campaign raised during the first six months of 2013 came from political action committees, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of filings with the Federal Election Commission. Just 10 individual donors — most of them Georgians — have given more than $200 to Lewis’ campaign this year. That's the threshold at which their names are publicly disclosed in campaign finance filings.

4. Lewis gets labor and business PAC support

Lewis has received $23,500 from union PACs so far this year — nearly a quarter of the $98,500 he has collected from all PACs. The political committees of the American Federation of Teachers, the Laborers International Union of North America and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union have each given Lewis $5,000.

Among business, insurers and other companies in the financial sector have been the most generous to Lewis this year.

Such groups account for about $16,800 — about 17 percent of Lewis’ total receipts from PACs this year, according to the Center’s research. Donors include the PACs of insurer Chubb Corp. ($3,000), AFLAC Inc. ($2,500), American Express Co. ($1,000) and Wells Fargo & Co. ($1,000).

Notably, the PAC of Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. also gave $5,000 to Lewis in March.

5. Lewis danced ‘Gangnam style’ in the name of voting

Ahead of the 2012 election, Lewis appeared in a get-out-the-vote-themed video that spoofed the hit song “Gangnam Style” by South Korean rapper Psy.

The parody was produced by the Georgia's Asian American Legal Advocacy Center and Kollaboration Atlanta, a nonprofit that promotes “empowerment through entertainment.”

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Friday proposed a long-awaited rule to control worker exposures to silica, a toxic mineral that can cause the deadly lung disease silicosis, lung cancer and other ailments.

The rule could save nearly 700 lives and prevent 1,600 new cases of silicosis each year, OSHA chief David Michaels told reporters in a conference call. Tiny silica particles are unleashed through activities such as sandblasting, concrete-cutting and a form of oil and gas drilling called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

“This proposal is long overdue,” Michaels said. “OSHA’s current standards are dangerously out of date and do not adequately protect workers’ health.”

The agency estimates that 2.2 million workers, most of them in construction, are exposed to silica in the United States. The rule will likely take “many months” to become final, Michaels said, with public hearings planned for March.

Last year the Center for Public Integrity highlighted OSHA’s inaction on silica as an example of regulatory inertia on workplace hazards. A silicosis victim interviewed by the Center, Alan White, took part in Friday’s conference call.

White, a 48-year-old foundry worker from Buffalo, N.Y., said his employer never warned him about the “unseen dangers” of silica. Now, he said, “Even simple tasks like walking while talking on a cellphone are difficult.” It recently took him an hour to walk the mile between his home and the foundry, White said.

OSHA’s silica proposal had been under review by the White House Office of Management and Budget since Feb. 14, 2011 — more than 900 days. It became a symbol of the regulatory bottleneck at OMB.

White House records show that OMB has held 10 meetings on silica since March 31, 2011, mostly with representatives of industry groups such as the American Foundry Society, the National Industrial Sand Association and the National Association of Home Builders. Many industry officials, citing what they say would be high compliance costs, question the need for a stricter silica exposure limit and say better enforcement of the current limit is sufficient to protect workers.

Michaels, however, said the existing standard, adopted in 1971, does not reflect “the most recent scientific evidence” — notably, that silica dust can cause lung cancer. OSHA is proposing a limit of 50 micrograms of silica per cubic meter of air, a number recommended by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in 1974. The current limit varies, depending on the silica content of dust, but can be far higher than 50 micrograms.

OSHA estimates that it would cost the average workplace covered by the proposed rule $1,242 per year to comply — using simple techniques such as wetting concrete before cutting it — and less than half that amount for companies with fewer than 20 employees. It predicts the rule would have “average net benefits” of $2.8 billion to $4.7 billion per year over the next 60 years.

Celeste Monforton, a lecturer at George Washington University and a former OSHA official, said the glacial pace of the silica rule is a product of “policymakers and lawmakers buying into the false argument that these regulations are too costly to pursue” and overreliance on cost-benefit analyses.

“How do you put a price on Alan White not being able to live to see his grandchildren?” Monforton asked.

The Senate Rules and Administration Committee will soon schedule an early September vote on two Federal Election Commission nominees, two sources close to the nomination process tell the Center for Public Integrity.

Such a vote means the full Senate could consider — and potentially approve — the nominations of Republican Lee E. Goodman, an attorney at law firm LeClairRyan, and Democrat Ann Ravel, chairwoman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission, within weeks.

As of Friday evening, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, of which Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is chairman, had not published an official notice of the vote.

The Senate Rules and Administration Committee conducted a largely uneventful confirmation hearing for Ravel and Goodman in July.

At the time, committee members offered no indications that they'd oppose either nominee, with some even posing for photos with Goodman and Ravel after the hearing's conclusion.

President Barack Obama nominated the pair on June 21, marking the first time in four years that he had sought to appoint someone to the FEC.

Obama's only other nominee, labor lawyer John Sullivan, withdrew from consideration in 2010 after the full Senate failed to conduct a vote on his nomination.

The FEC's five active commissioners are serving in "holdover status" despite each of their six-year terms having expired.

Goodman is slated to replace Vice Chairman Don McGahn, a Republican appointee whose term expired in 2009.

Ravel is due to replace a sixth commissioner, Democratic appointee Cynthia Bauerly, who resigned in February to become deputy director of workforce development at Minnesota's Department of Employment and Economic Development.

In the 12 years since American troops first deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 2.6 million veterans have returned home to a country largely unprepared to meet their needs. The government that sent them to war has failed on many levels to fulfill its obligations to these veterans as demanded by Congress and promised by both Republican and Democratic administrations, a News21 investigation has found.

Many of these combat veterans, returning from war with what will be lifelong illnesses and disabilities, are struggling to get the help they were promised in the form of disability payments, jobs, health care and treatment for such afflictions as post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injuries, physical disabilities and military sexual trauma.

Veterans who survived Taliban and al Qaida attacks, roadside bombs, mortar fire and the deaths of fellow soldiers told News21 that they have returned home to a future threatened by poverty, unemployment, homelessness and suicide. “The hardest thing you can ever do isn’t joining the military. It is hard,” said 30-year-old Luis Duran, a New Yorker who entered the Marine Corps after 9/11, deployed to Iraq and survived a suicide bomb. “The most difficult part is getting out.”

By far, the most vexing and public failure of the federal government has been its inability to distribute timely disability compensation to veterans with physical and mental injuries associated with their service — at a critical point in their transition home.

The News21 investigation found that as the lengthy backlog of delayed and mishandled claims began to surge dramatically, more than two-thirds of the claims processors in the Department of Veterans Affairs collected more than $5.5 million in bonuses.

Claims workers were effectively encouraged, based on a performance “credit system,” to process less-complex claims first, leaving to languish those claims involving multiple war injuries and missing paperwork.

Complex claims, the workers said, require calling and sending follow-up letters to veterans and requesting federal documents and medical records, all of which received zero points on the Veterans Benefits Administration performance evaluation for processors until December 2012, when the system was changed.

A local union representative for Boston claims processors, Roger Moore, said employees set aside complicated claims to preserve their jobs. “It’s like, ‘He’s gotta wait, because I have to get my numbers or my job is in jeopardy,’” Moore told News21.

Members of Congress continue to demand that the claims of the more than 500,000 veterans waiting more than 125 days be processed and paid, but so far the VA’s fixes have not cleared the backlog.

“They (soldiers) were put in these incredibly stressful situations and they also put their civilian jobs and education on hold, so it’s not like they win the lottery when they come back," said Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., of the benefits promised to veterans. “It’s meant to put them back on par with their peers, who had an advantage in the civilian sector while these men and women were gone.”

Large numbers of post-9/11 veterans are seeking treatment and compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, considered nearly epidemic among those veterans. Both are widely claimed as an injury, and they are often difficult to assess and treat.

PTSD and TBI are “the two most prolific wounds coming out of the war,” said retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army from 2008 to 2012 and now CEO of One Mind, a research and advocacy nonprofit for mental health and brain diseases.

“I have to be considered a horrible failure in my ability to get a handle on this problem,” Chiarelli said, noting the number of troops suffering from PTSD and TBI increased dramatically during his tenure.

Stephen Leon served two tours in Afghanistan and won the Army Commendation Medal for valor after a firefight with three suicide bombers outside a gate in Kabul in 2011. The blast from one of their bombs left him with wrist, neck, knee, back and ankle injuries, as well as traumatic brain injury and PTSD.

When he returned home July 2011, Leon couldn’t get his mind off Afghanistan, the battles and the friends he lost. “You’re used to a life of being at peace, with yourself and your family and having a nice time with your family, when you go over there all that breaks up,” he said.

More than a year later, Leon received his disability rating and compensation. Without it, he said he likely would be homeless or dead.

“It’s a waiting game” for veterans, said Mike Salois a regional executive director the Volunteers of America of Greater Ohio, which provides housing for homeless veterans in Ohio. “And when you particularly are already suffering from something on top of the disability, whether it be a mental illness or substance-abuse problem … they are not knowing how to cope with putting that off any more.”

America’s post-9/11 veterans are the most diverse group of soldiers in the nation’s history, not only by race and gender, but by age, a News21 demographic analysis shows. They are overwhelmingly young, more than half were between the ages of 18 and 32.

By comparison, about 37 percent of the nonveteran population is over 50, and less than 29 percent of the nonveteran population is between the ages of 18 and 32.

This younger generation of veterans will count on the VA’s assistance to stabilize their lives and help them readjust for many years to come.

Veterans told News21 that the collateral consequences of PTSD, financial instability and other injuries associated with their disabilities sometimes triggered depression, anxiety, aggressive behavior and thoughts of suicide.

“All I ever considered when I thought about (suicide) was the guilt I was feeling and just wanting a way out, wanting to not have those memories anymore,” said Clinton Hall, 35, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an infantryman and now lives in Portland, Ore.  His friend and fellow soldier killed himself shortly after returning home.

Despite intervention initiatives by the Department of Defense and VA, more than 46,000 veterans nationwide died by suicide between 2005 and 2011, according to state mortality data collected from 49 states by News21 in its eight-month investigation.

In every year over the last decade, the percentage of veteran suicides has significantly exceeded — usually by double or even triple — the suicide rate of the general populations, the analysis shows.  For example, Arizona’s 2011 veteran suicide rate was 43.9 per 100,000 people, more than three times the civilian suicide rate of 14.4.

Among states with the widest disparities and highest rates, Idaho had an average annual veteran suicide rate of 58.3 per 100,000 people, according to News21 analysis, compared to 22.8 for civilians. Montana had an average annual veteran suicide rate of 53 per 100,000 compared to 18.8 for civilians.

“(Veterans) have different rules and different expectations and ways of seeing themselves and their roles in society,” said Craig Bryan, research director at the University of Utah National Center for Veterans Studies. “What we see in society doesn’t always translate as well into the military.”

About 25 percent of post-9/11 veterans have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and 7 percent have traumatic brain injury, according to Congressional Budget Office analysis of VA data. The average cost to treat them is about four to six times greater than those without these injuries, the CBO reported.

The post-9/11 veterans use the VA more than other veterans and their numbers are growing at the fastest rate, records show. Many will require care for the rest of their lives.

Yet, no government agency has calculated fully the lifetime cost of health care for the large number of post-9/11 veterans with lifelong ailments and disabilities. It is certain to be high, given the veterans’ survival rates, longer tours of duty, and multiple injuries.

They are veterans like Erik Castillo, who has been living with traumatic brain injury for nine years and goes to the VA three times a week for therapy. The shrapnel that entered Castillo’s brain from a bomb in Baghdad in 2004 burned a portion of his frontal lobe, which had to be removed. “I’ll utilize the VA for the rest of my life,” he said.

“Medical costs peak decades later,” said Linda Bilmes, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and co-author of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

Post-9/11 veterans cost the VA $2.8 billion in 2012, out of its total $50.9 billion health care budget for the year, records show. And that number is expected to increase by $510 million in 2013, according to the VA’s budget.

“And their needs will change as they age. And we don’t know with the TBIs and the multiple TBIs how those will evolve,” said Susan Lucht, program director of the VA Polytrauma Network Site in Tucson. “So VHA (Veterans Health Administration) is committed to doing lifetime care management for these injuries."

Women constitute an unprecedented 17.4 percent of the post-9/11 veteran cohort, more than twice the percentage of women in the overall veteran population, the News21 demographic analysis shows. More women will have served in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom than in any single previous conflict. More than a quarter of those women are black, almost twice the proportion found in the entire U.S. population.

Yet, these same women return to a nation that historically defines ‘veteran’ as male, which in the post-9/11 era has meant a lack of female-specific resources at VA facilities across the country.

