    [House Hearing, 119 Congress]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

                              DETRIMENTAL DELAYS:
                           REVIEWING PAYMENT FAILURES
                           IN VA'S EDUCATION PROGRAMS

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   before the

                          SUBCOMMITTEE ON ECONOMIC
                                OPPORTUNITY

                                     of the

                         COMMITTEE ON VETERANS' AFFAIRS

                         U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                        ONE HUNDRED NINETEENTH CONGRESS

                                 FIRST SESSION

                                   __________

                           TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2025

                                   __________

                               Serial No. 119-41

                                   __________

           Printed for the use of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs

                     [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                        Available via http://govinfo.gov

                                   ______

                     U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE

    62-635                    WASHINGTON : 2026

                         COMMITTEE ON VETERANS' AFFAIRS

                         MIKE BOST, Illinois, Chairman

    AUMUA AMATA COLEMAN RADEWAGEN,       MARK TAKANO, California, Ranking
        American Samoa, Vice-Chairwoman      Member
    JACK BERGMAN, Michigan               JULIA BROWNLEY, California
    NANCY MACE, South Carolina           CHRIS PAPPAS, New Hampshire
    MARIANNETTE MILLER-MEEKS, Iowa       SHEILA CHERFILUS-MCCORMICK,
    GREGORY F. MURPHY, North Carolina        Florida
    DERRICK VAN ORDEN, Wisconsin         MORGAN MCGARVEY, Kentucky
    MORGAN LUTTRELL, Texas               DELIA RAMIREZ, Illinois
    JUAN CISCOMANI, Arizona              NIKKI BUDZINSKI, Illinois
    KEITH SELF, Texas                    TIMOTHY M. KENNEDY, New York
    JEN KIGGANS, Virginia                MAXINE DEXTER, Oregon
    ABE HAMADEH, Arizona                 HERB CONAWAY, New Jersey
    KIMBERLYN KING-HINDS, Northern       KELLY MORRISON, Minnesota
        Mariana Islands
    TOM BARRETT, Michigan

                           Jon Clark, Staff Director
                      Matt Reel, Democratic Staff Director

                      SUBCOMMITTEE ON ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY

                     DERRICK VAN ORDEN, Wisconsin, Chairman

    JUAN CISCOMANI, Arizona              CHRIS PAPPAS, New Hampshire,
    ABE HAMADEH, Arizona                     Ranking Member
    KIMBERLYN KING-HINDS, Northern       MORGAN MCGARVEY, Kentucky
        Mariana Islands                  DELIA RAMIREZ, Illinois
    TOM BARRETT, Michigan                TIMOTHY M. KENNEDY, New York

    Pursuant to clause 2(e)(4) of Rule XI of the Rules of the House, public
    hearing records of the Committee on Veterans' Affairs are also
    published in electronic form. The printed hearing record remains the
    official version. Because electronic submissions are used to prepare
    both printed and electronic versions of the hearing record, the process
    of converting between various electronic formats may introduce
    unintentional errors or omissions. Such occurrences are inherent in the
    current publication process and should diminish as the process is
    further refined.

                             C  O  N  T  E  N  T  S

                                  ----------

                           TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2025

                                                                       Page

                               OPENING STATEMENTS

    The Honorable Tom Barrett, Acting Chairman.......................     1
    The Honorable Chris Pappas, Ranking Member.......................     2

                                   WITNESSES
                                    Panel I

    Ms. Margarita Devlin, Acting Principal Deputy Undersecretary for
      Benefits, Veterans Benefits Administration, U.S. Department of
      Veterans Affairs...............................................     5

            Accompanied by:

        Mr. Kenneth Smith, Executive Director at Education Service,
            Veterans Benefits Administration, U.S. Department of
            Veterans Affairs

    Mr. Justin Parke, Managing Director, Digital GI Bill Program
      Manger, Accenture Federal Services.............................     6

                                    Panel II

    Ms. Ashlynne Haycock-Lohmann, Director, Government & Legislative
      Affairs, Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors..............    20

                                    APPENDIX
                        Prepared Statements Of Witnesses

    Ms. Margarita Devlin Prepared Statement..........................    31
    Mr. Justin Parke Prepared Statement..............................    33
    Ms. Ashlynne Haycock-Lohmann Prepared Statement..................    35

                           Statements For The Record

    Veterans Education Success Prepared Statement....................    41
    Student Veterans of America Prepared Statement...................    44
    Document for the Record Submitted by The Honorable Chris Pappas,
      U.S. House of Representatives, (NH-01).........................    47
    Questions for the Record Submitted by The Honorable Abe Hamadeh,
      U.S. House of Representatives, (AZ-08).........................    68
    U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Response to Questions for the
      Record.........................................................    70

                              DETRIMENTAL DELAYS:
                           REVIEWING PAYMENT FAILURES
                           IN VA'S EDUCATION PROGRAMS

                                  ----------

                           TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2025

          Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity,
                        Committee on Veterans' Affairs,
                                 U.S. House of Representatives,
                                                        Washington, DC.
        The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:07 a.m., in
    room 360, Cannon House Office Building, Hon. Derrick Van Orden
    (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
        Present: Representatives Van Orden, Hamadeh, Barrett,
    Pappas, McGarvey, Ramirez, and Kennedy.
        Also present: Representative Budzinski.

           OPENING STATEMENT OF TOM BARRETT, ACTING CHAIRMAN

        Mr. Barrett. All right, good morning. The subcommittee will
    come to order. Starting out, I want to make sure that we
    stipulate that the chair may declare recess at any time, which
    we already know we will need to utilize.
        I want to welcome the witnesses here today to discuss the
    Chapter 35 issues that have plagued the U.S. Department of
    Veterans Affairs (VA) education benefits for the last several
    months. While I am not the chairman of this specific
    subcommittee, I am the chairman of the Subcommittee on
    Technology Modernization, as well as a member of this
    subcommittee, and a top priority of mine is ensuring VA's
    technology works for veterans. There is significant overlap
    with what we are talking about today.
        The VA, of course, was created to provide world-class
    services to the veterans that they serve and that our country
    owes a debt of gratitude to. Unfortunately, VA has fallen short
    of providing these services and that promise to veterans and
    their families through delays in processing a subset of
    education benefits. This hearing today will review how payment
    failures in the Department of Veterans Affairs Digital GI Bill
    (DGIB) program originated.
        Since August, estimates are up to 75,000, children or
    spouses of a veteran who has died, is missing, or have a
    permanent and total service-connected disability paid through
    the Dependents' Education Assistance Program had a delay in
    payments. This is not money that goes to the institution, like
    the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Instead, the benefit goes directly to
    the student, who then uses it to pay the institution and cover
    their expenses. Because of the payment delays, this
    subcommittee has heard horror stories about students not being
    able to make ends meet because of VA's mistake, and jeopardized
    their enrollment in their college education.
        While I recognize that the situation was made worse by the
    government shutdown, the VA has failed students by not paying
    them on time and refusing to communicate with the stakeholders
    along the way. This hearing today is not about politics or
    partisan differences in games. It is about getting to the
    bottom of how this decision was made, who made the decision,
    who is at fault, and how we can move forward appropriately so
    that we can have proper authentication for Chapter 35 benefit
    cases.
        Ms. Devlin, while you have only been at the VA a few
    months, and you and Mr. Smith have overseen this data
    reconciliation, thousands of claims that were not processed on
    time. Because of that, I expect the days of the status quo to
    end, and the VA is holding those responsible for this failure
    accountable because the subcommittee plans to exercise that
    responsibility.
        Today, we will also examine how many students utilizing VA
    education programs were impacted. These delays have a real
    world impact for Dependents' Education Assistance and Post-9/11
    GI Bill participants. Military-connected students should not be
    put in financial hardship due to VA's technology and processes
    falling short on delivering for our veterans.
        While I am new to Congress, I understand that this is at
    least the fourth time since the Post-9/11 GI Bill was
    implemented that significant payment delays because of
    Information Technology (IT) issues have impacted checks going
    out to veterans and other beneficiaries. If you are a student
    that is in my district or anywhere else in this country and you
    are facing delays in education payments from VA, please contact
    my office or this subcommittee to help work through your
    issues. My door is always open to help fellow veterans, and we
    have to make sure we are working through this backlog.
        I expect this to be a productive hearing today. Hope to
    understand who is at fault for this crisis and who at VA will
    be taking accountability so that we can ensure this does not
    happen again. I will yield to the Ranking Member for his
    opening remarks as well.

