Congress spent years building the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act. It bundles 62 separate bills, including the Major Richard Star Act, a fix combat-injured retirees have been promised for more than a decade and never gotten. Recently, the American Legion and 22 other veterans organizations asked House and Senate leaders to move it. Over 70% of veterans support this bill. For the first time in years, the votes and the money lined up.
Then the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) set out to kill it.
The VFW immediately rejected it from the offset over a small provision readjusting future rating criteria for tinnitus and sleep apnea. Despite making up one line in the 62-bill package, the VFW instead chose to go after the whole bill. It did so with a cartoon of veterans standing in front of a firing squad of men in suits.
Twenty-three veterans organizations looked at this bill and backed it. One of the largest looked at it and started selling t-shirts.
House Veterans Affairs Committee Mike Bost along with Congressman Jack Bergman wrote to VA Secretary Doug Collins asking him to review whether an organization running that campaign is still fit to represent claimants before the department. The House pulled its vote. The bill is still sitting there, and so are the veterans it was written for.
This is where it stops being about one bill. The VFW holds a congressional charter and VA accreditation, and it treats both as proof that it speaks for every veteran in the country. In statehouses starting with Sacramento, the VFW and groups like it have pushed bills that would make them the only help a veteran is allowed to use when filing a claim.
So, we stopped taking it on faith and went looking at what these organizations actually do.
California Veterans United runs VSOsExposed.com, an incident map that tracks misconduct connected to VSOs and their posts and auxiliaries. Everything on it comes from somewhere you can check like news reports, court filings, prosecutors’ offices, public agency records. We update it every week.
We’ve logged over 600 different incidents already, ranging from stealing money from veterans to more physical crimes that leave veterans emotionally and physically scarred.
Read enough of these and the setup stops surprising you. Someone the post trusted had the keys to the account, and nobody checked until the money was already gone. That kind of theft describes over half of our entries. The quartermaster who moved more than $1.7 million out of Oregon’s state VFW department before a federal judge sent her to prison was handling money raised in a veteran’s name, and so was the Idaho state Legion commander now accused of taking $1.45 million.
The violent cases follow the same structure of a VSO leader exploiting their position of trust. A Minnesota post commander is serving nearly 24 years for killing a woman who worked for him.
None of this is about the countless volunteers who run the posts and keep them operating. They deserve better than what national leadership is doing with their name. That’s the whole reason we put the record in public, in one place, where anybody can find it. A group that claims to speak for millions of veterans should expect that.
Congress should pass the bill it has built that an overwhelming majority of veterans want, and before it allows the VFW to walk into their offices pretending to speak on behalf of the 18 million veterans in the United States, ask them what happens inside their posts. The VA has the authority to find out today.
The map’s not going anywhere. It’s organized by state, so a veteran or a reporter can see what’s happened near them. Ten minutes with it tells you plenty. Before anyone lets the VFW have the last word on who speaks for veterans, that’s time worth spending.
Sky Ainsworth
Director of Veterans Affairs
Veterans United
Sky Ainsworth is an Army veteran, focused on advocating for veterans’ issues and civic engagement.