“I think because the VA has dealt with men for so long, through all the previous wars, they’re not set up to handle females,”  said Ohio Army National Guard veteran Crystal Sandor. “But we’ve been at this war for 10 years, it’s about time they figure it out.”

Though their numbers have been historic, with more than 280,000 women returning from deployments, female veterans said in interviews with News21 that they have trouble finding care and camaraderie within the VA services.

“I don’t think I’ve talked to one female veteran who goes to the VA who has had a good experience, that has been treated and received the care that they deserve,” Sandor said.

A 2013 Institute of Medicine report noted that, “Research on the health of veterans has focused on the health consequences of combat service in men, and there has been little scientific research . . . of the health consequences of military service in women who served.”

Some female veterans say this lack of understanding discourages them from seeking help at the VA, particularly for trauma from sexual attacks while in the military.

“Women already, so often, feel that they don’t belong in the military, either they’re not wanted or they have to prove to other people or themselves that they deserve to be there,” said Harvard psychologist Paula Caplan. “When you are traumatized and you’re devastated ... then you think, ‘But I have military training, I’m supposed to be tough, I’m supposed to be resilient.’ ”

Jessie de Leon said she was raped while serving as an Army medic in Bamberg, Germany, from 2007 to 2009. Once back home in Florida, she said she found no comfort with therapists at the West Palm Beach VA and ended up at the Healing Horse Therapy Center with other female veterans in Loxahatchee, Fla.

“No one was forcing you to talk, nobody was saying you had to do anything,” de Leon said of the therapy center. “I didn’t realize you could gain so much confidence, gain so much self-motivation, get back your self-esteem, just by working with a horse, who never said a word to you.”

Women also are less likely to find a job than male veterans and more likely to be single parents with children to support, interviews and records show. In September 2012, the unemployment rate for post-9/11 female veterans hit a high of 19.9 percent before falling to 12.5 percent, three percentage points higher than the annual average for male veterans.

Employment — and underemployment — are issues for both men and women veterans in spite of highly visible efforts by Congress, state legislatures, businesses and philanthropists to push jobs initiatives. As of July, about 160,000 post-9/11 veterans of wars had not found work.

Job fairs, though highly touted and backed by the best of intentions, have had minimal success, according to data reviewed by News21. Hiring Our Heroes, a series of job fairs sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, has helped fewer than 10 percent of participating veterans find work.

The Obama administration has prodded states to recognize military experience as sufficient for state licensing — certifying truck drivers, nurses and paramedics, among others. But most state licensing boards have so far delayed, forcing veterans to duplicate the training they received in their military jobs.

Sometimes, though, veterans who do get jobs can’t keep them, because of the residual effects of war or because their own failure to seek help interferes with their success.

“When I came back I was little torn up because we had lost one of our (explosive ordnance disposal) guys, the guy who was teaching us how to deactivate mines,” said Victor Nunez Ortiz, 31, who deployed to Iraq in 2004. “Around the same time, my great-grandmother who raised me passed away. I was notified when I was overseas. I was really sad most of the time, sad and angry towards the end of my deployment. When I came home I wasn’t able to let that go.”

“I wasn't able to hold my job, any job, for a year or longer,” said Nunez Ortiz. “The last time before I really realized that I needed to, like, seek help, I was the manager at Panera Bread. They let me go because they said I was I was a loose cannon.”

He began drinking, he said, and had a child, but no income.

“It became a roller-coaster ride of emotions,” he said.

Nunez Ortiz now lives in Massachusetts and works for Veterans Advocacy Services.

Retired Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, an Arizona State University professor who is based in Washington, D.C., said most of the nation has little contact with the military since “the military represents just 1 percent of the population.”

“That means,” he told News21, that 99 percent of Americans “don’t know what a family is going through, don’t know what a military child is going through with a mom who deploys overseas … there’s a disconnection.”

While veterans waited longer than ever in recent years for their wartime disability compensation, the Department of Veterans Affairs gave its workers millions of dollars in bonuses for “excellent” performances that effectively encouraged them to avoid claims that needed extra work to document veterans’ injuries, a News21 investigation has found.

In 2011, a year in which the claims backlog ballooned by 155 percent, more than two-thirds of claims processors shared $5.5 million in bonuses, according to salary data from the Office of Personnel Management.

The more complex claims were often set aside by workers so they could keep their jobs, meet performance standards, or, in some cases, collect extra pay, said VA claims processors and union representatives. Those claims now make up much of VA’s widely scrutinized disability claims backlog, defined by the agency as claims pending more than 125 days.

“At the beginning of the month … I’d try to work my really easy stuff so I could get my numbers up,” said Renee Cotter, a union steward for the local Reno, Nev. American Federation of Government Employees.

Now, claims workers said, they fear the VA’s aggressive new push to finish all one-year-old claims by Oct. 1 — and eliminate the entire backlog by 2015 — could continue the emphasis of quantity over quality in claims processing that has often led to mistakes. VA workers have processed 1 million claims a year for three years in a row.

Beth McCoy, the assistant deputy undersecretary for field operations for the Veterans Benefits Administration, said bonuses for claims processors were justified because, even though the number of backlogged claims was rising, workers were processing more claims than ever before.

“There are many, many employees who are exceeding their minimum standards and they deserve to recognized for that,” she said.

She also said the VBA is improving quality even as it processes more claims.

But documents show that a board of veterans judges found in 2012 that almost three out of four appealed claims — which determine how much money veterans receive for their disabilities — were either wrong or based on incomplete information. When veterans choose to appeal a claim decision, it can add several years to their wait, records show.

But the VA’s plan to process the oldest claims did not address the quarter-million veterans in its appeals process as of July. Approximately 14,000 veterans had an appeal pending for more than two years as of November 2012.

The VA has promised to lower wait times and improve accuracy by scanning the piles of paper claims into an electronic system for processing with new software, but the expensive transition has been beset with problems.

The workload for VA claims workers also has doubled in the last five years. This included new claims from a quarter-million Vietnam veterans in 2010, when the VA expanded added B-cell leukemias, Parkinson’s disease and ischemic heart disease to the growing list of health conditions that veterans could claim as a result of the toxic chemical, Agent Orange. In addition, more than 830,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans returning home had filed claims as of March 2013, according to VBA data.

In an attempt to encourage more productivity, the VA changed a claims processor’s performance criteria between 2010 and 2012 to discourage spending time gathering additional documents that could prove complicated claims, according to written performance requirements for claims processors.

McCoy said she heard from employees in the field that they felt performance standards were not fair. “Things are changing very quickly and we’re struggling a little bit to keep up with the pace of change as we update our performance standards,” she said.

A processor must gather medical and military records for each disability and give veterans disability ratings based on the severity of injury, which then determines their monthly check from the government.

Claims for multiple injuries require significant time to gather documentation. Other claims, for post-traumatic stress disorder, military sexual trauma or traumatic brain injury can require just as much effort because they can be more difficult to prove than physical injuries.

In April 2010, the VA stopped giving performance credit for “supplemental development,” which included tasks such as calling and sending follow-up letters to veterans, follow-up requests for military documents and medical records.

The change was meant to encourage processors to finish claims. But a complex disability claim could take all day, while a claim for one or two injuries could be completed much faster, said David Bump, a national representative for the AFGE and former claims processor at the Milwaukee regional office.

“I think after a couple of years of seeing things piling up, they realized that that didn’t work,” said Bump, part of the VBA’s bargaining committee that has met three times in 10 months to discuss changing the performance standards.

Claims workers can be fired or demoted for not meeting standards in Automated Standardized Performance Elements Nationwide, or ASPEN, the VA’s system of awarding a specific number of points daily for each task an employee performs.

Annual performance evaluations for all claims workers include the elements of “productivity,” “quality” and “customer service.” While “quality” is measured by a random sampling of an employee’s claims and “customer service” is measured by the number of complaints against the employee, “productivity” is judged by ASPEN points, the average work credits the employee must earn per day.

ASPEN points could translate into financial awards at the end of each year if a worker earns an “excellent” or “outstanding” performance.

But News21 found that regional office management gave bonuses to some employees even as their claims backlogs grew. During 2012, Office of Personnel Management records show, some of the most troubled offices gave their employees the most extra pay.

The Baltimore office, which has the longest wait times in the country, gave bonuses averaging $1,100 each to 40 percent of its workforce. The Oakland, Calif., office, which shut its doors to retrain underperforming employees, awarded nine of 10 workers a total of about $33,000 — almost enough to pay a full year’s worth of benefits to a veteran who is 100 percent disabled.

In Sioux Falls, S.D., claims workers processed claims four times faster than both Oakland and Baltimore but less than one in 10 there received extra pay last year.

In 2008, Congress ordered the VA to review its work-credit system. A 75-page report produced by the Center for Naval Analysis in 2009 recommended the VA address perceptions that quantity receives more emphasis than quality, by changing the tasks that receive points to better reflect the actual work.

“This is one of the reasons why, as some managers noted, the inventory of old claims consists disproportionately of ‘difficult’ cases,” the report said.

A claims processor in Reno told News21 that this “breeds cheating” and that he has seen employees who aren’t making enough points go into “survival mode” and process only easy claims. Shifting performance points to reward backlog-related work would be more effective, said the worker, who, like others, requested anonymity.

“Your backlog is over here. But your points are in this direction. How stupid is that?” asked the worker.

Damon Wood’s disability claim for PTSD, ringing in the ear and a bad back and knee has been cycling for 21 months through a fortified federal office building in a corporate park on the outskirts of Reno.

He quit checking its status online because it hadn’t changed for more than 11 months. When he tried calling the Reno regional office for more help, he was diverted to one of VA’s eight national call centers.

“Your hands are tied by the people who actually have the claim in their hands,” Wood said. “So you can’t do anything more or anything less. It’s up to them.”

Fran Lynch, a former Seattle claims processor and exam consultant, said the VA built a “wall of separation” between the workers and the veteran.

“People form opinions about veterans based on paperwork and they make decisions based on those opinions without ever really knowing the guys’ circumstance,” he said.

Allison Hickey, undersecretary of the benefits at the VA, promised veterans in April that the more than 65,000 claims two years and older would get a temporary or permanent decision by June 19, while those waiting more than year would be considered by October.

For the third consecutive year, the VA mandated 20 hours per month of overtime for part of this year to meet the deadlines, costing the agency approximately $44 million.

The VBA’s McCoy said mandating overtime was the best way to tackle the backlog because it can take two years to fully train a new employee.

When the VA announced in June that workers finished 97 percent of the two-year-old claims, members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, were skeptical that processors had enough time to do the job correctly.

“If two months was all VA needed to adjudicate these claims, why did the department let them sit for two years or longer?” asked Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

McCoy said 600 people had been assigned to quality-review teams to ensure correct decisions. She said this is the fourth year in a row the VBA will process over a million claims and it processed a record 110,000 claims in June. Despite record production levels, employees still issued correct decisions for 95.5 percent of individual injuries for the year through the end of June, she said.

Bump, the union representative, said regional office directors sometimes cut corners to meet standards. “As long as we have a system in place that does not acknowledge the amount of work that’s truly there and the limited resources we have to do the work, you’re going to have creative ways to get the work done,” Bump said.

Jonathan Bivens, an Iraq veteran living in California, Md., is one of the 3 percent of veterans whose two-year-old claim was not processed by Hickey’s deadline. On August 8, the VA rated his hernia as a 10 percent disability and denied the other eight injuries he filed 30 months ago. He said he plans to appeal.

“I am sure it was a lot of skim reading and not a whole lot of doing what is right,” Bivens said.

Darin Selnick, a VA political appointee in the Bush administration, called the quickly finished claims an old “sleight-of-hand trick.” Selnick said regional office directors and central office staff misled VA leadership during the last decade with similar numbers games that disguised the problem and kicked the can down the road.

“They knew it was coming, and they knew it was going to get worse,” Selnick said. “ ... I think the current leadership, Allison Hickey, they do the same thing to her.”

Union representatives, claims processors and lawyers predict more veterans will turn to the appeals process because of Hickey’s deadlines.

“When VA over-emphasizes speed to meet artificial deadlines, VA makes additional errors that lead to more appeals further clogging an already overwhelmed agency,” said Joseph Moore, a lawyer who handles appeals.

An appeals worker in the Columbia, S.C., regional office said Hickey’s “go ahead” for claims processors to “make a decision no matter what” has typically resulted in a rating without all of the needed evidence. “Appeals are definitely going to go up.”

At the same time, the Board of Veterans Appeals decreased its staff from 535 in 2011 to 510 in 2012 because of a “constrained fiscal environment affecting the entire federal government,” according to its 2012 annual report.