           OPENING STATEMENT OF CHRIS PAPPAS, RANKING MEMBER

        Mr. Pappas. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and
    thanks for pinch-hitting with this subcommittee today, and
    thank you to our witnesses for joining.
        This is a critically overdue hearing today, and in all my
    years on this subcommittee, I have never felt as frustrated as
    I do at this moment. One of the points of frustration is the
    request that I have made directly to expect a Senate-confirmed
    appointee to testify today, someone who can provide answers but
    also take responsibility for the failure to pay out Chapter 35
    benefits on time. We do not have that.
        While I recognize that Veterans Benefits Administration
    (VBA) does not have a confirmed undersecretary, it is
    abundantly clear from VA stonewalling to multiple congressional
    inquiries and its written testimony that this administration
    has no intention of taking responsibility and instead is trying
    to shift our attention and the blame onto the previous
    administration. Our veterans and VA beneficiaries deserve a lot
    better. Forget about pointing fingers. VA's responsibility is
    to serve veterans when mistakes or unexpected developments
    occur. VA also has a responsibility to communicate with those
    same veterans, and veterans expect VA to work with Congress to
    solve the problem.
        As I have always said on the subcommittee, congressional
    oversight is important regardless of who is in the White House,
    which is why, Mr. Chairman, we and our veterans have come to
    expect public and involved supervision of what VA is doing or
    not doing, no matter which administration is in charge. We have
    not had that. In fact, in all my years on this committee, I
    have never experienced this level of stonewalling before.
        The Trump administration and its VA have deliberately
    failed to communicate with Congress and, more importantly, the
    affected beneficiaries as they try to hide the mess that is
    been months in the making. VA has issued little to no public
    acknowledgment for months about the 75,000 beneficiaries whose
    benefits have been delayed. There have been minimal
    communications for months to schools and beneficiaries
    themselves, and there has been zero communication with Congress
    unless you can count the letter that we received back that did
    not answer our questions at 5:45 yesterday. Three letters that
    were sent from members of this committee that went unanswered
    for a month and a half.
        In fact, VA officials refused to formally acknowledge this
    problem until a briefing on December 5th. That is December 5th.
    VA knew in September that it had a problem because they sent
    requirements to Accenture to try to address the backlog. It
    took 4 months between this problem being identified and
    Congress being updated. 4 months during which tens of thousands
    of beneficiaries were left without any information. There is
    just no excuse for an egregious lack of communication around an
    issue that affects so many veterans. Any reasonable person
    would conclude that a deliberate political decision was made to
    cutoff communications with Congress and veterans to avoid
    accountability and to hide the problem.
        VA continues to refer to the problem simply as a tech issue
    or a glitch, yet contradicts itself in written testimony. Now,
    I am glad that the Ranking Member of the Technology
    Modernization subcommittee, Ms. Budzinski, could join us today,
    along with Mr. Barrett, to explore that issue. A glitch implies
    a malfunction. There was no glitch. The software worked as
    expected. VA's planning factors and assumptions were wrong. VA
    failed to validate the assumptions and failed to react when
    things did not go as planned.
        Now, the real glitch, the real malfunction here, is VA's
    unprecedented failure to communicate with beneficiaries, the
    public, and Congress. This administration and its VA can try to
    misdirect our attention by blaming the previous administration.
    Let us do a quick review. The decision to conduct data
    reconciliation by hand in 2024 was due to VA cultural distrust
    of automation and the accuracy of the information in the data
    bases. This has not changed between administrations.
        Now, regardless of how we got here, Secretary Collins VA
    was in charge in August when things began to spiral. Throughout
    the last few months of ignoring veteran and congressional
    inquiries, for example, the decision to shift to automate some
    of the claims reconciliation and processing only occurred once
    VA was late on 75,000 claims and was looking for any possible
    help. Regardless of what the previous administration set forth,
    VA could and should have tested the data reconciliation process
    to validate the assumptions on the time that it would take.
    June or July would have been great for that to occur. The Trump
    VA can point to planning that took place in December 2024, but
    they came in and continued that plan. The absence of decision-
    making or oversight for 9 months is just as damning as the
    original planning.
        VA failed to follow guidance from the White House on who to
    furlough during the government shutdown. Government employees
    working on funded programs, like these mandatory VA education
    benefits, were directed to work. Yet the information technology
    staff needed to test and field the automation updates were
    furloughed and not brought back until the day before the
    shutdown ended. Worst of all, this administration made the
    decision not to communicate with veterans, families, and
    survivors impacted for 4 months. People in our districts were
    in the dark about what was going on and why their benefits were
    not getting paid.
        One of my constituents from Manchester contacted our office
    and said, ``Due to an error with the VA benefits system, I have
    not received my education benefits so far this semester. The
    call-in line that I and the University of New Hampshire
    Veterans Center staff use to resolve such issues has been
    deactivated for the duration of the shutdown, leaving me dead
    in the water. My wife's salary has so far covered our rent and
    food, but we are at risk of losing childcare for my son due to
    non-payment, as well as having to miss car payments.'' The
    financial stress put on him and his family is evident. It is
    also unacceptable. We have been elected to advocate on behalf
    of our constituents, yet VA refuses to do its most basic job
    and ignores our inquiries for months.
        I think we all agree that veterans and their families and
    their survivors deserve so much better, and we deserve
    bipartisan advocacy on their behalf when government fails to
    uphold its promise and deliver the benefits they have earned.
    The only question is, will we in Congress hold the
    administration, like any other administration, responsible for
    fulfilling that promise?
        Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.
        Mr. Barrett. Thank you, Ranking Member Pappas. In
    accordance with committee rules, I ask unanimous consent that
    Representative Budzinski from Illinois be permitted to
    participate in today's subcommittee hearing. Without objection,
    it is so ordered.
        With that, we are going to move on to our witnesses.
        Our first witness is Ms. Margarita Devlin, Acting Principal
    Deputy Undersecretary for Benefits, Veteran Benefits
    Administration at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Did I get
    that all correct? It is a lot to put on a business card.
        Accompanying Ms. Devlin is Mr. Kenneth Smith, Executive
    Director at Education Service, Veteran Benefits Administration
    at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
        Our third witness is Mr. Justin Parke, Managing Director,
    Digital GI Bill Program Manager for Accenture Federal Services.
        Thank you all for being here.
        I ask the witnesses and our first panel to please stand and
    raise your right hand.
        [Witnesses sworn.]
        Mr. Barrett. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you
    are about to provide is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
    but the truth?
        Thank you, and let the record reflect that the witnesses
    have answered in the affirmative.
        Ms. Devlin, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to deliver
    your testimony on behalf of the Department of Veteran Affairs.

                     STATEMENT OF MARGARITA DEVLIN

        Ms. Devlin. Thank you, Chairman Barrett, Ranking Member
    Pappas, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the
    opportunity to appear before you today. I am joined by Mr.
    Kenneth Smith, Executive Director for Education Service. I
    appreciate the chance to speak candidly about the challenges we
    face with the implementation of Release 8 of the Digital GI
    Bill platform, particularly its impact on Chapter 35 education
    benefits.
        In August 2025, VA completed a major milestone. The final
    transition from our 50-year-old Legacy Benefits Delivery
    Network, or BDN, to the modern digital GI Bill system. This
    release migrated beneficiaries and payments for Chapters 35,
    30, and 1606. The core migration was technically successful.
    However, there were design challenges. Specifically, a 2024
    decision required manual reconciliation of claims for
    beneficiaries converted from BDN. This was intended to reduce
    improper payments, but in practice, it dramatically increased
    processing time.
        Unfortunately, the timing of the release, driven by the
    need to decommission BDN before the end of the fiscal year,
    meant we could not delay implementation to address the issue.
        Chapter 35 students were most severely impacted. While they
    represent about 24 percent of GI Bill beneficiaries, they made
    up the majority of pending claims. VA could not delay DGIB
    release date because of the need to decommission BDN by the end
    of the fiscal year. This enabled automation and saved
    approximately $25 million.
        Delays in system readiness, specifically, the inability to
    support Chapter 35 until the end of March based on previous
    decisions to change the DGIB program schedule, resulted in a
    compressed testing period for Chapter 35 and required VA to
    process claims in BDN that then required conversion in August.
    The timeframe limited the ability to mitigate issues in advance
    and reduce the volume of claims requiring manual
    reconciliation.
        Several factors compounded those delays. First, the manual
    reconciliation requirement was a business decision, not a
    technical failure, but it more than doubled the time needed to
    process many claims. Second, testing was compressed due to
    delays in partner system readiness and the looming BDN
    shutdown. Third, a lack of enterprise governance in 2024 meant
    critical decisions were not elevated for broader risk
    assessment. Finally, we saw a 19 percent surge in Chapter 35
    claims likely linked to increased disability decisions
    following the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our
    Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act.
        When the system went live in August, we quickly identified
    missing functionality in the Verify My Enrollment tool for
    Chapter 35 students. We waived the attendance verification
    requirement to ensure students could still receive payments and
    communicated this broadly to students, schools, and Congress.
        We also faced challenges during the lapse in
    appropriations. Under our contingency plan, Education Call
    Center staff were furloughed because they do not establish
    protected dates for claims of entitlement and payment. While
    this was consistent with our criteria for protecting life and
    property that has been in place since 2013, we recognize the
    impact this had on students and schools trying to get
    information. We are conducting an after-action review to assess
    which positions should be considered essential in future
    contingency planning.
        To mitigate the impact of the delays, we took several
    steps. We validated automation rules to speed up processing
    where reconciliation was not needed. We directed claims
    processors to trust prior entitlement calculations to reduce
    manual work. We developed and tested an automation solution to
    handle reconciliations. Although the lapse in appropriations
    delayed its deployment, we launched it on November 15th. It
    resolved issues for over 5,000 students and enabled more than
    1,100 payments. Finally, we recalled furloughed staff
    streamlining policies to reduce the burden on frontline
    processors and reimplemented over time once the appropriations
    bill was signed into law.
        Today, our automation rules can now process enrollments for
    returning Chapter 35 students on the same day. We continue to
    waive the verification requirement and are working on a change
    management strategy to ensure students update their contact
    information for the most convenient verification experience.
    Looking ahead, we have taken several key steps to prevent such
    reoccurrence. We have strengthened executive governance with
    clear accountability at all levels.
        We have reaffirmed an automation-first strategy, reserving
    manual work for exceptions only. We are enhancing change
    management, ensuring better field engagement and end-to-end
    planning.
        I will close by saying that while the transition to DGIB is
    a major step forward, the challenges of Release 8 have
    underscored the need for strong governance, strategic
    alignment, and proactive risk management. We are committed to
    learning from this experience and ensuring our systems better
    serve veterans and their families.
        Thank you for your oversight and support. I welcome your
    questions.

        [The Prepared Statement Of Margarita Devlin Appears In The
    Appendix]

        Mr. Barrett. Thank you, Ms. Devlin. The written statement
    of Ms. Devlin will be entered into the hearing record.
        Mr. Parke, you are now recognized for 5 minutes to deliver
    your testimony on behalf of Accenture Federal Services.