Appeals were not included in the VA’s plan to take down the high-profile backlog of original old claims. More than 250,000 appeals were pending review as of July — an increase of 65 percent from 2008 — and nearly 14,000 were pending more than two years as of November, according to the VA.

“You can throw them in a closet and shut the door. That’s what an appeal is,” said Roger Moore, the union steward at the Boston office.

Sean Meade was a National Guardsman who deployed with the Army to Iraq for a tour during 2006 and 2007. Claims processors denied his disability claim for PTSD after he filed in 2008, because they couldn’t find documents that showed one event during his service that triggered it.

“I was in combat, I saw (improvised explosive devices) go off, I saw (rocket-propelled grenades) go over my truck,” Meade said. “You know, you see things. You see things on the side of the road that were human at one point and it makes you think, well, that could be me. So whether or not you get attacked directly, or your truck gets blown up or you get shot, it’s still a stressor.”

He appealed in 2009 and is still waiting for a decision, even though in 2010 rules were changed to make PTSD claims easier to prove.

Brett Buchanan, a lawyer in the St. Louis area who helps veterans with their appeals, said he tells his clients “we’re in for a long relationship, and we could very well be together for five to seven years.”

Files he receives are often missing evidence that prove a veteran is disabled because of military service, he said. “They just ran with what they had,” he said. “The VA just can’t find the records, or they don’t know to find them.”

His clients’ files often reach 2,000 pages, and he boxes of evidence are shipped to him every day.

“It’s really 20 sheets of paper that make a difference,” Buchanan said. “So if one of those sheets of paper is missing because it was misplaced or wasn’t transferred correctly for DOD to VA, it goes from slam-dunk case to a very challenging case. And that’s why they probably got denied and are calling me.”

Claims processors struggle with understaffing, an incomplete software system and paper claims that must be shipped around the country in boxes, sorted in mailrooms and are sometimes forgotten in file cabinets.

The VA has for years tried to alleviate the load on overwhelmed offices by shipping backlogged claims around the country to other offices. Hickey ordered this “brokering” of old claims as a way for some offices to meet her deadlines.

According to internal documents, VA has shuffled more than 50,000 claims among regional offices since January, including 16,000 in the month of June. But workers say the practice is unfair to local veterans filing claims when their local office has to shoulder the load for poorly managed offices.

Workers in Milwaukee received more than 5,000 old claims from Houston and Los Angeles beginning June 11. Sioux Falls received 2,600 claims from St. Louis, Houston and Portland, Ore. Meanwhile, Reno completed just more than 1,000 old claims after shipping off 4,500 claims in its inventory to offices in Louisville, Ky., Sioux Falls and others.

“We’re looking like we’re making progress … but in ways that aren’t sustainable,” said one claims processor. “We’re not actually doing anything to fix problems that are actually causing the backlog … At some point, that overtime’s got to end and you can’t continue to broker out work, and what happens at that point? Nothing’s been fixed, and the same problem persists.”

All of these problems come at a critical time for veterans seeking disability compensation.

Stephen Leon served two tours in Afghanistan and won the Army Commendation Medal for valor after a firefight with three suicide bombers outside a gate in Kabul in 2011. The blast from one of their bombs left him with wrist, neck, knee, back and ankle injuries, as well as traumatic brain injury and PTSD.

When he returned home July 2011, he couldn’t get his mind off Afghanistan, the battles and the friends he lost. “You’re used to a life of being at peace, with yourself and your family and … when you go over there, all that breaks up,” he said.

Facing financial difficulties and struggling with PTSD, he was forced to move in with his mom. “I couldn’t get a dime for claims, I couldn’t get in touch with anyone and the ones I could get in touch with, they didn’t want to help me anyway,” he said.

He enlisted the help of an independent advocate, who fought for his claim and connected him with housing and better PTSD treatment. He was rated 70 percent for his disabilities a year ago and now lives in his own apartment in Revere, Mass.

Without the help of an advocate and without the money, Leon said he would be “homeless” or “dead.”

Hannah Winston contributed to this report

Mary Shinn was a Women & Philanthropy Fellow for News21 this summer.

In this weekly column, former health insurance executive Wendell Potter offers commentary on matters relating to U.S. health care reform.

Opponents of Obamacare know that time is not on their side. If they can’t kill the health care law by threatening to shut down the government, as some Republicans are suggesting, the game will be over, and they know it. That’s because there is an expiration date on their long-running campaign to scare the bejesus out of Americans about the awful things that will happen if health care reform is not mortally wounded by year’s end.

Fear mongering has a shelf life. The strategy the president’s opponents have been using to influence public opinion is based on the premise that people fear the unknown. Most of us just don’t like uncertainty.

President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law on March 23, 2010, but the most important consumer benefits and protections won’t go into effect until January 1, 2014. That has given the president’s political adversaries three and a half years to spread lies and misinformation.

Because supporters of the law have been outspent by hundreds of millions of dollars already — with much of that cash coming from insurance companies and their business pals worried about shrinking profit margins — it’s little wonder that opinion surveys continue to show that more Americans oppose the law than support it.

But those opinion polls will start to change in a few months when Americans realize that their worst politically inspired fears have not been realized, and that, gosh darn it, things are actually better than they used to be.

Having played a role in similar campaigns designed to mislead the public by spreading fear in hopes of defeating profit-threatening legislation, I know how frantic the anti-Obamacare folks must be right about now.

Although efforts to repeal the law have fallen short in Congress no fewer than 40 times, Republicans have still benefited significantly from their years-long campaign against the legislation. Those efforts helped them more than anything else to win control of the House in 2010. Several Congressional Republicans reportedly have been meeting weekly over the past several months to develop new tactics to keep the game going. They apparently believe there is nothing to lose by continuing to foster what is known in the world of psychology as anticipatory anxiety. Yet they have to know by now that the expiration date for their obfuscation is fast approaching.

As Dr. Srini Pillay, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, notes, anticipatory anxiety is a negative projection about an unknown outcome. Shrewd political strategists know that many are hardwired for anxiety about unknown outcomes. Which is why all campaigns against a proposed law or regulation are fear-based. And they work. Until, of course, the unknown becomes known and it turns out life is not as bad as we feared.

We’ve been told by people who want to take over our government that we must fear Obamacare because it will be a job-killing and grandma-killing government takeover of health care that will destroy the best health care system in the world. But folks, that’s a dog whose hunting days are numbered.

Some politicians have even slipped up and let an uncomfortable truth slip out: that when the Americans they’ve spooked about Obamacare find out in a few months that they have been misled and realize that the law has multiple benefits, they will not want to go back to the bad old days that were so profitable for their big political contributors.

Obamacare haters need to look more closely at those surveys they cite time and again to “prove” that most Americans want to get rid of the law. While a recent Gallup poll showed that 49 percent of Americans disapprove of the law and 41 percent approve, the details of just about every poll on the subject reveal that a significant percentage of the disapprovers actually think the law doesn’t go far enough to protect us from abusive insurance companies and money-hungry doctors and hospitals. This means that those who want to repeal or defund Obamacare because they think it goes too far are in the minority.

Be forwarned: this doesn’t mean that come January 1 the warriors will raise the white flag and forget about Obamacare. Because 2014 is an election year, the job then will be to create false or misleading perceptions about the law, and they’ll attempt to do that through the use of selective statistics and anecdotes. Trust me on this. I used to do that kind of work for a living. And trust me on this, too: the anti-Obamacare campaign has never really been about overturning the law as much as it has been about winning elections.

The Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense spent at least $1.3 billion during the last four years trying unsuccessfully to develop a single electronic health-records system between the two departments — leaving veterans’ disability claims to continue piling up in paper files across the country, a News21 investigation shows.

This does not include billions of other dollars wasted during the last three decades, including $2 billion spent on a failed upgrade to the DOD’s existing electronic health-records system.

For a veteran in the disability claims process, these records are critical: They include DOD service and health records needed by the VA to decide veterans’ disability ratings and the compensation they will receive for their injuries. Stacks of paper files — including veterans’ evidence from DOD of their military service and injuries — sit at VA regional offices waiting to be processed instead of being readily accessible in electronic files.

Although Congress repeatedly has demanded an “integrated” and “interoperable” electronic health-records system, neither the DOD nor the VA is able to completely access the other’s electronic records. Meanwhile, each has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on upgrades to its information technology and on attempts to improve interoperability between their systems.

At a July hearing before the House Armed Services Committee and the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., said he was disappointed and frustrated by the years of promises and billions of dollars spent without interoperable health records. “The only thing interoperable we get are the litany of excuses flying across both departments every year as to why it has taken so long to get this done,” said Miller, the chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee.

The National Defense Authorization Act for 2008 mandated that the DOD and VA secretaries “develop and implement electronic health-record systems or capabilities that allow for full interoperability of personal health information between the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

In 2011, the DOD and VA decided the solution would be to create a single electronic healthcare record together. But after two years and more than $1 billion spent on a single, joint integrated electronic health record between the DOD and VA, the department’s two secretaries in February canceled the plan with little explanation.

“It’s frustrating. It’s been inefficient for service members to have to hand-deliver records from one system to another when they get out of the military,” then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said at the time. “It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.”

Instead of a joint system, Panetta said the two agencies would upgrade their own electronic health-record systems and build software that would allow the two systems to talk with each other to exchange files. “As President (Barack) Obama directed in 2009, we can and we must do better.”

Panetta said the new direction would allow the departments to meet the president’s goal and do it for a lower cost. But records show the cost may not be lower.

Meanwhile, the VA has moved to invest $12 billion over five years on an entirely new project called Transformation Twenty-One Total Technology, or T4, to upgrade its own technologies. Those upgrades are supposed to include interoperable software that can be used between the VA and DOD.

According to contract data gathered by News21, the VA began paying companies for the project in July 2011, at the same time money still was still being spent by both the DOD and VA on the single, joint health care records system.

In fact, one of the VA’s contractors, Harris Corp., has a multiyear contract with the VA worth $80.3 million to create software allowing the two departments’ systems to communicate with each other, a deal that was signed almost a year before the DOD and VA gave up on a single electronic health record.

The DOD also is looking for a replacement for its health record system. The 2014 DOD budget requests $466.9 million for “initial outfitting” and “replacement and modernization” of its current health care record.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, told News21 in an email statement that she is concerned about the future of electronic health records shared between DOD and VA.

“While it is not easy to get the government’s two largest bureaucracies to work together efficiently, I have been very troubled about the effort to develop systems to allow communication between VA and DOD’s medical records,” she said. “I am especially concerned DOD spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars — and thousands of staff hours over the last few years — trying to create an integrated IT platform with the VA only to announce they were unable to come to a solution.”

For a disability claim to be processed in 125 days, a goal outlined in a Jan. 25 VA report, the files must be electronic, which means all paper records must be scanned into the system.

The VA scanning system — Veterans Benefits Management System (VBMS) — cost $480 million between 2009 and 2012, yet the VA never set deadlines for the records to be scanned. As of early July, only about 30 percent of paper claims had been scanned — that’s 165 million pieces of paper, according to the VA.

That represents about one-third of the entire paper workload, which does not include the estimated 26,000 service members who will make their way home within the next year from Afghanistan. Nor does it include veterans who have yet to file disability claims.

Those pieces of paper can make or break a veteran’s chance of getting the correct disability compensation. The compensation can help offset costs such as rent and car payments for those who may not be able to work because of issues they suffer, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or chronic back pain. All are common among veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2012, the average time a claim waited for evidence to be processed — which includes those health and service records from DOD as well as physical exams — was 206.7 days, according to Veterans Benefits Administration documents. Gathering evidence is the longest part of the claims process.

DOD health records make their way to the VA within 45 days, DOD spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith told News21 in an email. She wrote that, although the records are available electronically on request, all DOD records are transferred on paper to the VA. Yet, DOD Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall contradicted her, saying most records are transferred electronically.

The VA did not say how it receives records from the DOD.

The National Defense Authorization Act for 2008 also called for the creation of an agency to fix the interoperability problems between the VA and DOD. The Interagency Program Office was established as the “single point of accountability” between the two departments.

Debbie Filippi, the first director of the office, said restrictions from the VA and DOD, as well as a minimal budget, kept the office from making progress during her two-year tenure. “It takes time to turn an aircraft carrier,” she said.

Filippi retired in 2011, before this February’s cancellation of the joint electronic health-record project. “The hope had fizzled out and then re-gathered,” she said. “And then it broke apart again.”

In March, Allison Hickey, undersecretary of the Veterans Benefits Administration, told members of Congress there is an agreement in place requiring the DOD to provide “100-percent-complete service treatment and personnel records in an electronic, searchable format.”

The VBA estimates such a move would cut the claims backlog time by anywhere from 60 to 90 days.

An amendment to the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act, proposed by Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., would require the DOD to provide complete service treatment records to the VA within 90 days of a service member leaving the military. “No doubt in my mind our veterans will be better served by an electronic system,” Kirkpatrick told News21.

The Janus Joint Legacy Viewer, a cloud-based medical records system that allows DOD and VA medical records to be displayed on one screen, launched at nine sites in July. David Waltman, the VA’s chief user experience architect of the integrated electronic health record, said the department is exploring the use of the Janus Joint Legacy Viewer to help in the claims process. He said it will ultimately be tested at regional offices this year, but only two employees at each office will have training and access.

Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., in May introduced legislation requiring the VA and DOD to revive plans for the single, integrated health record system. “You don’t spend a billion dollars and say we can’t do it,” Roe told News21 in a phone interview.

“This is one we have to get right,” he said. “Not for my generation, but for future soldiers I don’t even know.”

Jerral Hancock wakes up every night in Lancaster, Calif., around 1 a.m., dreaming he is trapped in a burning tank. He opens his eyes, but he can’t move, he can’t get out of bed and he can’t get a drink of water.

Hancock, 27, joined the Army in 2004 and went to Iraq, where he drove a tank. On Memorial Day 2007 — one month after the birth of his second child — Hancock drove over an IED. Just 21, he lost his arm and the use of both legs, and now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. The Department of Veterans Affairs pays him $10,000 every month for his disability, his caretakers, health care, medications and equipment for his new life.

No government agency has calculated fully the lifetime cost of health care for the large number of post-9/11 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with life-lasting wounds. But it is certain to be high, with the veterans’ higher survival rates, longer tours of duty and multiple injuries, plus the anticipated cost to the VA of reducing the wait times for medical appointments and reaching veterans in rural areas.

“Medical costs peak decades later,” said Linda Bilmes, a professor in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and coauthor of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

As veterans age, their injuries worsen over time, she said. The same long-term costs seen in previous wars are likely to be repeated to a much larger extent.

Post-9/11 veterans in 2012 cost the VA $2.8 billion of its $50.9 billion health budget for all of its annual costs, records show. And that number is expected to increase by $510 million in 2013, according to the VA budget.

Like Hancock, many veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have survived multiple combat injuries because of military medicine’s highly advanced care. Doctors at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio repaired Hancock’s body with skin grafts and sent him to spinal-cord doctors for the shrapnel that ultimately left him paralyzed. He still has his right arm, but he can only move the thumb on his right hand.

Injuries like Hancock’s likely will lead to other medical issues, ranging from heart disease to diabetes, for example, as post-9/11 veterans age.

“So we have the same phenomenon but to a much greater extent,” Bilmes said. “And that drives a lot of the long-term costs of the war, which we’re not looking at the moment, but which will hit in 30, 40, 50 years from now.”

Veterans like Hancock with polytraumatic injuries will require decades of costly rehabilitation, according to a 2012 Military Medicine report that analyzed the medical costs of war through 2035. More than half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are between the ages of 18 and 32, according to 2011 American Community Survey data. They are expected to live 50 more years, the Institute of Medicine reports.

About 25 percent of post-9/11 veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and 7 percent have traumatic brain injury, according to Congressional Budget Office analyses of VA data. The average cost to treat them is about four to six times greater than those without these injuries, CBO reported. And polytrauma patients cost an additional 10 times more than that.

Post-9/11 veterans use the VA more than other veterans and their numbers are growing at the fastest rate. Fifty-six percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans use the VA now. and their numbers are expected to grow by 9.6 percent this year and another 7.2 percent next year, according to a VA report from March 2013.

In response to multiple injuries suffered by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, the VA established its polytrauma care system in 2005, creating centers around the country where veterans are treated for multiple injuries, ranging from TBI and PTSD to amputations, hearing loss, visual impairments, spinal-cord injuries, fractures and burns. Post-9/11 veterans make up around 90 percent of polytrauma patients, said Susan Lucht, program manager of the polytrauma center at the Southern Arizona VA Health Care System in Tucson.

Each polytrauma patient costs the VA on average $136,000 a year, according to a CBO report, using VA data from 2004 through 2009. And many of their medical issues will never go away.

One TBI patient at the Tucson center, Erik Castillo, has received speech, physical, occupational, psychological and recreational therapies for all of the paralysis, cognition and memory issues associated with injuries he received in a bomb blast in Baghdad. But Castillo’s treatment is exactly what medical professionals and economists say could potentially be cost-saving as well as life-saving.

If the VA treats primary injuries early on and creates a community and family support system, it might be able to lower costs later, said Dr. James Geiling, Dr. Joseph Rosen and Ryan Edwards, an economist, in their 2012 Military Medicine report.

“And those are the costs that we’re trying to reduce by giving the care that we do,” said Dr. G. Alex Hishaw, a staff neurologist at the Tucson center.

Castillo has been living with TBI for nine years, and he still goes to the VA three times a week for therapy. “I’ll utilize the VA for the rest of my life,” he said.

The shrapnel that entered Castillo’s brain from a bomb in Baghdad in 2004 burned a portion of his frontal lobe, which had to be removed. Doctors told his parents that he wouldn’t survive and that if he did, he would need care for the rest of his life.

Slowly, Castillo started to re-create himself. He learned to talk again, to eat again, to move his left arm and leg. Now, he is going to college.

“We want them to graduate,” Lucht said. “But they always know that this is their foundation. This space is here. And their needs will change as they age.”

As Hancock and other post-9/11 veterans age, they will need increased medical care and will become more expensive for the VA. The injuries they have now will likely lead to more complicated and expensive medical issues. TBI, for example, may lead to greater risk of Alzheimer’s disease, psychological, physical and functional problems, and alcohol-abuse disorders.

Doctors and economists argue that today’s conversation should not only be about the primary wounds of war, but about the medical issues that are often associated with them. PTSD, for example, is often associated with smoking, substance abuse, depression, anxiety, heart disease, obesity and diabetes. Amputations are associated with obesity, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, back pain and phantom limb pain.

“We should help an amputee to reduce his cholesterol and maintain his weight at age 30 to 40, rather than treating his coronary artery disease or diabetes at age 50,” Geiling, Rosen and Edwards wrote.

“Society is not yet considering the medical costs of caring for today’s veterans in 2035 — a time when they will be middle-aged, with health issues like those now seen in aging Vietnam veterans, exacerbated by comorbidities of post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury and polytrauma,”they wrote.

Polytrauma centers have expanded across the country. But that doesn’t mean that all veterans live close enough to access them. In many parts of country, health care is hampered by distance because veterans who use the VA live far away from their closest VA hospital.

For Army Spc. Terence “Bo” Jones, it is more important that he live near his family.

Jones lost both of his legs to an improvised explosive device blast in Afghanistan in 2012. Like Hancock, Jones woke up at Brooke Army Medical Center with his family by his side.

He was 21 when he stepped on the IED. It shot him 10 feet into the air and he landed in a nearby well. He doesn’t remember it, but his friends told him he was conscious and trying to climb out.

Now an outpatient at the VA polytrauma center in San Antonio, Jones is learning to walk on prosthetic legs, provided to him by the VA. The VA also provides adaptive driving equipment for his car, and he is taking driver education to learn how to drive with only his hands. One day, he hopes to get a service dog, and the VA will pay for veterinary care and equipment for the dog to help its owner.

“We can get them anything that they need,” Lucht said.

The VA provides other assistive accommodations for injured veterans — from grab bars and walk-in showers to wheelchairs and specialized seating. And a lot of veterans wear out their prosthetic limbs because they’re active, Lucht said.

When Jones finishes rehab, he plans to move home to Idaho, go to college and open his own shop doing custom cars and motorcycles. But in Idaho, Jones won’t be near a polytrauma center anymore.

One of the most rural veteran populations in the country is served by the Reno, Nev., VA hospital, said Darin Farr, the hospital’s public affairs officer. “We’re actually considered frontier,” he said.

The hospital’s patients come from as far away as 280 miles. More than 29,000 veterans are enrolled in the Reno hospital, staffed by 1,200 employees, only 40 to 50 percent of whom actually provide medical care.

Many VA hospitals fall behind in entering data from private health records or following up with patients, especially mental health patients for whom follow-up care is particularly important, according to VA Office of Inspector General reports.

The VA doesn’t always provide timely mental health evaluations for first-time patients, and existing patients often wait more than the recommended 14 days for their appointments, the OIG reported last year.

Veterans have complained for many years about long wait times to schedule appointments. “Long wait times and inadequate scheduling processes at VA medical centers have been long-standing problems that persist today,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in February. Inconsistent scheduling policies, staffing, phone access and an outdated scheduling system make the problem worse.

Meanwhile, both the GAO and OIG have reported that VA’s data on wait times for medical appointments is unreliable, and some schedulers entered incorrect dates or changed them to meet performance standards.

Farr says the Reno hospital faces unique challenges that might contribute to wait times. The hospital competes with other hospitals for employees who might pay more than the government does.

“We don’t have a lot of space,” he added. The hospital schedules more than 373,000 outpatient visits and 4,200 inpatient visits every year. But it only has 64 hospital beds — 14 psychiatric, 12 ICU and only 38 for general use.

When Terence Jones finishes rehab at the polytrauma center in San Antonio, he hopes adaptive equipment will help him return to a normal life. Jerral Hancock, on the other hand, knows that he never will.

Hancock misses the adrenaline rush of life before his injury. He longs for a wheelchair that will go faster than 5 mph. He described the time he fell out of his hospital bed as exhilarating. He busted his cheek open, but he loved it.

With the $100,000 the Defense Department gave Hancock for his injuries when he was discharged, he bought two mobile homes outside Los Angeles, one for him and his two children, ages 9 and 6, and one for his mother and stepfather, who take care of him full time. Hancock supports all of them with his monthly disability check from the VA.

The VA bought him a wheelchair and put a lift into his front porch. They widened the doors in his mobile home so his wheelchair could fit in and out. They will pay for his medications and all of his medical care for the rest of his life.

When Hancock arrived at his new mobile home, he couldn’t fit his wheelchair in the front door. So he kept one wheelchair inside, and his stepdad carried him through the door and down the steps to a second wheelchair that he paid for himself. It took eight months for the VA to pay him $1,000 for the second wheelchair, and four months to put a lift into his front porch.

“I was stuck in the house for six months over this fight,” Hancock said. “I had a wheelchair upstairs and I had a wheelchair downstairs. And my caretaker carried me up and down the stairs from wheelchair to wheelchair. It was ridiculous.”

The VA also bought Hancock an $85,000 arm that he could attach to his shoulder to use. But he can’t seem to get it to work.

The VA gave Hancock $11,000 toward a car, but his mother said that doesn’t come close to the cost of a handicap-equipped vehicle. Instead, he bought a seven-passenger bus with a lift for his wheelchair.

Even with all of the money that the VA spends on Hancock’s medical and family care, he still lives in a mobile home, and his bedroom has little extra space with a hospital bed and a wheelchair in it. He can’t fit into his kids’ bedrooms. He can’t drink a glass of water on his own. And his air conditioning hardly works, even though he can’t be in the heat for too long because his burns prevent him from sweating.

Hancock’s children also have had to adjust.

“My son watched me walk off — he was going on 3 — and I jumped on a bus with a couple hundred pounds of gear,” he said. “The next time he saw me, I lost 100 pounds… I looked like a skeleton and I had tubes coming out everywhere… My daughter, this is all she knows.”

A mysterious kidney disease that is afflicting Central American agricultural workers has been raising growing alarms among governments, and in April the region’s health ministers jointly declared that the ailment was among their top public health priorities.

Yet only weeks after the health ministers issued their declaration, the World Bank approved a new loan to expand a sugar plantation in Nicaragua, renewing its support for an industry whose workers have been devastated by the disease. The $15 million loan to the Montelimar plantation in Nicaragua is estimated to create 1,300 new rural jobs, according to World Bank documents.

Over the last two years, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has examined how a rare type of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is killing thousands of agricultural workers along Central America’s Pacific Coast, as well as in Sri Lanka and India. Scientists have yet to definitively uncover the cause of the parallel epidemics, which have caused tens of thousands of deaths worldwide and are suspected to be linked to dehydration and toxic exposure.