                       STATEMENT OF JUSTIN PARKE

        Mr. Parke. Chairman Barrett, Ranking Member Pappas, members
    of the subcommittee on Economic Opportunity, thank you for
    inviting me to testify at today's hearing. I am Justin Parke,
    Managing Director of Accenture Federal Services and a member of
    the Accenture Federal Leadership Team. I am the Program Manager
    of the Digital GI Bill engagement, leading the implementation
    and operations of Accenture Federal DGIB systems. I am honored
    to be here today and to serve veterans and their families in my
    role on the DGIB program.
        Since 2021, through the work on DGIB, Accenture has
    supported VA's efforts to make it faster and easier for
    veterans to access and reliably receive education benefits.
    These education benefits enable veterans to take better care of
    themselves and their families, and to pursue life-changing
    post-service goals and aspirations. The education benefits
    provided by VA have real impact. Compared with a high school
    diploma holder, a veteran with a college degree can earn an
    average of 84 percent more, that is $1.2 million more, over
    their lifetime.
        Since we met last year, we have delivered on our commitment
    to successfully replace VA's nearly 50-year-old BDN mainframe
    with our state-of-the-art cloud-based claims processing
    platform. This technology improves VA's operational resilience,
    and for the first time in GI Bill's 80-year history, has
    enabled fully automated processing of Chapter 33 eligibility
    and Chapter 35 claims.
        Through our DGIB automation efforts with VA, more than 55
    percent of all education claims, that is all Chapters, all
    claim types, are processed same day, the vast majority of these
    in seconds. To date, DGIB has processed over 16 million claims,
    delivering more than $43 billion in veteran benefits to 2.3
    million unique beneficiaries.
        We understand and share the committee's concerns about the
    Chapter 35 claim backlog. Delayed payments are unacceptable. We
    recognize the significant impact on veterans and their
    families, and we have been working tirelessly with the VA to
    help reduce the backlog and quickly get payments into the hands
    of eligible beneficiaries. There have been inaccurate reports
    of a system glitch causing the Chapter 35 backlog. These
    reports are not true. The system is working as required.
        That said, there are many contributing factors to the
    backlog, but there are two key drivers. First, the number of
    unique Chapter 35 students increased by 19 percent year on
    year, increasing veteran claim examiner, or VCE, workload.
    Second, per requirement, a requirement that VA decided in 2024,
    DGIB was designed to require a one-time manual validation or
    reconciliation of BDN Mainframe data for all claimants
    migrated, and this takes VCE time.
        Since December 2024, and before the manual data
    reconciliation was required, DGIB successfully processed tens
    of thousands of non-Chapter 33 claims for new beneficiaries and
    millions of claims overall. Throughout this time, DGIB
    continued to work as required. When it was identified that VCEs
    were unable to keep up with the claim workload, we worked
    closely with VA to identify solutions that automate a portion
    of the manual data validation and reconciliation to decrease
    the backlog.
        To give you additional details, on September 23d, VA
    completed and approved new requirements for this automation,
    and we developed the system enhancements shortly after. VA
    completed the user acceptance testing, approved the
    enhancements, and we deployed the new automation to production
    with on November 15th. Since that deployment, we have
    automatically reconciled data for approximately 88,000 claims,
    greatly reducing the backlog.
        We remain focused on delivering on the promise made to
    veterans. With the mainframe retired, we have completed all
    required major technical modernization. VA finally has the
    technology platform in DGIB that allows it to take full
    advantage of these automations.
        Since the inception of DGIB in 2021, we have improved
    access to education benefits, and utilization has increased
    with 42 percent more requests for eligibility, generating
    billions of dollars in economic activity and creating new jobs.
    We continue to work with VA to increase automation and deliver
    education benefits faster, easier, and more reliably, which is
    what our veterans have earned and deserve.
        Thank you, I look forward to your questions.

        [The Prepared Statement Of Justin Parke Appears In The
    Appendix]