ICIJ’s initial report, Island of the Widows, focused on a leading Nicaraguan sugar plantation that received substantial loans in 2006 from the World Bank’s private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation. Sick former workers from the plantation filed a complaint to the IFC’s ombudsman alleging that the loan violated the Bank’s guidelines by failing to consider the epidemic. The complaint resulted in a recently concluded study of the epidemic’s causes by a team from Boston University, which found that there was still not enough evidence to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Now, for the first time since the controversy emerged, the World Bank has approved a new loan to another Central American sugar plantation within the affected region. In its environmental and social review of the loan, the IFC stated that there was no proof that the disease is linked to sugarcane work.

“Disease epidemiology and an alleged connection between sugar industries in general have previously been investigated through studies requested by the IFC Compliance Advisor Ombudsman,” stated the IFC’s review documents, referring to the Boston University study. “No direct relationship between the sugar sector and the disease has been established.”

It’s an interpretation that Daniel Brooks, the lead scientist for the Boston University team, said is technically accurate. But it’s quite different from how Brooks characterized his findings, which included a study of workers over the course of one six-month harvest season that found that laborers in more physically strenuous jobs were suffering significant levels of kidney damage.

“What I wouldn’t say there is that there’s no direct link and what I wouldn’t say is that the evidence is most consistent with no link,” Brooks said. “It’s pretty much the consensus of researchers in the region that heat stress and these occupational exposures are most likely to be playing a role.”

The declaration adopted by Central America’s Council of Health Ministers in April sounded a similar note. The agreement stated that the disease “predominates among young men, and has been associated with conditions including toxic environmental and occupational risk factors, dehydration, and habits that are damaging to renal health.”

The World Bank’s review process for this year’s loan, which was approved in May and signed in June, also had significant differences from its review of the initial 2006 loan. While its 2006 review did not address CKD at all, the review of the current loan to Montelimar describes the company’s preventive measures for protecting its workers from CKD. After the document states that there is no direct link between the sugar industry and the illness, it notes the hydration and worker education policies for CKD that Montelimar has put in place.

IFC spokeswoman Adriana Gomez said that as part of the Environment and Social Action Plan developed as a part of the loan, these preventive measures were formalized and incorporated into Montelimar’s management system.

“To this date, there is no definitive scientific answer to what the cause of CKD is, so all possible connections remain open to future research,” Gomez said. “Manual cane harvesters are performing physical work under hot weather conditions. Preventing dehydration is a key part of these workers occupational health and safety.”

The sugar industry is a major exporter in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America, and in some rural communities it is one of the only sources of employment. Earlier this month, Nicaragua’s National Commission of Sugar Producers confirmed that Nicaragua had entered an agreement to export 40,000 tons of sugar to the European Union.

As the mysterious kidney epidemic continues to afflict sugarcane workers and other agricultural laborers, the stakes will only continue to grow in determining whether it is related to their grueling labor in the fields.

A supposedly Texas-based super PAC is living up to its hush-hush name — and potentially breaking federal law in the process.

Secretive Politics, which in August 2012 filed organizational paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, has yet to submit one mandatory campaign finance report or otherwise disclose a dime of what it's raised or spent, according to agency records.

The super PAC initially sprang to a hasty start, with treasurer June Walton asking the FEC to "register this organization as a super pac as soon as possible" as the "committee intends to make unlimited independent expenditures."

But since last year, the FEC has mailed Secretive Politics four "failure to file" notices, the most recent on Aug. 22. In the letter, Deborah Chacona, assistant staff director for the FEC's reports analysis division, threatened the super PAC with "civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action."

And now, the person or people behind Secretive Politics, which as a super PAC may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for and against politicians, are nowhere to be found.

Messages to its listed email address bounce back, and its stated website, SecretivePolitics.com, is nonfunctional, the domain today owned by registration company GoDaddy.com.

The toll-free phone number listed on FEC documents for Walton ring to a voicemail box where a computerized voice states that the caller has reached the "learn-on-demand sales team" and invites one to leave a message. The phone number is also identical to that of a seemingly defunct company that advertised "luxurious, exclusive in-flight spa services" for private aircraft owners.

Meanwhile, the address Secretive Politics lists for itself leads to an office building management company in Sugar Land, Texas, called BusinesSuites Sugar Creek.

The company, in addition to providing physical offices for tenants, specializes in "virtual offices" that, for $350 a month, offer clients a mailing address, live receptionist and access to a conference room — but no actual office.

FEC Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub said she "wouldn't want to pre-judge" the actions of Secretive Politics since it's "possible I could be called upon to render a formal decision at some point."

The commission itself has a menu of enforcement options at its disposal. They include slapping the super PAC with civil fines to administratively terminating it, as it has with a some federally registered political committees that either provided erroneous information to the FEC or failed to file required reports.

It could also refer the matter to the Department of Justice if it believes the super PAC has violated a criminal statute.

A citizen could also file a complaint against Secretive Politics with the FEC.

Marine Corps reservist Mauricio Mota served in five combat zones between 1987 and 2008, the last one in Iraq, where he slept next to what he described as “deafening” field generators and rode in loud helicopters. In training he fired an even louder weapon, a “bunker buster.”

Toward the end of his Iraq tour, the now-retired staff sergeant said he realized his hearing had gone bad. “I found myself telling others, ‘Wear some ear protection so you don’t go deaf like me,’” he said.

Among post-9/11 veterans, 414,000 have come home with hearing loss and tinnitus, or ringing in the ears. The most-widespread injury for veterans has been hearing loss and other auditory complications, according to interviews and benefits data. Hearing maladies cost more than $1.4 billion in veterans disability payments annually, according to fiscal year 2010 data from the Hearing Center of Excellence, a part of the Department of Defense. At least $216 million was spent that same year for hearing aids and related devices, according to an advisory committee report to the VA.

Paying an average of $348.15 each, the VA buys one in five hearing aids sold annually in the U.S., according to that 2010 spending report, the last year that data was available.

While much of the public concern about injuries suffered by post-9/11 troops has focused on missing limbs, traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, Scott C. Forbes, immediate past-president of the Association of Veterans Administration Audiologists, said “Actually, I think the signature injury is an auditory injury.”

Hearing injuries are the most commonly documented trauma, said Forbes, a Marine veteran who has a doctorate in audiology and served during the Gulf War/Somalia conflicts. He has been a VA audiologist for 13 years. The most common disability among all veterans is hearing related, according to a January 2011 Government Accountability Office report.

Despite being such a prevalent condition, hearing problems don’t get much attention, because “in general, very few people die because of hearing loss,” said Theresa Schulz, a retired Air Force audiologist who now works in a similar capacity for Honeywell Safety Products.

Rep. Dan Benishek, R-Mich., chairman of the Subcommittee on Health of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, said in a telephone interview that 25 to 30 percent of VA disability claims involved hearing. Among them, “almost 99 percent” eventually are approved, he said. Benishek, who is a physician, has proposed that every service member gets a full audiology examination at discharge. His bills have been sent to the Congressional Budget Office to determine their impact on federal spending.

Mota took occasional hearing tests, but always managed to pass, he said. He didn’t recall hearing protection being issued, but said, “I think it was always around somewhere.”

Shortly after his discharge, Mota was with his family at a mall when he stopped at a hearing professional’s office to get tested. Immediately, he was fitted with his first two hearing aids.

“I walked out of that office and the world just opened up,” he said, “and the first sound I remember hearing was actually the ‘click click’ of a woman’s high heels.”

Last year at a Marine Corps ball, he noticed that many of his buddies seemed to have trouble hearing, too.

“I would say provocative things to someone to see how they’d respond,” said Mota, who works now as a charge nurse in a Gallup, N.M., hospital operating room, “and I could tell by the answer if they’d actually heard what I said.”

Master Sgt. Charles Peworski’s last hearing test was in 2004 despite the fact that he knows his hearing is a problem. When he and his fellow reservists gather to celebrate the Marine Corps anniversary, they joke about their hearing, or rather, the lack of it.

“We laugh about it. Out of the 10 guys in my unit, when we get together we say, ‘You know I can’t hear ... talk to my good ear,” he said.

If there is a good ear.

One of his Marine buddies wears hearing aids in both ears; necessary, he said, because of noise exposure over his career.

Peworski was exposed to several factors that cause hearing impairment for military personnel: loud noises from trucks and helicopters, as well as machine-gun bursts and artillery fire.

In October 2008, Congress mandated a Pentagon-based office that would determine ways to prevent, diagnose, mitigate, treat, rehabilitate and research hearing loss and auditory issues for active-duty service members and veterans.

Experts say too few returning veterans, like most people, don’t seek medical attention for their hearing loss when they first notice it. They just live with it.

“We know that it is usually seven years between the time someone notes a problem with their hearing and the time they actually seek medical attention for it,” said Nancy Macklin, director of events and marketing for the Hearing Loss Association of America.

Prolonged excessive noise damages hearing, according to the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), a division of the National Institutes of Health. Loud noises destroy the ear’s special cells, called “hair cells.” The ear cannot grow new hair cells.

Hair cells are one aspect of how hearing works; they help translate sound into a signal the brain interprets, or “hears.”

Loud noises also damage the auditory nerve, another hearing component that helps translate sound waves into signals the brain understands.

Hearing also can be damaged significantly by a single impulse sound — gunfire, for example.

Normal conversation is considered to be “safe” at a sound level of 60 decibels, according to the NIDCD.

On flight decks, noise levels are around 130 decibels and helicopter noise is around 100 decibels, according to military noise assessment. A soldier near an M60 machine gun is exposed to 150 decibels and within 50 feet of an exploding grenade, 160 decibels.

Blast pressure also damages hearing. Eardrums can rupture at pressure as low as 5 pounds per square inch, a fraction of what it takes to damage internal organs. Explosives used in Iraq and Afghanistan create pressure that exceeds 60 psi, according to VA audiology research. The pressure that damages lungs and intestines is 56-76 psi.

Another feature of blast injury/hearing impairment is that it likely will show up later, often as part of blast-induced traumatic brain injury.

Brett Buchanan, an Army veteran, is a claims agent for Allsup, a Belleville, Ill.-based national disability representation company that helps veterans through their medical appeals.

“Hearing loss and tinnitus are classic examples of medical issues that veterans may or may not be aware they have,” he said. “Earlier is better, and that applies to medical treatment and filing the claim for compensation.”

If veterans wait seven years, Buchanan said, their time discharged might be longer than the time they served on active duty. Upon discharge, veterans should get a baseline audiology examination, he said.

“Ultimately when the VA adjudicator looks at your claim and sees that you entered at this hearing threshold and left at this hearing threshold, and that every year after discharge your hearing has gotten progressively worse even though you were working in an office environment, it just lends credibility to your case that the hearing loss you experience today is due to that noise exposure in service,” Buchanan said.

Retired Army Capt. Mark A. Brogan was severely wounded in Iraq when a suicide bomb attack blew away part of his skull. Beyond his surviving that 2006 blast, Brogan said he is amazed by how much his hearing-assistive devices improved his life.

Brogan uses a device called CapTel lets him hear and read a transcription of telephone conversations as he listens to them.

“I had to find ways to re-engage and I just happened to discover a local HLAA (Hearing Loss Association of America) chapter,” Brogan said by phone from his Knoxville, Tenn., home. After speaking at an association convention, he now is invited to speak on many speaking panels, for organizations such as the HLAA and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Army Col. Vickie Tuten, associate director for the Hearing Center of Excellence, and Kyle Dennis, the VA representative to the center, work together to assure veterans’ well-being.

The VA and the Defense Department had worked together for about a decade, but the formal establishment of the HCE and its “one voice,” Dennis said, “is a welcome development.” That focused effort also could lead to much-needed advances in technology. For example, service members in 2011 told the GAO that they do not always wear hearing protection because of concerns with “comfort and communication.”

“There is emerging technology for the future to protect the hearing of our service members,” Tuten said. “We will see a time in the future that we won’t have to accept hearing loss as part of military service.”

African-American youth in Oakland, Calif. are arrested — but then not charged — at “vastly disproportionate” rates compared to others, which raises troubling questions about police interactions with some of the city’s most vulnerable young people, according to a report released this week by civil rights advocates.

During a five-year period between 2008 and 2012, black children represented 29 percent of Oakland’s school-age population but 78 percent of the more than 13,680 juveniles arrested — mostly by city police — and referred to the Alameda County Probation Department, according to the study, “From Report Card to Criminal Record.” 

“Shockingly,” the report also says, more than half of those arrests did not lead to charges or further involvement by probation officials. Black kids represented 78 percent of the youths whose arrests were not “sustained” in the end, according to an analysis of information obtained by the report’s authors.

Data also showed, the report said, that 72 percent of calls from schools to the Oakland Unified School District’s own police force were requests to respond to allegations of “non-criminal conduct” by students or others. Only 28 percent of calls were requests to respond to allegations of drugs, alcohol, weapons, crimes involving property or crimes against a person.

“This raises questions about the appropriate role of police in our schools,” the report says. “Why are police being called for so many non-serious incidents, situations that may be better handled by counselors, administrators, school staff or parent volunteers?”

That question may have particular resonance in Oakland, where the city police force has lost a quarter of its force since 2008 due to budget cutbacks that have hampered its effectiveness. Violent crime in Oakland— the Golden State’s number one city in crime per capita — rose almost 20 percent in one year between 2011 and 2012. 

The report on juveniles was produced by Public Counsel, the nation’s largest pro bono law firm, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Black Organizing Project, a community group focused on both police shootings of black youth and low graduation rates for black males in Oakland, estimated at about 50 percent. 

The groups are calling for more oversight and a “memorandum of understanding” to define the role of school police as well as city police involvement at or around schools in Oakland.

California legislators are considering an amended proposal that would encourage schools to clarify police roles on campuses statewide in safety plans.

The idea of deploying police in schools is popular, especially in the wake of last December’s schoolhouse massacre in Newtown, Conn. But juvenile and family court judges and civil rights groups nationwide warn that putting police in and around schools can lead to more arrests of kids for minor indiscretions, as the Center for Public Integrity reported earlier this year.

The more than 13,680 juvenile arrests in Oakland the rights groups’ report cited were made citywide; arrests in or near schools, however, are not broken out. The Oakland schools’ own police officers made 85 arrests between 2010 and 2012.

The rights groups are also urging more accountability for how the Oakland Police Department is using nearly $11 million in federal funds received as part of a Community Oriented Police Services (COPS) hiring grant. The U.S. Department of Justice gave Oakland the grant, which was sought with support from Oakland school officials.

Under the grant, which runs from late 2011 through mid-2014, more police officers are being assigned to Oakland schools. But the right groups argue that there is insufficient clarity on the role of police. In the grant language, Oakland officials state that officers will help enhance safety “by role modeling and mentoring” young people “at a critical stage in their lives.”

Following the Newtown shooting, states and many school officials began pushing for more federal, state and local resources to hire school police. But civil rights groups and juvenile and family court judges also began warning that school police can lead to more ticketing and arrests of children for minor reasons. 

In Oakland, police officials did not return calls for comment about the report released this week. The San Jose Mercury News quoted a police representative on Wednesday who did not provide data but said juvenile arrests had dropped during the grant’s first year in 2012.

The data cited in the report, the rights groups say, shows that Oakland’s black youth were are six times more likely than Latinos and 23 times more likely than whites their age to be arrested and referred to county probation officials.

Oakland is one of America’s most ethnically diverse cities, and while the black population has declined as a proportion of the population, the city is still considered a hub of black culture on the West Coast.

The city is currently struggling with the aftermath of severe budget cuts that have taken a toll on services of all kinds. Rising income inequality and family crises — poverty, high rates of incarceration of parents, violence — are also serious concerns.

The Oakland police have been under fire, too, for some time. Allegations of incompetence in addressing crime, abuses of residents and racial profiling led to a court appointment of a federal overseer to supervise reforms in the department— and avert a federal takeover. Former Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton, now a consultant — he also led New York City’s police — recently issued a report criticizing Oakland’s police practices and making recommendations to improve investigations and crime prevention.

Alarmingly high black school dropout rates prompted Oakland Unified district officials in 2010 to set up an office of African-American Male Achievement, believed to be the first office of its kind in the nation. The purpose is to end “epidemic failure” by instituting teaching and conflict-resolution models proven to work inside the district and elsewhere.

The district also agreed to voluntary federal oversight almost a year ago after officials at the U.S. Department of Education began investigating spiraling numbers of suspensions of black students. Forcing children to miss school to punish them only contributes to them falling more behind academically, argued the department’s Office for Civil Rights.

Studies show that 44 percent of black male students removed from Oakland’s schools multiple times were ousted as punishment for “defiance of authority.”

District officials concurred that reforms were needed and agreed to push ahead with more staff training and the institution of “restorative justice” methods of counseling designed to get students to understand their infractions and learn to resolve conflict.

School officials think if they’re helping children cope with problems and better engage in school, fewer arrests out on Oakland’s streets will follow, said Troy Flint, director of communications for the Oakland Unified School District.

Flint called some of the arguments in the new report “redundant” and said that the district is already working to address disproportionate suspensions at school and conflicts that might lead to negative interactions with police.  

He said the district would probably not have a problem establishing a memorandum of understanding for the role of police, but that it wouldn’t want to try to set quotas for arrests of students of certain ethnicities.

“It’s a leap to conclude that because more students of one ethnicity are arrested it’s because of bias,” Flint said. But he said the district supports reforms that aim to prevent “criminalization” of kids and police involvement when it’s not warranted.

Laura Faer, statewide education rights director in California for the Public Counsel Law Center, said that the new report’s findings underscore how too many kids are still being swept into the criminal justice system in Oakland — a phenomenon that isn’t good for trying to improve kids’ engagement in school.

As the report also notes, scholarly criminology research has found that “a first-time arrest doubles the chances that a student will drop out of high school, and a first-time court appearance quadruples those chances.”

Additional studies, the report points out, have found that getting kicked out of school — repeated suspensions, for example — also puts youths at greater risk of dropping out, getting into more serious legal trouble and developing records that complicate youths’ attempts to get a job, seek financial aid for education or join the military.

“There is incredible cause for alarm when you look at this data,” Faer said.

She questioned what happens to kids who are arrested and then not charged, and whether they or their families are directed to resources where they might find aid to help deal with kids’ problems or family crises that might contribute to behavior that drew police attention.

Sometimes, said former Oakland student Joevonte Kelly, black kids just feel picked on. A 2010 high school graduate, he now works with the Black Organizing Project. In the report, he recounts being stopped for changing a lane without a signal while driving and being held for 45 minutes in a squad car because he was told he matched a robbery suspect’s description. He said the officer laughed at him and insulted him before letting him go.  

While Flint said many parents and kids believe police officers in schools make people feel more secure, students quoted in the report say they feel uncomfortable or harassed by officers, harassed and that police “always assume you are doing something” wrong.

Veterans are killing themselves at more than double the rate of the civilian population with about 49,000 taking their own lives between 2005 and 2011, according to data collected over eight months by News21.

Records from 48 states show the annual suicide rate among veterans is about 30 for every 100,000 of the population, compared to a civilian rate of about 14 per 100,000. The suicide rate among veterans increased an average 2.6 percent a year from 2005 to 2011, or more than double that of the 1.1 percent civilian rate, according to News21’s analysis of states’ mortality data.

Nearly one in every five suicides nationally is a veteran — 18 to 20 percent annually — compared with Census data that shows veterans make up about 10 percent of the U.S. adult population.

“Anytime a veteran who fought our enemies abroad or helped defend America from within our borders dies by their own hand, it’s completely unacceptable,” Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veteran’s Affairs, told an American Legion conference in Washington earlier this year. The suicide rate has remained consistently high, he said, adding that more work was needed to address gaps in veterans’ mental health care.

“It’s not enough that the veteran suicide problem isn’t getting worse,” he said, “it isn’t getting any better.”

A 2007 law required the Department of Veterans Affairs to increase its suicide prevention efforts. In response to the Joshua Omvig Veteran Suicide Prevention Act — named for an Iraq war veteran who committed suicide in 2005 — the department’s efforts include educating the public about suicide risk factors, providing additional mental health resources for veterans and tracking veteran suicides in each state. The VA’s mental health care staff and budget have grown by nearly 40 percent over the last six years and more veterans are seeking mental health treatment.

The law mandated that the VA design a comprehensive program to reduce veteran suicides. Provisions included training VA staff in suicide-prevention techniques, factoring mental health concerns in overall veteran health assessments, providing referrals at veterans’ request to treatment programs and designating suicide-prevention counselors at VA medical centers. It also required the VA to work with the other federal departments on researching the “best practices” for preventing suicides.

VA efforts since 2007 have shown some results. The Veterans Crisis Line — a national phone line — has experienced a steady increase in the number of calls, texts and chat session visits from former soldiers struggling with suicidal thoughts. In 2007, its first year, 9,379 calls went to the crisis line. Each year the call volume has increased, reaching a high of 193,507 calls in 2012, totaling about 840,000 overall, according to the VA.

“It’s discouraging to keep looking at the (suicide) rates, and we have to keep plugging away,” said Dr. Jan Kemp, the VA national suicide-prevention coordinator, and program manager of the crisis line. But she said without resources such as the crisis line “the rates would be higher.”

The VA is analyzing mortality data collected from states and Department of Defense records to try to understand veteran suicides. The task has been “almost impossible” until recent years, Kemp said, because the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not track veteran deaths and most veterans are not enrolled in the VA system.

News21 sought data on post-9/11 veteran suicides, but state statistics rarely included identifying information or detailed service records. However, a 2012 report from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) showed that between 2002 and 2005, 144 veterans of post-9/11 wars committed suicide out of total veteran population of 490,346. In 2009, 98 men and women from post-9/11 wars took their own lives, according to that same report.

A plurality of veteran suicides has been among those 65 or older, according to the data. About 19 percent of suicides that took place between 2005 and 2011 were veterans between 18 and 44 years old, among the 36 states with available age data. It is important to reach post-9/11 veterans early, Kemp said, to help mitigate a potential increase in suicides as veterans approach those vulnerable ages.

“Maybe we can change that trajectory,” she said.

War can exact a heavy toll on the mental health of soldiers, but veterans have the same risk factors for suicide as the general population, said Craig Bryan, research director at the University of Utah National Center for Veterans Studies. Those factors include feelings of depression, hopelessness, post-traumatic stress disorder, a history of trauma and access to firearms.

“Veterans who die by suicide look a lot like Americans who die by suicide,” Kemp said.

Veterans experience periods of readjustment as they reintegrate into civilian life. Traits and training needed to survive in a war zone — like maintaining constant alertness — might contribute to troubling behaviors in civilian life, including edgy feelings while being easily startled, according to the SAMHSA report. Suicide warning signs including feelings of being hopeless, out of control, angry or trapped. Combat veterans might experience a variety of stress reactions including nightmares, sleeplessness, sadness, feelings of rejection, abandonment or hopelessness. Lack of concentration, aggressive behavior, reckless driving, and increasing use of alcohol, tobacco and drugs are other common struggles.

Clinton Hall, 35, lives in Portland, Ore., working as a supply-chain analyst. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army specialist and was discharged in 2007. One of his close friends, who also was a veteran, committed suicide upon coming home.

“The bad part about it is that he didn’t give us a chance to talk. I mean, if he had just said, ‘Hey, Clint I’m thinking about doing this.’ I could have said, hey man, I’m thinking about doing it too. You got to have that conversation. You have to tell somebody, as embarrassing as it is,” he said. “All I ever considered when I thought about (suicide) was the guilt I was feeling and just wanting a way out, wanting to not have those memories anymore.”

Concussions also are a chronic risk factor leading to suicidal thoughts, Bryan said, because head trauma makes people more vulnerable to suicidal thoughts. The dangerous daily routines of a soldier — or simply involvement in sports or accidents — increase the risk of injury.

“It turns up the volume on depression,” he said.

In 2010, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki asked governors to collaborate on collecting veterans’ suicides information in their states. Through November 2012, according the VA report, 34 states had submitted data and agreements had been forged with eight others to provide information.

News21 filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the raw data collected by the VA to this point, but it was denied because the “disclosure of raw research data poses a serious threat to the scientific process” and because of fears the information would be misinterpreted without peer review.

Most states provided veteran suicide information gleaned from death certificates. VA research, Kemp said, shows death certificates are about 90 percent accurate and “good enough” to help understand veteran suicides.

Veterans are over-represented among suicides compared to the general population, a trend seen in most states between 2005 and 2011.

For example, in Alaska, veterans were about 14 percent of the population, but represented about 21 percent of all suicides in 2010. The same year in Washington, Census data showed veterans were about 11 percent of the population, but state vital statistics showed they represented about 23 percent of suicides.

Suicide rates within the veteran population often were double and sometimes triple the civilian suicide rate in several states. Arizona’s 2011 veteran suicide rate was 43.9 per 100,000 people, nearly tripling the civilian suicide rate of 14.4, according to the latest numbers from the state health department.

Among states with the widest disparities and highest rates, Idaho had an average annual veteran suicide rate of 49.5 per 100,000 people, according to News21 analysis, compared to a civilian rate of 20 per 100,000. Montana had an average annual veteran suicide rate of 55.9 per 100,000 people and a 23.9 civilian rate.