        Mr. Barrett. Thank you, Mr. Parke. The written statement of
    Mr. Parke will be entered into the hearing record.
        We will now move on to questions from committee members,
    and we will each have 5 minutes in which to ask our questions.
    I will start by recognizing myself for 5 minutes.
        I want to get kind of an idea, basically, the timeline
    under which this takes place. The first step, as I understand
    it, is the certificate of eligibility. Is that correct? I
    guess, any of you on the panel, I guess, from the technical
    side, Mr. Parke would be more familiar. From the process side,
    perhaps the VA is.
        Ms. Devlin. That is correct. A certificate of eligibility
    establishes the eligibility to the program benefit.
        Mr. Barrett. That is the very first step in this process?
        Ms. Devlin. It is.
        Mr. Barrett. Where was the manual step? Was it on the
    certificate of eligibility or was it later in that process that
    it was determined to be a manual verification?
        Ms. Devlin. It was later in that process. It was converting
    claims that were previously processed in BDN over to the new
    system.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay. Would this be students who were
    previously enrolled? Not a brand new--not a brand new
    enrollment?
        Ms. Devlin. That is correct.
        Mr. Barrett. A brand new enrollment would be automated
    through the new system from the beginning, but those that were
    continuation, you know, following on another semester, or just
    adding or reducing your class load, would be done manually in
    that first tranche?
        Ms. Devlin. That is correct.
        Mr. Barrett. Who at VA, I understand this took place in
    2024, that it was the decision made to do that manually. Is
    that correct?
        Ms. Devlin. That is correct.
        Mr. Barrett. Who at VA made that decision?
        Ms. Devlin. I was not at VA at the time, so I cannot say at
    which level the decision was made.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay. Mr. Parke, were you in your position
    working this at that point?
        Mr. Parke. I was in the position as the program manager. I
    was not in the rooms where the decision was made, but I am
    aware of the decision, yes.
        Mr. Barrett. Did Accenture offer advice or candor to VA as
    to the potential risk of making that a manual process and the
    delays that would likely follow?
        Mr. Parke. Our position in general, as you heard from my
    testimony, is that we believe automation is the right answer
    whenever possible.
        Mr. Barrett. Right.
        Mr. Parke. As you heard from VA, there is an automation-
    first approach that is being taken going forward. At the time,
    as I understand from those discussions, there was a balance
    that VA was making between risks of mainframe data and the
    veteran claim examiner effort that would be needed. As I
    understand, at the time, in those rooms, the statement was made
    that the VCEs could handle that workload.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay. That was the VA's position----
        Mr. Parke. Correct.
        Mr. Barrett [continuing]. that the VCE, the veteran claim
    examiners, would have the capacity to be able to do that?
        Mr. Parke. That is correct.
        Mr. Barrett. Did Accenture offer, you know, basically try
    and encourage the VA against that, or was it more they are the
    client, and they get to make that decision?
        Mr. Parke. There are healthy debates. You know, there is
    no----
        Mr. Barrett. It is very diplomatic.
        Mr. Parke. Yes. No right answer. You know, in this case,
    obviously, we do not run the mainframe, so we could not speak
    to the risk specifically. As you have heard, this new
    leadership team understands the importance of automation. I
    think if we were to go back and have that discussion, there
    would have been a different answer.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay. Then coming into 2025, VA has the
    existing protocol for the manual process that is set in place.
    At what point did it become apparent to VA that this was going
    to present a problem, and the VCEs were not in a position to be
    able to swiftly move through them as they had hoped when they
    made the decision?
        Ms. Devlin. I will ask Mr. Smith to speak to the timeline.
        Mr. Smith. Thank you for the question. The conversion
    happened on August 4th. Initially, our focus----
        Mr. Barrett. Of 2025, correct?
        Mr. Smith. Of 2025. Initially, our focus was on the lack of
    that verification of enrollment, and that was the problem that
    we solved. By September, we were seeing or hearing anecdotal
    stories from claims processors that this reconciliation process
    was not taking minutes as originally anticipated, but rather
    hours. We immediately started putting procedures in place to
    streamline and essentially trust the data that is coming out of
    our 50-year-old system that has been used to pay countless
    numbers of Chapter 35 students. Then we began to build an
    automation solution to try to get these claim or
    reconciliations completed as quickly as possible.
        Mr. Barrett. It was really around the time that students
    were re-enrolling in college? Now these are all students who
    had previously been enrolled, and they were just continuing
    their education. It was at that moment that they were enrolling
    into the fall semester, and we get the surge of enrollment
    requests that all took place?
        Mr. Smith. That is correct. It was very much real-time.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay. VA did not anticipate or do a dry run of
    how long it would take to process these manually to get an
    assessment of what that would look like and why that would be
    problematic?
        Mr. Smith. I do not recall any sort of dry run on the claim
    or process.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay.
        Mr. Smith. We may have done some user acceptance testing on
    it, but I----
        Mr. Barrett. My time has expired anyway. I will yield to
    the Ranking Member, and we can maybe pick it up on the next
    round. Thank you.
        Mr. Pappas. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I ask unanimous
    consent to be able to submit to the hearing record three
    letters that were sent by Ranking Members Takano, Blumenthal,
    Budzinski, and myself over the course of October, November, and
    December.
        Mr. Barrett. Without objection.
        Mr. Pappas. Thank you. Ms. Devlin, the VA has received
    these letters. Mr. Smith testified at our last hearing on
    December 2d that education services passed up responses to
    these letters, at least to the first two. Last night at 5:45,
    we received a letter in response that frankly did not answer
    many of the core questions that were asked in these letters. I
    also know that the Secretary is well aware of the issue because
    Ranking Member Takano has spoken to him directly on a couple of
    occasions in October and November. It would have been great to
    have the information that we requested in full before this
    hearing. I find it hard to accept that anything other than the
    administration is deliberately ignoring our outreach and trying
    to either hide or avoid addressing this issue. The Secretary
    missed multiple deadlines to get us that information, and VA
    has also failed to communicate directly to beneficiaries and to
    the general public.
        Ms. Devlin, why is that? Were you or Mr. Smith directed not
    to talk to Congress and not to respond in writing to our
    requests?
        Ms. Devlin. No, sir. Thank you for the question. We were
    not directed, so.
        Mr. Pappas. Well, so what is responsible for the delay
    then?
        Ms. Devlin. We apologize for the delay. We did work on
    getting those responses, and I understand that they were
    delinquent and apologize for the delay.
        Mr. Pappas. So----
        Ms. Devlin. I cannot speak to the process delays that
    resulted in it taking so long, and I can only just share my
    apology for that.
        Mr. Pappas. Do you appreciate what we heard from Mr. Smith,
    that responses were being formal--formulated and passed up?
        Ms. Devlin. Yes.
        Mr. Pappas. Is there a reason why this information was not
    communicated to Congress?
        Ms. Devlin. The process of developing a response involves
    detailed reviews of data because there was--there were a lot of
    questions with those, and we needed to make sure the data was
    accurate. There were concurrence processes that went into place
    before the letter could be--could be submitted.
        Mr. Pappas. I hope you can see the problem here.
        Ms. Devlin. I do.
        Mr. Pappas. Where we are totally in the dark on this,
    trying to find breadcrumbs, whether it is through Veterans
    Service Organizations (VSO) or through veterans themselves that
    we represent, that are reaching out to our offices. We are just
    trying to get answers and get information, and I think we are
    owed that on behalf of the American people.
        Who is the approval authority to send out information to
    beneficiaries and to Congress, and why have they limited it so
    drastically in this instance?
        Ms. Devlin. It was not our intent to limit communication to
    veterans, other beneficiaries, or to Congress. We did provide
    some briefings to the four corners of the Hill, and we did send
    out some communications to students. Unfortunately, we did not
    realize the magnitude of the problem and how significant it
    would be before the shutdown happened and during the lapse in
    appropriations.
        Mr. Pappas. Who makes the call on that, though?
        Ms. Devlin. We determine the content of the communications
    that need to go out to beneficiaries and to stakeholders. Then
    there is a departmental process for review and concurrence of
    those and issuing those communications.
        Mr. Pappas. You cannot give us a name or put a finer point
    on that, on who we should be talking to with respect to the
    lack of communication over 4 months?
        Ms. Devlin. I would say it is a joint effort between VBA. I
    am the highest executive at VBA, so I would be the last person
    who sees anything before it goes out. Then again at the
    department, there is a review and approval processes.
        Mr. Pappas. I appreciate the position you are in, but
    someone has got to take responsibility for this, which is why
    we were asking for a Senate-confirmed appointee to be here at
    this hearing today.
        Now, you referenced the briefing. There was one that was
    scheduled for October 1st. It was canceled. During the
    government shutdown, Congress received only form responses when
    trying to contact VA for information or to conduct casework for
    constituents suffering from some of the financial hardship that
    I referenced in my opening statement. Were you VA education
    services or VA's congressional liaisons directed not to
    communicate with Congress?
        Ms. Devlin. We were bound by requirements of what we can
    and cannot do during a lapse in appropriations. I will say we
    took inquiries directly from beneficiaries from VSOs and from
    schools. I got emails directly, so did Mr. Smith. When there
    was a financial concern, also through Ask VA, we were
    monitoring those. If there was a financial emergency, we were
    handling that situation immediately and communicating with
    those beneficiaries.
        Mr. Pappas. I have limited time here. In terms of the plan
    of furloughing staff, who approved the plan, and why was it out
    of line with the guidance that the White House had actually
    issued?
        Ms. Devlin. The contingency plan the VA had was in
    alignment with prior contingency plans for which organization,
    which types of work could be considered accepted, and which
    types of work had to be furloughed.
        Mr. Pappas. Who had the signature authority required to
    bring back the User Acceptance Testing Group from furlough,
    which was a key issue with respect to the digital GI benefit
    update?
        Ms. Devlin. We worked on that as something new that we had
    not dealt with before in VA, and worked with our attorneys to
    get clearance on that process.
        Mr. Pappas. Well, I have got a number of additional
    questions. Again, incredibly frustrated with the way that
    Congress has been stonewalled here. We and the American people,
    and the veteran community deserve answers. I yield back.
        Mr. Barrett. Thank you, Ranking Member Pappas.
        I recognize Representative Hamadeh for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Hamadeh. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Now, we are here
    today because the VA has failed, plain and simple. The title of
    this hearing is ``Detrimental Delays,'' but let us call it for
    what it really is: a breach of contract with the men and women
    who serve this country and the families who supported them.
        Now, I sit here as a veteran who knows firsthand how
    important these benefits are. Now, the GI Bill is not a
    handout. It is earned. For the survivors and dependents relying
    on Chapter 35, the families of our fallen and disabled. These
    delays are not just an inconvenience; they are a crisis. We are
    talking about students unable to register for classes, families
    missing rent payments, and veterans being left in the dark.
    Why? The Department of Veterans Affairs decided to process
    claims using old dusty spreadsheets and fax machines.
        Now, we have spent nearly $1 billion on a contract with
    Accenture for the Digital GI Bill. We spent another $25 million
    to keep a 1970's legacy system on life support. Yet somehow the
    solution was to have case managers key files into ancient
    spreadsheets one claim at a time. Now, that is just not
    incompetent and wasteful. It is an insult to every veteran in
    my district. We hear a lot of excuses about complex processing
    and lapses in appropriations, but the reality is that the VA
    kept a failed policy in place.
        My first question is for you, Mr. Parke. The goal of this
    subcommittee is to ensure VA programs like the Digital GI Bill
    tangibly improve the lives of veterans and their families. How
    much has Accenture been paid to date, and what have veterans
    and beneficiaries received for this?
        Mr. Parke. Thank you for the question. We have been paid to
    date $686 million. For that, we now have the majority of all
    veterans able to access their benefits to get this certificate
    of eligibility in seconds, as opposed to weeks and in some
    cases months. That is a major change to the ability to get your
    benefits. That has driven an increase in utilization, as you
    heard in my oral testimony. This result is that we now have,
    you know, 16 million claims that have been processed and 43
    billion in benefits that have been sent out. That is for 2.3
    million unique beneficiaries. You can, I am sure, appreciate
    what that does for veterans and their families.
        We did all this while addressing decades of legacy debt,
    not the least of which was this BDN mainframe, which, if it had
    failed, as you heard from the VA, due to various issues, such
    as the fact it is past end of life, the fact that it could not
    be reasonably updated to comply with legislative and judicial
    mandates, and the fact that it could not be staffed any longer,
    given how old the technology was, it would have created impact
    to veterans and disconnected them from--from their benefits.
        We did all of those things while processing all of these
    claims that you have heard. There are plenty more that has been
    done for that amount of $686 million.
        Mr. Hamadeh. How long was the system not being used for?
        Mr. Parke. How long was the DGIB system?
        Mr. Hamadeh. Yes.
        Mr. Parke. Throughout the entire execution of this
    contract, the DGIB system has been up and running. It is up
    99.99 percent of the time. There has been no interruption of
    service for the system itself.
        Mr. Hamadeh. When did Accenture get paid?
        Mr. Parke. We get paid on a monthly basis based on delivery
    on specific milestones, and that occurs monthly.
        Mr. Hamadeh. You were getting paid when we were not even
    using the system?
        Mr. Parke. The system has been used every single day since
    we started in 2021.
        Mr. Hamadeh. Yet there is this backlog of over 100,000?
        Mr. Parke. That is correct. As you heard, that is driven by
    two main factors. You know, the increase in the Chapter 35 year
    on year of 19 percent, and also the decision to have VCs
    manually process claims. When they process things manually, it
    is important to understand they are doing it inside the DGIB
    system. What changed on September 23d is that we then had
    approved requirements to automate a portion of that processing
    so that the VCs would not need to do any manual processing.
        Mr. Hamadeh. Right. It took a long time for it to actually
    get implemented, right? From 2024 all the way to August 2025.
        Mr. Parke. Yes, I guess to help shed light, you know, the--
    the DGIB itself had the capability of processing Chapter 35 in
    December 2024 as a risk mitigation approach. That production
    capability was used for all new beneficiaries, but not, as you
    heard from other folks, the beneficiaries that were already in
    the mainframe. What occurred in July and then August was the
    migration of those older claim sets of data into DGIB, and then
    this reconciliation or validation of data.
        Mr. Hamadeh. I am out of time. I yield back.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay, thank you. Mr. Hamadeh yields back.
        Ms. Ramirez is recognized for 5 minutes.
        Ms. Ramirez. Thank you, Chairman and Ranking Member, for
    holding today's hearing, and our witnesses for joining us
    today.
        As we think about the work that we do here in this
    committee, we know that education is one of those benefits
    that, as someone just mentioned, our veterans not just deserve,
    they have really earned it. I have remained clear since my
    first day in Congress almost 3 years ago that delivering these
    benefits that veterans deserve has to be a top priority for all
    of us. I got to be honest with you, it is deeply alarming that
    we are here today to talk about the failures of the Digital GI
    Bill.
        Let me tell you why. Let us look at the facts. Despite
    millions of dollars in ample opportunities for the Digital GI
    Bill to be implemented smoothly and efficiently, a backlog
    remains, and rollout continues to be a problem. We know that
    many veterans rely on their GI Bill benefits to remain housed
    and to access basic necessities. Any delay in receiving these
    funds could be really dire for them. That is why it is deeply
    alarming that when Republicans shut the government down, 75,000
    Chapter 35 claims were backlogged. As of December 5th, it
    concerns me that the VA still has approximately 4,400 Chapter
    35 claims to process from the fall 2025 semester. To me, that
    is unacceptable, and I want to ask a couple of questions as