New Jersey had among the lowest annual veteran suicide rates across the time period, with 17.2 dying by suicide per 100,000 people and a civilian rate of 8.6 Connecticut had a veteran suicide rate of 20.11 per 100,000 people and a civilian rate of 11.

Massachusetts had the smallest disparity and one of the lowest rates, according to the data, with an average annual veteran suicide rate of 12.3 and a civilian rate of 10.3.

About 26 percent of suicides in Oregon were among veterans, with 96 percent of them being male, according to a November 2012 study by the state’s human services department. New21 analysis showed that 24 percent of all Oregon suicides annually were veterans.

As with suicides in general, veterans taking their own lives have been overwhelmingly male — about 97 percent among the 30 states that reported gender demographics. While suicide has traditionally been a problem among white males, it underscores the suicide risks faced by the U.S. veteran population.

In June, the VA hired 1,600 clinicians to assist with mental health counseling for veterans in compliance an executive order last year from President Barack Obama. This is only part of the solution, Utah researcher Bryan said, because “veterans don’t come to mental health treatment.”

The challenge is understanding suicide in the general population, Bryan said, and then translating those factors for the military and veterans, who are part of a “unique subculture” in the U.S.

“(Veterans) have different rules and different expectations and ways of seeing themselves” and their roles in society, he said. “What we see in society doesn’t always translate as well into the military.”

Part of that culture is mental toughness, he said, along with “elitism” and “feelings of superiority,” mindsets that render traditional suicide prevention methods less effective. “They are very much like elite athletes,” he said of those least likely to complain of pain or injury.

Hall, who was diagnosed with PTSD following his return home, had a message for veterans who might struggle — as he did — with suicidal thoughts:

“Talk to anybody. If you’ve got a number or an email address for your battle buddies, reach out to them. Chances are, they’re feeling the same way you do. If you don’t have anybody to talk to, call the VA. Call the suicide prevention hotline. Hell, if you can find me on Google, contact me and we’ll talk. But don’t do it (commit suicide). I’m thinking about it too, I know other people are too. But don’t do it.”

The Veterans Crisis Line can be reached online or by calling 800-273-8255.

Bonnie Campo and and Chase Cook were Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellows for News21 this summer.

Membership in labor unions fell last year to its lowest level in nearly a century, but Big Labor remains a major player in national politics.

Labor Day this year is celebrated on the heels of a massive strike by fast-food restaurants workers and a renewed discussion about the merits of raising the minimum wage in the United States. And unions have been vocally supporting a push for comprehensive immigration reform.

In the electoral arena, labor unions have long donated to candidates and urged their members to support like-minded politicians. But during the 2012 election cycle, labor unions represented seven of the top 25 super donors to super PACs, according to research by the Center for Public Integrity.

The United Auto Workers ranked seventh among the biggest super PAC donors, contributing $11.8 million, while the National Education Association ranked eighth and gave $10.8 million.

Other big union-givers included:

• The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, at $8.2 million
   
• The AFL-CIO, at $7.4 million
   
• The American Federation of Teachers, at $5.8 million
   
• The Service Employees International Union, at $4.4 million
   
• The United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing, Pipefitting and Sprinkler Fitting Industry, at $4.2 million

It’s worth noting, however, that these seven labor unions collectively gave super PACs about half as much money as billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam Adelson, who ranked as the top super PAC donors.

More than $1 billion in government contracts meant for small businesses owned by disabled veterans have been reclassified over the last 10 years by the Department of Veterans Affairs so that the work — and almost $150 million to date — could be given to non-veteran companies, a News21 analysis shows.

The reallocation is the consequence of increased enforcement measures and more stringent qualifications imposed by the VA after it discovered that it had awarded millions of dollars in contracts to companies that fraudulently claimed to be owned by veterans. Veterans are now required to submit a battery of paperwork in which the smallest flaw could result in disqualification.

The VA has said that the work was reclassified because there were not enough vet-owned companies that qualified for the contracts.

Since congressional passage of the Veterans Benefit Act of 2003, which mandated that each government agency set aside at least 3 percent of contracts for service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, the VA has set aside the largest percentage of contracts of any government agency. The contracts range from information technology to construction to janitorial work done for the VA.

Advocates for veteran-owned businesses, who had previously been primarily concerned about contract fraud, are now focused on the paperwork obstacles facing legitimate veteran-owned businesses applying for VA contracts.

“Unfortunately, the complaints from the veteran community have now shifted from contract awards going to misrepresented firms to the onerous and unpredictable verification process itself,” said Scott Denniston, executive director of the National Veterans Small Business Coalition. “We understand the need … to ensure only eligible veterans receive the benefits of the ‘Veterans First’ contracting program but we strongly disagree with VA’s punishing legitimate veteran small-business owners. It does not appear to us that VA had anyone involved in writing the rules who understands how small businesses operate in the digital age.”

In order to qualify for contracts set aside by the VA to service-disabled veterans, a business owner must submit a battery of paperwork, ranging from company organizational documents to the resumes of all the key personnel.

Robert Doyle, a sergeant first class in the Army during a tour in Iraq, returned in late 2007 as a 100 percent service-disabled veteran. For his actions, he received a Bronze Star for “heroic or meritorious achievement or service.”

Doyle started a business doing welding and offering plow services in 2012 out of his home in Massachusetts.

“The military teaches you to be an entrepreneur,” said the veteran who served for 14 years in the Army. “They teach you how to make important decisions. They teach you to be self-sufficient. I’m just embracing what I’ve been taught.”

To start contracting, Doyle needed two things: to be verified as a veteran-owned business by the VA and the money to get his business off the ground.

Doyle got the verification, but only after waiting seven months after submitting an application. And even that was not the end of the process. Despite being verified, Doyle said that he can neither apply for nor receive set-aside contracts because the VA gave his company a unique code used to identify companies that was incorrect. As a result, he’s going back through the process again.

In order to get verified by the VA to receive veteran business set-asides, a veteran must work 40 hours a week at the business — unrealistic for many, considering the business won’t have any federal contracts before they get verified.

“On the one hand, many veterans cannot afford to quit their day jobs, and give up their paychecks, until their SDVOSB (Service Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business) firms win their first contracts,” said Steven Koprince, a Kansas lawyer who has written books on small business contracts. “On the other hand, these veterans cannot, in many cases, qualify for SDVOSB verification unless they leave their day jobs because of the full-time requirement. In my mind, this conundrum unnecessarily discourages some otherwise qualified veterans from entering the federal contracting arena.”

In addition, the VA is required to verify the veteran status of applicants, as well as any service-connected disabilities, by querying its own databases.

In recent years, the government has had some success in uncovering companies accused of posing as veteran-owned. In 2011, a Georgia man was indicted on fraud charges for posing as a SDVOSB. Last year, an Illinois man was charged with defrauding the government. Just a few months ago, two Rochester, N.Y., brothers were accused of the same thing.

Construction company owner David Gorski of Massachusetts, for example, raked in more than $159 million in VA contracts set aside for service-disabled veterans in just a few years. But Gorski was disqualified and indicted last year because, as it turns out, he wasn’t a service-disabled veteran.

He wasn’t even a veteran.

Despite these efforts, fraudulent companies have still been able to get into the system. In October 2011, the Government Accountability Office issued 13 recommendations for the VA to improve its fraud-prevention program. In March 2013, William Shear, director of Financial Markets and Community Investment at the GAO, testified that the VA had not fully implemented seven of those recommendations.

“Without implementing these recommendations, VA’s program for awarding contracts to service-disabled and other veteran-owned small businesses remains vulnerable to the fraud and abuse that could result in contracts being awarded to ineligible firms,” he said.

While the VA has implemented some new strategies for verification of veteran-owned small businesses, experts say they have created barriers for legitimate companies.

Koprince says the process involves a great deal of paperwork and even some of the best-prepared companies can run into trouble.

“The documents that need to be submitted are a minefield,” Koprince said. “If a lawyer isn’t fully versed in the process, it’s easy for them to trip up.”

Most of the companies that get denied aren’t fraudulent, according to Koprince. They just filled out the paperwork wrong or forgot to submit certain documents,.

The VA reported in July that the average wait time in 2013 to be verified as a veteran-owned business was 37 days. The agency claimed to have approved more than 93 percent of those applying, up from 72 percent one month earlier.

But the appeals process for applicants who are denied was slower than the previous year. The VA reported it has taken an average of more than three months this year for denied firms to have their appeals fully processed, in addition to the initial 37 days.

About half of the firms that go through the appeals process get approved, meaning that either the initial application was missing some information in many cases or the application was mishandled.

In February 2011, James McDonnell, a Navy veteran who lives in Northern Virginia, submitted forms seeking classification as a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business. After 15 months, he was verified by the VA. In that time, he faced a plethora of hurdles including the submission of upwards of 300 documents. This allowed him to see what he called the “broken process” of veteran business verification by the agency.

McDonnell called it “ironic” that while agencies such as the departments of Homeland Security, Defense, State and Education “are expanding their support of veteran-owned small businesses, the one agency that is funded specifically to assist veterans is making it difficult to run a business,” in a 2012 letter to the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

“The VA should be assisting veterans and their companies with becoming registered in this program instead of focusing on punishing small business by using the weight of their bureaucracy as a hammer,” he wrote.

The VA allows some qualified businesses to participate in a mentor-protege program where new businesses are paired with experienced contractors in an effort to help the new veteran business get into the contracting world. Another program helps veterans who want to start businesses get the money to get off the ground if they have a feasible plan to do so.

If a veteran-owned small business needs some funds to get off the ground, the VA program can help pay for things including training in how to run a small business, materials required for daily operations and business license fees. Doyle, the veteran who started a welding and snowplow business last year, found this program by searching the Internet. Most veterans aren’t even told the program exists, Doyle said.

“Out of the millions of veterans out there, nobody knows about this,” said Doyle, who found out about the program by stumbling upon it online. “When you apply for Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment services, they don’t talk about this in the initial briefing. If you don’t know about it you’ll never hear about it.”

Doyle said his company received $97,000 in start-up help from the VA in July, more than a year after being approved. But he said that for months the VA didn’t know which account to pay him from.

“They don’t know who’s going to cut the check,” Doyle said a couple months ago. “The VA has no idea how to access this money.”

The experience left Doyle frustrated.

“I’ve been in the self-employment track for a year,” Doyle said in June. “Every single night in Iraq we wrote a check that was cashable to the enemy for our lives. So why can’t they just get me the check they’ve already promised me?”

Paul Bailey made the White House pitch on July 31. Flanked by six colleagues from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the coal industry’s most public voice, Bailey pressed the case for “achievable” greenhouse gas emissions standards for coal-fired power plants.

At the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House’s regulatory clearinghouse, the lobbyist presented a table full of economists with the coal group’s latest analysis — a survey of carbon pollution from 22 coal plants built in the U.S. over the past five years. Today’s most efficient coal-burning utilities, they still emit carbon dioxide at nearly twice the rate pegged as the first-ever emissions limit for new power plants.

Bailey reiterated longstanding industry arguments about the costs of stringent environmental regulation — lost jobs, higher energy costs. He offered the coalition’s own emissions standards. And he issued a plea: Don’t kill coal plants.

The pitch marked an opening salvo in the battle brewing over carbon regulations for power plants, a key pillar of President Obama’s climate plan. On June 25, in a speech at Georgetown University, Obama unveiled a national blueprint for cutting carbon pollution, framing it as “a plan to protect our country from the impacts of climate change.”

The president directed the Environmental Protection Agency to “put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our power plants,” and laid out a schedule for the agency to issue rules for both new and existing facilities by June 2014.

For the coal industry, the stakes instantly intensified. EPA’s carbon regulations could halt construction of future coal plants, experts say, and potentially shutter many of the more than 500 plants operating today.

Now, the industry stands poised to push back against Obama’s proposals in three fundamental ways, interviews with two dozen coal lobbyists, utility executives, environmental advocates, scholars and former EPA officials suggest:

• Industry is sure to flex its muscles in the regulatory process, inundating the EPA with comments, analyses, legal opinions and technical documents, and picking apart its draft plans.
• Plan critics will engage lobbyists to influence the rules’ language, enlisting support from other federal agencies, and offering alternatives to the White House.
• And, the coal industry is sure to oppose strict rules in a scorched-earth strategy infused with aid from allies in Congress.

In the weeks since Obama’s announcement, coal companies, coal-burning utilities and their allies have begun to unfurl their show of force. The day Bailey visited the White House, executives of American Electric Power — one of the nation’s largest utilities, with coal powering 60 percent of its fleet — also appeared there, at the Office of Management and Budget, relaying concerns about the precedent set by an aggressive rule for new plants. The next day, lawmakers and industry representatives from the coal-reliant state of West Virginia sounded a similar note during a meeting with EPA administrator Gina McCarthy. Coal-heavy utilities including Duke Energy, DTE Energy and Southern Company have since followed suit.

Some utility trade groups are airing TV ads exhorting the Obama plan as “a tax we can least afford.” Others are “educating” policy makers about its perils, including those at the Energy Department, the Council of Economic Advisors and others in the White House.

“We’re talking to everybody,” said Bailey, of the coal-advocacy coalition, which is backed by 31 railroad, mining and utility companies. “We’re trying to show we have a responsible alternative.”

Industry representatives insist they are not trying to stop carbon regulations — yet. Instead, they say, they aim to shape what has come to be seen as inevitable. “The climate issue is here, and there will be regulations,” explains John McManus, American Electric’s environmental manager, who made the trip to OMB to highlight the company’s experiences with the latest technology for curbing carbon emissions at coal plants. “We want the carbon rules to be as reasonable as possible.”

Environmentalists — many advocating their own carbon agendas — see a familiar pattern.

“The industry comes out swinging whenever EPA does anything to regulate power plants,” said Abigail Dillen, who heads the coal program at Earthjustice, and who has clashed with the coal and utility lobbies in recent regulatory battles involving coal ash, mercury emissions and other plant hazards.

If past playbooks are any indication, she explains, these groups will work to delay and weaken the Obama administration’s carbon rules at every turn, from the EPA, to the White House, Congress and the courts. “What always strikes me,” Dillen adds, “is just how successful this industry is at avoiding regulation.”

The coal industry has flexed its political muscle at record levels in recent years. Since January 2011, coal companies have funneled $14.2 million into federal campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; another $41 million went toward lobbying the federal government. A handful of large member companies, including American Electric, Southern Company and Norfolk Southern, have combined to give more than $1.9 million to the industry’s two biggest trade organizations — the clean-coal coalition and National Mining Association — the Center for Public Integrity found. And that’s just a fraction of the groups’ total lobbying budgets, since corporate disclosure reports are voluntary.

Pushback has already reached the Hill. On August 6, Republican leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee called on Obama administration officials to testify about the president’s climate plan. Summoning representatives from 13 agencies, including the EPA, committee leaders have scheduled hearings for September 18 — likely the first of many sessions.

“We seek to hear from relevant Federal agencies about U.S. climate change policies and the administration’s second term climate agenda,” wrote Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican who chairs the Subcommittee on Energy and Power.

Whitfield is among the top House recipients of coal money. His spokesperson, Chris Pack, said the industry’s support has no impact on Whitfield’s actions. He notes that the coal industry employs 14,000-plus Kentucky residents, and provides nearly 92 percent of the state’s electricity. “The Congressman believes that eliminating coal-fired power plants will cost jobs and only put our country at a competitive disadvantage with countries like China and India, who are building new coal-fired power plants every day,” Pack added.

New Focus on Long-Contentious Issue

Obama’s speech may have signaled a new commitment to tackle the threat of climate change. Yet EPA officials have long considered how to curb carbon pollution from power plants, which produce almost 40 percent of domestic greenhouse gases. In 2011, EPA’s McCarthy, then head of the agency’s air office, began holding “listening sessions” — inviting more than two dozen utility executives, environmental advocates and policy experts to share input on how to design the novel regulatory program.

By March 2012, the EPA had published a proposal to limit the carbon emissions of new plants — by law, a necessary precursor to any rule on existing plants. In its draft, the agency put forth a uniform emissions standard for all power plants, including natural gas and coal, equal to what a cutting-edge gas facility emits. Experts say a gas plant could meet that standard, but not its coal counterpart. Under the plan, the EPA would require companies looking to build coal plants to install equipment for capturing and storing carbon pollution, a costly and nascent technology.

The draft plan left the coal industry reeling at the prospect of what it calls “an effective ban” on coal plants. “Any person looking at it would say, ‘You may be paranoid,’ ” said Luke Popovich, of the National Mining Association, “ ‘but even paranoids have enemies.’ ”

Scott Segal, a D.C. lobbyist who represents coal-burning utilities, puts it bluntly: “They wrote the rule to do away with coal-fired power plants.”

Coal and utility groups hurriedly pushed back. Entities, big and small, have flooded the EPA with official comments, some totaling in the hundreds of pages, all criticizing the proposal. Most present highly technical and legal arguments, but the industries have their climate deniers, too.

Peabody Energy, the nation’s leading coal producer, has compiled 348 pages’ worth of reports, questioning the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health, and contending that global-warming science is unproven.

Peabody declined an interview request, but gave the Center a three-paragraph statement saying “any actions that would reduce coal-fueled generation harm Americans, who would feel the same pain at the plug that we all feel at the pump.” Laying out a “Peabody Plan,” the company wrote: “We stand ready to partner with the President and the Congress to invest in solutions that deliver our energy and environmental goals.”

The mining association has twice met with air officials, urging them to consider the additional “public health and welfare impacts” of a stringent carbon rule, such as the loss of coal jobs. Other groups, including the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, which Segal directs, have blasted the proposal as “regulation at its worst” in public hearings.

The most vociferous industry claim is that, by relying on the same pollution standard for separate facilities and fuels, the EPA’s draft plan violates the federal Clean Air Act. Historically, the agency has set different limits for coal and gas plants.

For the carbon rules, the “EPA proposed something that really was unprecedented,” notes Jeffrey Holmstead, who ran the EPA’s air division under President George W. Bush. Officials, he asserts, “can’t say the best technology for a coal-fired power plant is not to build a coal-fired power plant.”

Holmstead, now representing coal and utility companies at D.C. lobbyist Bracewell & Giuliani, where Segal also works, argued as much last year in an unusual lawsuit challenging the EPA proposal. Rather than wait for a final rule to be implemented, four companies, each planning to build a future coal plant, sued the agency in the federal Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit. The case was dismissed as premature, but Holmstead says it had the desired effect.

“If EPA had finalized what it had proposed,” he asserts, “it almost certainly would have been struck down in court.”

Now, the agency is revising its proposal for new power plants — attracting a record three million comments. The “re-proposal,” currently with the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or OIRA, is slated for public release “by no later than September 20,” a June 25, 2013, presidential memorandum said.

Those familiar with the rulemaking say they expect the agency will shore up the re-proposal’s policy rationale to insulate it from the legal attacks likely to follow. That could mean EPA officials will adopt a more traditional, dual standard — one for coal, and one for gas. It could also mean they will ease up on a pollution limit for coal plants, a prospect vigorously pushed by coal-friendly voices, and vehemently opposed by their environmental foes.

The EPA’s McCarthy declined to be interviewed. Obama’s top energy and climate advisor, Heather Zichal, did not respond to interview requests.

Environmentalists are hoping the EPA’s re-proposal proves to be as strong as its original. They seek an emissions standard that would still require future coal plants to capture and store some amount of carbon dioxide, thus diverting the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

“That’s the right answer,” said David Doniger, chief climate attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has lobbied the EPA, the White House and even utility companies on the group’s vision for carbon-limiting regulations. “That’s the only way to burn coal.”

Climate Fight Shifts to Obscure, Influential Agency

On July 2, EPA air officials sent a confidential draft of their re-proposal to OIRA, shifting the battleground to an obscure yet powerful agency often criticized for favoring industry. OIRA’s staff, consisting mostly of economists, serves as the White House’s window into the regulatory world. Yet its hard-edged cost-benefit analyses and regulatory reviews, critics say, sometimes act more to impede and weaken protective environmental regulations.

“OIRA is a very politicized institution,” asserts Rena Steinzor, law professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Center for Progressive Reform, an OIRA watchdog group.

In 2011, she and two CPR colleagues catalogued 10 years’ worth of OIRA’s public meetings over federal rulemakings, 1,080 in total. Industry lobbyists and company executives had visited the OIRA staff five times as often as environmental and other public-interest groups had, they found. Invariably, industry pushback triggered delays and watered-down fixes at OIRA, the study concluded. For the EPA, according to the report, OIRA changed its proposed rules 84 percent of the time after industry lobbying, compared to 65 percent for other federal agencies.

Coal and utility companies have seen such results before. Consider the EPA’s protracted rulemaking over coal ash, waste from the production of electricity. In 2010, the agency unveiled a plan to regulate coal ash disposal for the first time, setting off a frenzy of lobbying by coal and utility groups. At OIRA, staff economists have held more meetings on this one environmental rule than on any other in the office’s history, 47 to date. Of those, 34 involved industry representatives; environmentalists and representatives of the public accounted for 13.

The imbalance has had a clear effect: Now, post-OIRA review, the EPA’s proposal features a less stringent, less costly regulatory option that amounts to guidelines for the states. “Coal ash exemplified the complete politicization of the regulatory process,” said Steinzor, yet it “was not an isolated incident.”

On the EPA’s carbon-limiting rules, she warns, “The interference has probably already begun.”

Coal and utility groups began visiting OIRA about the carbon rule for new power plants as far back as February 2012, records show. Like the coal ash rule, the industry sessions have outnumbered those attended by environmental groups by 10 to four so far.

Some environmentalists fear the worst, but others point to one fundamental difference between the EPA’s carbon regulations and most other environmental rulemakings submitted for OIRA’s review: President Obama’s vocal support has put a very public spotlight on the process.

“We expect OIRA to be on the team,” said the NRDC’s Doniger. “We’d be upset if it’s not.”

Coal and utility lobbyists say they are not sure what to expect. “You hope that somebody pays attention to you,” said Bailey of the coal coalition, “and you make your case wherever you can.”

In a statement, an OIRA spokesperson said the agency “maintains a balance between protecting the health, welfare, and safety of Americans and promoting economic growth, job creation, competitiveness, and innovation.”

Referring to the carbon regulations, the spokesperson said, “The Environmental Protection Agency was directed by the President to issue a proposed rule … in a timely manner, and we expect that the deadlines in the Presidential Memorandum will be met.”

Coal Allies on the Hill

Certainly, coal industry allies on the Hill have begun to take notice. Already, they are convening hearings on Obama’s climate plan and sending letters to the White House opposing the carbon rules. A July 22, 2013 letter, signed by 23 House members, all but one Republican, from coal-heavy states, implores the president to reject the EPA’s proposal for new power plants and instead “stand with our constituents, our coal miners, and our coal communities.”

Members of Congress have introduced a litany of legislation meant to curtail the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. About half a dozen efforts target the agency’s regulatory authority, including a House budget “rider” that would block the implementation of carbon rules for power plants. Other efforts, such as the Energy Consumers Relief Act, take a broader aim. Passed by a 232-181 vote in the House Aug. 1, the legislation would require the Energy Department to review and perhaps veto any EPA regulation yielding economic costs of more than $1 billion — a figure sure to capture the carbon rules.

And then, there are subtler attacks. Recently, House Republicans have set their sights on a numeric formula known as the “social cost of carbon.” That’s the Obama administration’s assessment of the toll carbon pollution inflicts on public health, the environment and agriculture. In June, after a lengthy inter-agency discussion, administration officials raised their estimate, setting off GOP calls for hearings and investigations. Last month, lawmakers pushed through an amendment that would prohibit the EPA from using the social cost of carbon when crafting its power plant rules, among other regulations.

To environmentalists, the message seems clear.

“It’s the industry reminding the president that they have tremendous political power,” said Brad Johnson of Forecast the Facts, which tracks the lobbying efforts of fossil-fuel companies. “They are saying, ‘We will fight this on every front.’ ”

Some industry lobbyists are already predicting the kind of full court press evidenced by coal and utility groups in the recent regulatory battle over mercury emissions. In February 2012, after nearly two decades of fierce opposition, EPA officials issued a final rule requiring power plants for the first time to control emissions of mercury and other toxic air pollution. Viewed as a victory by environmental groups — some of which had sued the EPA to force regulation — the mercury rule will kick into effect for existing plants in 2015.

The final rule did not end coal’s fight. A coalition of coal companies and coal-burning utilities swiftly turned to the courts; by October 2012, they had sued the EPA, challenging its mercury standards in a case pending today. They turned to their friends on the Hill as well. Relying on a law allowing Congress to review major regulations, the groups tried to roll back the EPA’s mercury rule — for good. In June 2012, their resolution made it to the full Senate floor, where it failed by a 46-53 vote.

Some industry representatives believe a similar campaign over the EPA’s carbon rules would fare well. Strict EPA regulations would send shock waves through not just the coal industry, they say, but the broader, more influential fossil-fuel industry as well.

For now, the coal industry is taking a wait-and-see approach. “We’ll make our point very plain and assert it very strongly, as we always do,” said the mining association’s Popovich.

Michael Beckel contributed to this report.