    follow up.
        Ms. Devlin, survivors and dependents rely on education
    benefits for access to basic needs. When education benefits are
    not paid on time, veterans have these tough decisions they have
    to face, right, about where the money will come from. Will it
    be out of their rent money? Will it be out of their car
    payments? Will it be the grocery funds? By September, VA knew
    reconciliation was taking four to six times longer than
    planned. Why has Congress not immediately been notified when
    VA's new payments would be delayed for survivors and dependents
    relying on this income to stay enrolled? Did the VA understand
    the financial harm the payment delays would cause?
        Ms. Devlin. Thank you for the question. We also were very
    concerned about the delays in payments. We did not understand
    the magnitude of what these delays would cause before the
    shutdown. I will say we are caught up on the backlog, and we
    only have 28, as of yesterday, Chapter 35 claims that were
    received before December 12th. We have 400 that were received
    for the fall term in the last 7 days. We are caught up with the
    fall term backlog. I will say that in October, from October to
    November, we processed 56 percent more payments than the
    previous year, disbursing $238 million.
        Ms. Ramirez. Well, Ms. Devlin, let me follow up on that. We
    were not notified, and I think that is alarming. This is a body
    of oversight, and we should have. I appreciate you hearing--
    hearing you say that you are addressing this. It is not going
    to happen again. Do you believe it is acceptable, though, that
    during the government shutdown, affected beneficiaries had no
    call center, they had no answers, and no response to
    congressional casework, while still being told that they still
    had to pay their rent, they still had to cover tuition, they
    still had to cover childcare without their earned benefits?
    That is a really easy yes or no. Do you think it is acceptable?
        Ms. Devlin. We were following the VA's contingency plan. We
    followed the rule of law on that.
        Ms. Ramirez. In that rule, there was no call center and no
    answers, and no response to congressional casework. That is
    unacceptable.
        Mr. Smith, families were told their payments would not be
    delayed, and then they were. Mr. Smith, you stated that you do
    not expect similar problems in the spring semester. What
    specifically has changed, and why should survivors trust that
    assurance now?
        Mr. Smith. Thank you for the question. Working with
    Accenture Partners, we have talked a little bit about the
    automation of the reconciliation process. We have already pre-
    reconciled more than 86,000 beneficiaries who may be returning
    in the spring but were not enrolled in the fall. Add to that
    all the folks that will continue from fall into spring, all of
    those people are now automation eligible.
        Just yesterday, VA automated 3,500 of the 6,600 Chapter 35
    claims that were completed. That is an automation rate of 54
    percent. That is 54 percent on top of what our normal claims
    processors are doing. We are completing more claims at an
    unprecedented rate and delivering those benefits in a day now.
        Ms. Ramirez. Thank you, Mr. Smith. I think that that is the
    goal and priority every single day. Look, January 20th will
    come before we know it. I do not want to see us go back to some
    Republican government shutdown where veterans are impacted. It
    is why this hearing is so important, ensuring that our veterans
    and their families are getting the acts they need. I look
    forward to following up with you in the new year. Thank you.
        Mr. Barrett. Thank you, Ms. Ramirez.
        Next is Mr. Kennedy for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Kennedy. Thank you, Chairman, and thanks to you, you
    and the Ranking Member, for hosting this today. Thank you all
    for being here.
        I represent the Buffalo Niagara region, which is home to
    Western New York's VA Healthcare system and one of only two
    Post-9/11 GI bill processing centers. For years, workforce
    shortages at both the Veterans Benefit Administration Regional
    Office and the Buffalo VA Medical Center have been severe and
    persistent, particularly in primary care, mental health,
    urology, gastroenterology, and endocrinology. I have seen how
    understaffing at the VA affects veterans and their families. It
    means longer wait times, delayed care, and real consequences
    for those who rely on these services.
        In August 2024, dozens of nurses gathered outside the
    Buffalo VA to protest pay disparities, excessive work hours,
    and the VA's hiring freeze. They warned that these severe
    staffing shortages jeopardize patient safety and undermine the
    VA's commitment to providing high-quality care for our Nation's
    bravest. Those warnings were echoed weeks later when the VA's
    Office of Inspector General (OIG) September 2024 report titled
    Community Care Consult Delays Despite Staff Advocacy Efforts at
    the VA Western New York Health Care System in Buffalo. The
    report found that staffing shortages in both administrative and
    clinical settings led to delayed consult and appointments,
    leaving our heroes without the care they needed, including ones
    who were hospitalized and others who were tragically passed as
    a result. Despite those known challenges, conditions have
    continued to deteriorate at the hands of this administration.
        At the end of 2024, the VA reported 40,000 vacancies
    nationwide. Rather than filling those positions, including
    critical vacancies at the Buffalo VA, the Trump administration
    imposed a hiring freeze, dismissing approximately 2,400
    employees between February 13th and in February 20-24th of this
    year. On March 4th, a leaked internal memo revealed plans to
    lay off more than 80,000 of the VA's 470,000 employees,
    returning staffing to pre-PACT Act levels. Although the VA
    later claimed a reverse course on July 7th of this year, that
    commitment has now been abandoned.
        This past Saturday, the VA announced plans to eliminate up
    to 35,000 health care jobs, including doctors, nurses, and
    critical support staff. 23,000 more than what the agency said
    just months ago. Instead of addressing the deficiencies, this
    administration is exacerbating them. Cutting 35,000 additional
    health care positions will only deepen the VA's workforce
    crisis, worsening access to care for veterans in my district
    and across the country.
        For an administration that claims to be pro-service member
    and pro-veteran, reality is telling a very different story. You
    cannot claim to support veterans while cutting the dedicated
    staff who care for them. You cannot claim to support veterans
    while delaying their benefits. You cannot claim to support
    veterans while ignoring the concerns raised by members of this
    committee.
        I want to be clear about the human cost. As an occupational
    therapist myself, I know the consequences of understaffing.
    Quality of patient care declines, burnout rises, and providers
    leave not because they do not care, but because the system
    becomes unsustainable. When that breakdown occurs at the VA, it
    is our veterans who are paying the price with their lives.
        As members of this committee, we are entrusted to upholding
    this Nation's promise to our veterans, not weakening it. These
    cuts that the Trump administration is making betray that
    promise. They are shortsighted, they are un-American, and they
    are deeply disrespectful to both the veterans who served, and
    the professionals dedicated to caring for them.
        I yield back.
        Mr. Barrett. Mr. Kennedy yields back.
        I now recognize Ms. Budzinski for 5 minutes.
        Ms. Budzinski. Thank you, Chairman Barrett, and Ranking
    Member Pappas, for allowing me to join this hearing today. I
    really appreciate it. Our two subcommittees have performed
    oversight on the Digital GI Bill program together for several
    years.
        It is unfortunate that the program's relative success has
    been impaired by recent missed payments and a lack of
    communication by the department, which has been obviously
    discussed at the committee already today. Even more unfortunate
    is that IT hiccups and tech glitches have become the scapegoats
    when it appears that policy decisions and a lack of planning
    were actually to blame. Issues that plague too many of VA's
    modernization efforts. It appears your next policy effort is to
    accelerate the automation approach, despite the initial choice
    to not automate due to integrity concerns with the data coming
    from BDN. I now hear that you are choosing to move to an
    automation-first strategy.
        Ms. Devlin, what work has your team done to ensure that
    this move is not an overcorrection and will not result in
    erroneous payments?
        Ms. Devlin. Thank you for the question. Our accuracy is
    very high with automation. Excuse me. If automation-first had
    been the strategy last year, we would not be having this
    conversation today. The accuracy of automation is currently at
    96 percent for originals and 93 percent for supplementals.
    Errors do not necessarily mean an error in payment. A lot of
    times, they are just technical errors that do not result in
    reduced or overpayment.
        Ms. Budzinski. Okay. I find it very alarming that the VA
    did not notify Congress, as has been said, about these delays
    for over 3 months. As far as I can tell, VA never officially
    notified beneficiaries or the VSOs. That lack of communication
    caused confusion, frustration, and further delays in benefits.
        I just want to add my voice to what has been already
    expressed in this committee today, that sheer frustration over
    that lack of communication. This absolutely cannot be the norm
    when errors at the VA occur. I am also concerned that the
    issues that led to these payment delays will not be fully
    resolved before veterans and their beneficiaries start classes
    in January. I urge our VA witnesses here today and the
    Secretary himself to get ahead of this and communicate with
    beneficiaries.
        Ms. Devlin, it is clear that VA's communication strategy
    failed veterans during this gap in benefits payment. How has VA
    assessed the impacts of these errors for the spring semester?
    How has VA communicated to beneficiaries for potential delays?
        Ms. Devlin. Thank you for that question as well. It is our
    practice and our philosophy to communicate early when we know
    there is going to be a problem. I mentioned earlier that we did
    not understand the magnitude of this problem and how it would
    affect our beneficiaries. For your question about the spring
    term, we automated 50 percent of those--of those claims that we
    have received so far already in December. We have 997 pending
    for the spring, but of those, 875 were just received in the
    last 7 days. I tell you with confidence, we are processing the
    spring term claims in a timely manner.
        Ms. Budzinski. Mr. Park mentioned that back in 2024, that
    was when the decision was made to manually reconcile, and it
    was done with the understanding that VCEs had the capacity to
    take on this load. Ms. Devlin, how did the Deferred Resignation
    Program or the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority impact VCEs
    capacity to manually reconcile these claims?
        Ms. Devlin. Thank you. That is a great question. VBA had
    excluded claims processors from both the deferred resignation
    program and from early retirement. We did not have any
    individuals from that business line, or any claims processors
    take those options.
        Ms. Budzinski. Okay. Okay, great. I yield back. Thank you
    very much, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Barrett. Thank you. Ms. Budzinski yields back.
        Mr. McGarvey, for 5 or less minutes so we can get out of
    here on time.
        Mr. McGarvey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Appreciate it.
        You know, too many times up here we use government speak
    and sterile language like payment delays, when back home at
    Louisville, you have got veterans, survivors, dependents, who
    rely on these benefits that they have earned. They rely on them
    to pay tuition on time. They rely on them to have a roof over
    their head. The families, when these payments do not show up,
    they are not inconvenienced by a payment delay. They are
    completely blindsided because they have done everything right.
    This is not just a technical glitch or a policy issue. It is a
    complete breakdown of trust.
        These survivors, these dependents, they applied on time.
    They checked their status. They waited. They did everything
    they were supposed to do, and the VA did not tell them the
    truth about what was happening. These families were left in the
    dark. We were left in the dark. If we cannot trust the VA to be
    up front when things go wrong, then how can we trust the VA to
    fix the problem? Survivors in Louisville and across the country
    should never, ever have to wonder when they have done
    everything right, when they or their loved one has put on the
    uniform and served us, they should never have to wonder if
    their benefits they have earned will arrive. They have already
    sacrificed enough. That is what this hearing is about.
        Ms. Devlin, you said this was not a glitch, but a business
    decision. Why did not the VA tell Congress and students, and
    the people receiving these benefits up front that the claims
    would take longer? Why were they left in the dark until
    thousands had already missed payments?
        Ms. Devlin. Thank you for the question. When we know we
    have something that is going to impact beneficiaries, we do
    notify Congress. The challenge was with that business decision
    that was made in 2024, is that the estimates were that it would
    take seconds to manually reconcile these claims. It did not, in
    fact, take seconds. It took, in some cases, hours. As soon as
    we heard that, we immediately jumped into action to correct the
    matter. We did not know the magnitude of the delays that would
    happen, otherwise, we would have notified. We did, we did do a
    briefing, a Four Corners briefing. Again, at that time, we did
    not understand the magnitude of the effect on beneficiaries,
    which we also regret deeply because we understand the impact on
    these people's lives.
        Mr. McGarvey. Why did not you understand the magnitude of
    it?
        Ms. Devlin. Because when the decision was made last year,
    the estimates of time would be seconds, and we believed that we
    would be able to manage that. We also implemented an IT
    solution to automate the reconciliation. Unfortunately, there
    was a delay in implementing that, that automated solution,
    which we believed would correct the problem.
        Mr. McGarvey. Who was held accountable for this incredible
    error and mistake?
        Ms. Devlin. I cannot speak to who made those decisions last
    year. I was not there.
        Mr. McGarvey. We would love to know. Looking ahead, I mean,
    look, we are obviously, we are upset the families are impacted
    again, blindsided, devastated by these decisions. We have to
    look ahead, too. What is the VA's plan to make sure the spring
    semester does not repeat this fall backlog? Will you commit to
    clear, timely communication with us, with the schools, and with
    the families if these problems come up again?
        Ms. Devlin. Thank you. Yes, I make that commitment to you
    to continue to do a better job of communicating more
    transparently with you, all of you on the subcommittee, and
    also with our beneficiaries.
        For the spring term, we automated 50 percent of the spring
    term enrollments that we have gotten already. Of the ones that
    we have received just in the last 7 days, well, we only have
    997 pending, and of those, 875 were received just in the last 7
    days. We are timely on the spring already.
        Mr. McGarvey. I am glad you brought up automation because
    you have said automation is helping now, but until that number,
    I had that only about 13 percent of claims are processed that
    way. If you are saying it is 50 percent, great. When will these
    reconciliations be fully automated, and when will they have
    proper human checks in place to make sure that the automation
    is doing what it needs to do?
        Ms. Devlin. Many of the reconciliations are already
    automated at this point in time. We have corrected that, and
    our accuracy right now is 96 percent for originals and 93
    percent for supplementals. We are--we are processing the claims
    correctly, we are trusting the BDN data that is coming over,
    and we are finding it to--to be accurate.
        Mr. McGarvey. Part of the problem here, and I know I have
    got short time for lots of reasons, part of the problem here is
    when you did this right, it happened at the beginning of the
    semester when families are hit the hardest by this. What is
    your plan for scheduling future updates so families are not
    blindsided in this way? Have you thought about the actual time
    in which you can do this?
        Ms. Devlin. Absolutely. We generally would not time a
    release this big around that timeframe. Unfortunately, the
    contract for the BDN was ending the end of the fiscal year. To
    be honest, if we had to keep that system alive for another
    year, not only would it cost 25 million additional dollars, but
    the risk to students was even greater. We would be having a
    much different kind of. It would be catastrophic if the BDN
    shut down.
        Mr. McGarvey. Thank you. I have a lot more questions, but I
    am out of time. Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
        Mr. Barrett. Yes, thank you. Due to circumstances beyond
    the control of this committee, we are going to need to take a
    brief recess for this panel, these witnesses. Thank you. You
    are excused. We will reconvene with our second panel.
        We have to take leave for a recess for a classified
    briefing scheduled for all members of the House. Therefore, the
    subcommittee will stand in recess subject to the call of the
    chair. I expect to reconvene at 12:25 or as soon as possible.
    Thank you.
        [Recess.]
        Mr. Barrett. All right. Committee will come back to order.
    Our second panel, we will hear from the following witness. Ms.
    Ashlynne Haycock-Lohmann, Director, Government of Legislative
    Affairs at Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, also known
    as TAPS. I would like to welcome the witness on our second
    panel to the witness table.
        I ask you, please stand and raise your right hand.
        [Witness sworn.]
        Mr. Barrett. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you
    are about to provide is the truth, the whole truth and nothing
    but the truth?
        Let the record--thank you and let the record reflect that
    the witness of witness has answered in the affirmative. Ma'am,
    you are now recognized for 5 minutes to deliver your testimony.

                 STATEMENT OF ASHLYNNE HAYCOCK-LOHMANN

        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Chairman Barrett, Ranking Member
    Pappas, and distinguished committee members, the Tragedy
    Assistance Program for Survivors is grateful for the
    opportunity to continue to testify today on behalf of the
    120,000 surviving families TAPS is honored to serve and the
    168,000 Chapter 35----
        Mr. Barrett. Can you move the microphone a little closer?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Yes. The 168,000 Chapter 35
    beneficiaries who received delayed payments for the fall
    semester. The recent delays and incomplete payments in the VA's
    Chapter 35 Survivors and Dependents Education Assistance
    Program are not just a technical failure. For surviving
    families, they represent a deeply personal setback at a time
    when they are already rebuilding their lives after a profound
    loss.
        As a surviving child who previously utilized these
    benefits, I can say with certainty that when payments do not
    arrive on time, it creates unnecessary stress and anxiety. When
    payments were delayed, for me, that often meant hours on the
    phone and having to choose between attending classes or picking
    up extra shifts at the restaurant I waited tables at to make
    sure I could cover rent, food, and bills. This is not a choice
    any VA beneficiary should have to make, especially when the
    student did everything they were supposed to do.
        Chapter 35 is an education benefit created nearly 70 years
    ago under the War Orphans Education Assistance Act of 1956.
    Despite small improvements, the benefit is still only $15.74
    per month. That is less than half of the Montgomery GI Bill and
    far below the Post-9/11 GI Bill and Fry Scholarship. For
    students today, it barely makes a dent in the cost of tuition,
    let alone living expenses. Students using Chapter 35 are the
    dependents of 100 percent disabled veterans, those who died at
    service, connected causes, and the families of those who died
    before 9/11. Populations that already received fewer benefits
    than their Post-9/11 counterparts.
        While the VA has made progress automating Chapter 33 claims
    through the Digital GI Bill, Chapter 35 was still being
    processed on Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL), a
    system from 1959, until recently. When the VA finally moved
    toward automation in August 2025, the update triggered major
    technical failures. In September, the VA told Congress that
    around 900 students were affected. By mid-October, over 75,000
    Chapter 35 beneficiaries still had not received a single
    payment. In total, 168,000 fall semester beneficiary payments
    were delayed.
        TAPS only learned of the issue because families and schools
    contacted us, not because VA alerted stakeholders. While we
    understand that payments often arrive late, the volume of
    October inquiries this year was unlike anything we had seen
    since 2018. To date, the VA has not provided any briefings to
    the VSO community on what happened or how they plan to fix it.
    For surviving families, these benefits are not supplemental
    income. They are a lifeline, a bridge to stability, healing,
    and opportunity. When payments did not arrive, students missed
    tuition deadlines, schools could not get information, and
    families borrowed money or went into debt. Some students
    dropped courses or delayed enrollment. This hardship is
    unacceptable for anyone, but especially for survivors who have
    already endured so much.
        This is also not the first time VA Education Services has
    struggled with major IT changes. In 2018, failures implementing
    the Forever GI Bill caused a backlog of more than 200,000
    claims. Congress acted then to prevent students from being
    penalized by their schools, a law that helped many of the
    168,000 Chapter 35 beneficiaries this year. That law does not
    protect against eviction notices, repossession, or late fees.
    Being made whole eventually is not enough. The situation was
    made worse by the government shutdown. While the IT failure
    occurred in August, unrelated to the shutdown, the shutdown
    eliminated the very resources students needed to seek help. The
    GI Bill hotline was closed, communication staffs were
    furloughed, yet press releases continued even as 75,000
    students were left completely in the dark.
        TAPS tried to submit hardship cases through established VA
    inboxes, but received only automated shutdown messages.
    Ultimately, we relied on the staff of this committee to help
    surviving families during a critical time, and we thank them
    sincerely.
        TAPS is committed to working with VA to ensure our
    surviving families receive their education benefits on time and
    ensure this never happens again, which is why we recommend VA
    implement the following. One, make the GI Bill hotline an
    essential service during any future government shutdown. Two,
    designate all education claims processors as essential, just as
    other VBA processors are. Three is to resume the monthly
    stakeholder calls so that updates, issues, and upcoming IT
    changes are communicated clearly and consistently. Four, to
    create an IT rollout plan that avoids the start of academic
    terms. Last, publicly share rigorous IT testing and rollout
    plans with the community.
        Our surviving families did everything right. They applied
    early, checked their status, and waited. The system failed
    them. We must ensure it does not happen again.
        On behalf of our surviving families, TAPS appreciates the
    opportunity to testify today, and I look forward to your
    questions. Thank you.

        [The Prepared Statement Of Ashlynne Haycock-Lohmann Appears
    In The Appendix]

        Mr. Barrett. Thank you. The written statement of Ms.
    Haycock-Lohmann will be entered into the record. Appreciate
    your testimony.
        Now, we will move on to questions, and I will recognize
    myself for 5 minutes.
        Deeply appreciate your willingness to come and testify in
    front of the committee and share some of these examples and
    stories with us. I know you have quite a few folks that you
    have spoken to that have been deeply affected by this. You
    know, from our position on this committee, to the extent that,
    you know, we offer an apology for that. I want it to be, you
    know, heartfelt and sincere, that, you know, we want to make
    sure that this does not happen again, and we want to work with
    you on that. I am committed to working with the VA to re-engage
    that periodic, you know, outreach to our VSOs so that there is
    a flow of information back and forth where they can hear from
    you and you can hear from them and vice versa.
        Also, you know, I began to think about potential policy
    changes that might be effective in helping to ease this, one of
    which was the certificate of eligibility. Instead of waiting
    until a student is about to enroll in college, which might be
    10 or more years after they would become eligible due to the
    death of a parent or family member, why not furnish the
    certificate of eligibility upon the time that they are
    eligible? That way, it is one less step in the process later
    on, and trying to accumulate military records from 10 or 15 or
    more years prior to that, for example. That is something that
    we are going to look at.
        I know that there was concerns of students that may have
    been dismissed from school because enough time had gone on. I
    think there is a 90-day window that they cannot take action
    against a student. Some of that may have, you know,
    unfortunately, gone beyond that threshold. Do you know of any
    institution that, you know, that removed from enrollment a
    student that fell into this circumstance of not having payment
    authorized?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. We heard of quite a few schools that
    threatened to do so. Our casework team is phenomenal and
    reached out directly to the schools, provided them with the
    law, and provided them with all of the publicly available
    information, which is very little from VA. Tried to work with
    them as well as we work with a lot of private scholarship
    organizations to try and make sure that there was enough of a
    payment made for those students if the school was truly
    threatening that to make sure that they were not going to be
    dropped.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay.
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. The stress and anxiety of that was
    something that was----
        Mr. Barrett. Oh, sure.
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann [continuing]. very difficult for them.
        Mr. Barrett. No schools that we know of and that you have
    heard of disenrolled or unenrolled a student during this? Not
    that that defends the delay, but we want to make sure that
    there are not any--any schools that actually followed through
    on that, to the best of your knowledge?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Not that we know of, because we made
    sure those working with other organizations to make sure those
    payments were at least made to prevent that from happening.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay, thank you. Then do you know how many of
    the--of the students within the TAPS program were affected by
    this specific delay?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. We heard from several dozen cases that
    were true hardship, which we worked directly with your staff to
    establish. We heard from even larger numbers, more in the
    hundreds, potentially thousands, that were delayed but did not
    consider themselves true hardships, especially if they had
    other scholarships and things that were helping supplement at
    least the tuition piece.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay. Then we have heard that the Chapter 35
    backlog has essentially been extinguished. Have you heard from
    any of your members that does not substantiate that claim?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Not at this time. Every case that we
    sent forward was paid fairly quickly, and we are hearing--we
    have not heard from anyone that they still have outstanding
    payments.
        Mr. Barrett. As of the last few weeks or so?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Correct.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay. What, I guess, you may have mentioned
    this in your testimony in an earlier question, but do you have
    any regular contact with the VA through your organization, or
    is that really just sort of halted?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Normally, we do. We actually have a
    memorandum of understanding with the VA, and we have worked
    closely with education services in the past. The stakeholder
    meeting that I mentioned was held monthly for many years, but
    the last VA stakeholder meeting occurred in December 2024. We
    were told in January that they were moving them to quarterly.
    Then the first two quarterly ones were canceled, and then
    everything has been removed from the calendar since.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay. Okay. Then, have you heard for the
    upcoming semester, the January enrollment, obviously, there are
    going to be individuals applying for either continuation of
    benefits or for new benefits that they would be enrolling in.
    Have you heard of any lengthy delays beyond, you know, maybe a
    couple of weeks or so for these claims to get processed?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Not that we are aware of, but we also
    have not been briefed, and to my knowledge, schools have not
    been briefed on any possible delays or things that schools can
    be doing to better support students if there is a delay.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay. You have not had from either--or have
    not heard from either schools or beneficiaries that you are
    affiliated with that have had lengthy delays for the January
    semester?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. We generally would not know until a
    payment does not arrive.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay. So----
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Because the way VA pays, we would not
    even generally know until February, because the VA pays in the
    arrears.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay.
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. January payments would not arrive
    until February 1st.
        Mr. Barrett. Okay, thank you.
        I will now recognize Ranking Member Pappas for 5 minutes.
        Mr. Pappas. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Ms. Haycock-
    Lohmann, for joining us here at this hearing. We really
    appreciate your testimony.
        Now, VA had been calling this problem for months a
    technical glitch, but it really was not technical at all. It
    was a result of poor planning and management. I am just
    wondering if you can tell us more about the level of
    communication that you may have or have not had with VA to
    understand this challenge. Did you receive direct communication
    from VA about this issue, or how did you learn about it?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. We learned from students in schools.
    We started getting large numbers of outreach, and other VSOs
    were hearing similar things when we actually do have biweekly
    education calls within the VSO community to communicate the
    things we are hearing. We all started hearing a lot of the same
    things. We were able to work through some back channels and
    start hearing, especially from committee staff, that they were
    hearing consistently that there was a bigger issue. To date, we
    have not received any briefing or messaging from VA on the
    pathway forward.
        Mr. Pappas. Okay. As you said, no stakeholder meeting, no
    quarterly meeting. Those have not been happening. No direct
    communication. You are piecing this together with your
    colleagues from other organizations and based on what you are
    hearing directly from your members?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Yes. As well as committee staff who
    were hearing the same thing and were getting more communication
    at least than we were.
        Mr. Pappas. Like you, I have been hearing from people on
    this issue, from constituents who have been impacted by the
    failure to pay benefits on time, and I spoke to one of those
    stories in my opening statement. Here I ask unanimous consent
    that the October 2025 report from the National Association of
    Veterans Program Administrators on the impact of missed
    payments and the government shutdown into the record, as it has
    direct quotes from beneficiaries and hardship and emotional
    stress that has been put on our veterans and beneficiaries. Mr.
    Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to put this report into the
    hearing record.
        Mr. Barrett. Without objection, so ordered.
        Mr. Pappas. Thanks. Ms. Haycock-Lohmann, what impact, you
    talked about your own personal experience with delayed
    benefits, what impact does 4 months of missed benefits have on
    someone?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Most Chapter 35 recipients are
    children. They are, you know, between the ages of 18 and 26.
    They are young adults. They do not have savings. They generally
    do not have other income or benefits coming in. Four months of
    no payments means 4 months of missed rent, 4 months of not
    making car payments, you know, scrambling to pay for food,
    things like that that these young adults should not be having
    to deal with. This is a pretty young community. They do not
    have that savings, and they generally do not have credit. It
    also opens them up to predatory actors, things like looking for
    payday lenders, title loans, you know, emergency situations
    when you are that desperate to make sure you do not get
    evicted.
        Mr. Pappas. You made an important point. There are a lot of
    folks that are just not moving money between accounts to be
    able to deal with the lack of benefits being paid on time. You
    mentioned that people are not necessarily whole even if their
    benefits have been paid?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Correct.
        Mr. Pappas. Well, I appreciate that. You know, can you talk
    about other ways that you think VA should be acting to address
    this? You gave us a list of things that you would hope VA
    could--could take under consideration including--including
    making the hotline permanent, ensuring that that is always open
    for GI Bill beneficiaries, and making sure that, that those
    stakeholders' calls get back online. You know, what can we work
    with you on to ensure that VA is, you know, taking steps that
    are going to help either prevent this from happening again, but
    also, you know, making sure ultimately that people who have
    these tough cases and are not getting their answers have some
    way of getting through the system?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. A big piece of that is transparency
    and working with the VSO community. We are oftentimes talking
    to survivors and veterans more closely and daily than the VA
    generally is. We are hearing these stories, but we are also
    messaging to them. We put out newsletters. We have social media
    with large followings. We have ability to make sure this
    information is getting to the community that it needs to when
    VA is sending out--they have not sent out really anything
    specific on this to date. You know, large, we have newsletters
    and things that are hitting the population that are actually
    read more closely than large things, you know, from VA that are
    in legalese that they might not understand what exactly that VA
    email says. The way we are able to word it, because we are not
    tied to those legal rules, makes it a little easier for
    survivors to understand. If we do not know what is going on, we
    cannot message that to our community.
        Mr. Pappas. Sure, certainly. I think you probably heard the
    exchange that we had with VA officials on the first panel.
    Congress was kept in the dark on this. VSOs were kept in the
    dark. Beneficiaries were kept in the dark. That level of
    transparency, you think that would have helped individuals,
    even if they know their benefits were going to be late, just
    knowing what was going on and being able to plan would have
    been of some value to folks?
        Ms. Haycock-Lohmann. Absolutely, because they could have,
    you know, we could have messaged this out to survivors. We
    could have worked more closely ahead of time with some of our
    partner scholarship organizations and the other programs out
    there that support survivors to make sure that, you know,
    instead of this very scrambling of trying to make payments,
    that we were working with them and getting them into some of
    these other programs to help offset the immediate costs earlier
    instead of, you know, waiting until it was too late because we
    did not know what was happening.
        Mr. Pappas. Well, I thank you for your testimony today and
    answering those questions and for being patient with us, too.
    This is an important issue, and we want to continue to engage
    with you. You--you often help us understand how veterans are
    receiving information, how beneficiaries are encountering
    challenges with programs. Your feedback is so critical. Thanks
    for being here. I yield back.
        Mr. Barrett. Very good. I want to thank our witness on the
    second panel and our witnesses earlier today for being here to
    discuss the ways that VA can resolve the issue of delayed
    payments and ensure that this problem does not happen again.
    While Chairman Van Orden could not be here today, he takes
    these issues very seriously. He conveyed that to me and to all
    of us on this committee. This will not be our final hearing on
    the digital GI Bill this Congress. With that, I am going to
    yield to. Well, I want to dismiss our panel now and then yield
    to Ranking Member Pappas for any concluding remarks.
        Very good. I want to thank our witness on the second panel
    and our witnesses earlier today for being here to discuss the
    ways that VA can resolve the issue of delayed payments and
    ensure that this problem does not happen again. While Chairman
    Van Orden could not be here today, he takes these issues very
    seriously. He conveyed that to me and to all of us on this
    committee. This will not be our final hearing on the Digital GI
    Bill this Congress.
        With that, I am going to yield to--well, I want to dismiss
    our panel now. Then yield to Ranking Member Pappas for any
    concluding remarks.
        Mr. Pappas. Well, thanks, Mr. Chairman, and I think this
    was an important hearing today.
        What is clear is that the problem is not fully solved. We
    need to continue to dedicate more time to it, examining it,
    especially as we enter the spring 2026 school semester. People
    that we hear from the most, veterans, families, survivors
    themselves, need to have a larger voice. I would like to
    receive testimony from more VSOs on how their members have been
    impacted.
        I also want to note that we were only discussing Chapter 35
    benefits today. Our committee has received reports of delayed
    benefits in Chapter 31, Veterans Readiness and Employment
    (VR&E), and Chapter 33, the Post-9/11 GI Bill, during the fall
    2025 school semester. We must conduct rigorous bipartisan
    oversight to identify and address benefits payments issues in
    those programs as well.
        Finally, Mr. Chairman, I would like to have a follow-up
    hearing on these Chapter 35 delays when we get back from the
    holiday recess, where we have appointees of the President
    testifying. We as Congress must assert our Article 1 powers to
    conduct oversight and demand answers from those attempting to
    sweep failure under the rug. Those in charge must be held to
    account.
        With that, I would like to thank our witnesses for their
    flexibility, and I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
        Mr. Barrett. Thank you, Ranking Member Pappas. Again, thank
    you to all of our witnesses who are here today. This will not
    be the last time we examine this issue, and we are going to
    really extract expectations from the VA around what is the
    appropriate amount of time under which an approval will take
    place, what is the target time that we are going to have, how
    are we going to hold to that standard and what is the
    methodology that we are going to follow to get there.
        As I said on the subcommittee in which I serve as chairman,
    on the Technology and Modernization Subcommittee, there is
    quite a bit of overlap with this area of jurisdiction as well.
    Look forward to working with the members of this subcommittee
    in that effort in that pursuit, as well as our folks at the VA,
    that we will be working with as well.
        Thank you again to all of our witnesses. Thank you to the
    Ranking Member. I ask unanimous consent that all members have 5
    legislative days to revise and extend the remarks and include
    extraneous material. Without objection, so ordered. With that,
    this hearing is adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 12:45 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

    =======================================================================

                             A  P  P  E  N  D  I  X

    =======================================================================

                        Prepared Statements of Witnesses

                                  ----------

                     Prepared Statement of Margarita Devlin

        Chairman Tom Barrett, Ranking Member Pappas, and Members of the
    Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today
    to discuss the recent challenges associated with the implementation of
    Release 8 of the Digital GI Bill (DGIB) platform and its impact on the
    processing of Chapter 35 education benefits. I am accompanied today by
    Mr. Kenneth Smith, the Executive Director for the Education Service.

    Background

        In August 2025, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) completed
    the final phase of its transition from the legacy Benefits Delivery
    Network (BDN) to the modern DGIB platform. This transition was a
    critical milestone in our multi-year effort to modernize education
    benefits delivery, improve services for Veterans and their families,
    and eliminate approximately $25 million in annual Information
    Technology maintenance costs through the decommissioning of BDN.
        This specific release was designed to migrate beneficiaries and
    payments from the BDN system to the DGIB system for Chapters 35, 30,
    and 1606. The migration was successful, resulting in a 99.3 percent
    success rate. A decision in 2024 which required a complex manual
    reconciliation for all first-time claims converted beneficiaries, in
    addition to an August 2025 software release severely impacted our
    Chapter 35 program. By September, the majority of all pending claims
    were for Chapter 35 students, which consists of approximately 24
    percent of GI Bill beneficiaries.

    Root Causes of the Fall 2025 Delays

        The delays in Chapter 35 processing during the Fall 2025 enrollment
    period were the result of several interrelated factors:

            1. Manual Reconciliation Requirement:
            In February 2024, during the prior administration, VA
            implemented a policy in the DGIB design requiring manual review
            and reconciliation of all claims converted from BDN to DGIB.
            This decision, made at the recommendation of staff to mitigate
            the risk of improper payments, significantly increased the
            processing time for each converted claim. This ``glitch'' was
            not a technical failure but a business decision that could have
            been avoided through analytics and risk-based decisions. It was
            expected to add seconds to minutes to the claims process, but
            by some reports, this reconciliation requirement more than
            doubled the time to process these claims.

            2. Compressed Testing Timeline:
            VA was unable to delay DGIB Release 8 beyond August 4, 2025,
            due to the requirement to decommission BDN by the end of the
            Fiscal Year due to loss of contract support and financial close
            out of BDN on September 30. Extension of the contract, if
            possible, would have cost approximately $25 million and
            required BDN to stay online for the full Fiscal Year 2026 to
            support final Fiscal Year accounting and reconciliation. Delays
            in partner system readiness--specifically, the payment system's
            inability to support Chapter 35 until March 22, 2025, due to
            the previous administrations decision to pause and review the
            DGIB Program--forced DGIB to compress the testing period for
            Chapter 35 and required VA to process claims in BDN that would
            need to be converted in August. This limited the ability to
            mitigate issues in advance and reduced the volume of claims
            requiring manual reconciliation.

            3. Lack of Enterprise Governance in 2024:
            The Office of Inspector General cited the absence of a robust
            executive governance structure in 2024 as a contributing factor
            for past DGIB challenges. Without strong oversight, critical
            decisions about conversion timelines and system integration
            were not elevated for broader risk assessment, and resulting
            delays were absorbed into the DGIB schedule. Fundamental
            decisions about manual requirements post conversion were not
            evaluated for mitigation or avoidance, they were accepted and
            baked into the requirements for the build. Release 8 efforts
            for BDN decommissioning began as soon as the prior release was
            put into production.

            4. Unanticipated Surge in Claims Volume:
            VA experienced a 19 percent increase in Chapter 35 claimants
            during the July-October 2025 enrollment period compared to the
            previous year. Preliminary analysis suggests this may be linked
            to an increase in permanent and total disability decisions
            following the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our
            Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Act, though
            further analysis is ongoing.

    Call Center

        VBA's Contingency Plan for 2025 placed all Education Call Center
    (ECC) personnel on furlough during the lapse in appropriation, because
    they do not routinely receive calls from Veterans requesting to
    establish a date of claim for entitlement and potential payment
    purposes. The establishment of a protective date for payment was
    considered the criteria for protection of life and property. As ECC
    does not do this, they were furloughed. VA is conducting an after
    action to reassess excepted positions for future contingency planning
    purposes.

    Mitigation Efforts

        VA took immediate action to address issues as they arose. Following
    the August 4, 2025, release, VA identified that Chapter 35 students
    could not verify their attendance on an external system known as Verify
    Your Enrollment (VYE). While students could still verify via text or
    email if enrolled, the lack of the VYE feature for chapter 35 posed an
    unacceptable degradation in the user experience. VA communicated with
    students, schools, Congress and others about its mitigation strategy,
    which included the waiver of attendance verification requirements. The
    impact was initially a small number of students whose claims had been
    processed but could not be paid due to the verification process. As the
    impact of the reconciliation process became the larger issue causing
    significant degradation in speed to process, this waiver was left in
    place to allow payment processing immediately for students who had been
    waiting too long for their education benefits. The Verify Your
    Enrollment tool was enabled for Chapter 35 students on December 13, and
    planning for the re-implementation of attendance verification is
    underway, and the schedule and communications products will be
    communicated to Congress and stakeholders.
        VA quickly reviewed and validated automation rules to speed up
    processing for Chapter 35 claims where reconciliation was not required.
    In Fiscal Year 2026 through November 17, 2025, approximately 13 percent
    of completed Chapter 35 claims were completed through automation. VA
    continues to assess additional automation capability to speed up
    delivery of benefits for students.
        VA then began to develop solutions to alleviate the high level of
    effort expended by claims processors on each claim requiring
    reconciliation. First, in an attempt to relieve the manual processing
    time, VA provided formal direction to claims processors to allow them
    to trust entitlement calculations from BDN rather than recomputing and
    reducing remaining entitlement due solely from the change from BDN to
    DGIB. Second, VA developed technical requirements to automate the
    reconciliation process. This automation capability was developed and
    ready for testing starting on October 6, with a planned release on
    October 18. At that time, an expected 40,000 reconciliations were
    expected to be completed, approximately 25 percent of the total pending
    inventory of supplemental claims. However, the team required to test
    and deploy the software was furloughed due to the lapse in
    appropriation.
        VA has long relied on claims processor overtime to deliver timely
    benefits, particularly education benefits, where seasonal fluctuations
    are common and predictable. Through summer 2025, overtime was directed
    toward reduction of Chapter 35 inventories in an attempt to work claims
    down prior to Release 8. Due to the amount of data converted, the
    release required a full week where no Chapter 35 claims could be
    processed, and overtime resumed immediately following the release. VA
    provided an additional $1.6 million in overtime to Education Service in
    August 2025, and this was immediately made available to the field for
    use, specifically to work Chapter 35 claims. VA typically uses overtime
    in October and November to address surging inventory during fall
    enrollment. Overtime for Education Service claims processors resumed in
    mid-November, following passage of the appropriation bill.
        Without technology improvements or overtime, VA worked to mitigate
    impact through other means, recalling quality and training personnel--
    more than 50 people who were initially furloughed--to perform claims
    processing actions, as well as policy positions to lighten the load and
    streamline processing for front-line personnel.
        VA began testing the software solution and deployed it on November
    15, 2025, which resolved the reconciliation requirement for
    approximately 5,400 students, resulting in more than 1,100 payments to
    students. To prevent recurrence in the spring term, VA performed
    similar reconciliation processing for approximately 67,000 students who
    have attended in the past year but are not currently enrolled. VA's
    automation rules can now process enrollments from these students,
    resulting in a same-day completion.
        VA continues to waive the verification of attendance requirement
    and is currently working on a change management strategy to ensure that
    students update their contact information with their cell number or
    email address for simplest and most convenient enrollment verification.
    For any student who has changed their enrollments, this system will
    trigger a request to the school to confirm the change, which can also
    be automated. The verification requirement and change notices are
    anticipated to reduce the most common causes of overpayments--a simple
    change to enrolled hours.

    Lessons Learned and Path Forward

        Identifying the root cause for problems and mitigating them as
    quickly as possible are always important and urgent steps, but
    developing lessons learned and communicating a new vision for Education
    Service is necessary to prevent recurrence.
            1. Strengthened Executive Governance:
            In 2025, VA implemented a governance structure with clear
            executive sponsorship to ensure accountability across programs.
            There are now three clear levels of leadership accountability,
            under the sponsorship of the VA Deputy Secretary, who ensures
            integration at the VA level to enforce schedules and
            commitments across the VA's systems and articulates priorities.
            The Education Service Executive Director ensures planning and
            execution at the program level, so that work leads to
            completion of prioritized requirements across multiple planning
            cycles. The Program Director ensures the requirements for each
            build are clear, the contractors can execute them on schedule,
            and the goals for each release are accomplished.

            2. Automation-First Strategy:
            We have reaffirmed our strategic objective to automate all
            possible claims processing, reserving manual intervention for
            exceptions only. Clearly articulating this strategy will ensure
            alignment and accountability for accomplishing automation
            instead of re-building the BDN capability, which was primarily
            manual.

            3. Enhanced Change Management:
            We are expanding our change management team and improving field
            engagement to better anticipate and respond to operational
            impacts. Going forward, the entire process, from planning,
            analysis and design will prioritize end-to-end automation, with
            manual processing capabilities for exceptional cases.

    Conclusion

        While the transition to DGIB represents a significant step forward
    in modernizing VA's education benefits systems, the challenges we faced
    during Release 8 underscore the importance of strong governance,
    strategic alignment, and proactive risk management. We are committed to
    learning from these experiences and ensuring that our systems and
    processes better serve Veterans and their families.
        Thank you for your continued oversight and support. I welcome your
    questions.

                       Prepared Statement of Justin Parke

        Congressman Barrett, Ranking Member Pappas, members of the
    Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity, thank you for inviting me to
    testify at today's hearing. I am Justin Parke, a Managing Director at
    Accenture Federal Services and a member of Accenture Federal
    Leadership. I am also the Program Manager of our Digital GI Bill
    engagement, leading the implementation and operations of Accenture
    Federal DGIB systems. I am honored to be here today and to serve
    Veterans and their families in my role on the DGIB program.
        Since 2021, through our work on DGIB, Accenture has supported VA's
    efforts to make it faster and easier for Veterans to access and
    reliably receive education benefits. These education benefits enable
    Veterans to take better care of themselves and their families, and to
    pursue life-changing post-service goals and aspirations. The education
    benefits provided by VA have real impact. Compared with a high school
    diploma holder, a Veteran with a college degree can earn an average 84
    percent more ($1.2M) over their lifetime.
        Since we met last year, we have delivered on our commitment to
    successfully replace VA's nearly 50-year-old BDN mainframe with our
    state-of-the-art cloud-based claims processing platform. This
    technology improves VA's operational resilience, and, for the first
    time in the GI Bill's 80-year history, has enabled fully automated
    processing of Chapter 33 eligibility and Chapter 35 claims.
        We completed this milestone ahead of schedule after VA experienced
    multiple failed attempts to replace BDN over several decades. Retiring
    BDN and replacing it with modern technology as soon as possible was
    imperative and is now complete. As we have heard from VA this effort
    was necessary because of the serious operational risks that BDN created
    for VA, including but not limited to:

              BDN was past end-of-life, and VA was unable to
            reasonably update BDN to comply with legislative and judicial
            mandates such as Dole and Rudisill, meaning that any
            legislation changes or judicial rulings providing new or
            updated benefits to Veterans could not be accommodated, and
            those claims would need to be processed completely by hand;

              BDN was at risk of catastrophic failure, such as
            overheating and completely shutting down. Due to the age of the
            system and its component parts, there would be no way to
            reasonably bring BDN back online, meaning all non-33 claims
            processing would be stopped in the case of such failure; and

              Of VA staff supporting BDN, more than 80 percent are
            eligible to retire, with the most knowledgeable and senior
            technical staff having retired in the past 6 months. Due to the
            age of this technology, these skillsets are not readily
            available in the job market,and this talent cannot be replaced,
            which presents a large risk to keeping the system online and
            operational for claims processing.

        Through our DGIB automation efforts with VA, more than 55 percent
    of all education claims - all chapters, all claim types - are processed
    same-day, the vast majority of these in seconds. To date, DGIB has
    processed over 16 million claims, delivering more than 43 billion
    dollars in Veteran benefits to 2.3 million unique beneficiaries.
        In partnership with VA, we have retired the major legacy systems
    envisioned, exceeded original Chapter 33 automation aspirations, and
    are on track to do the same for Non-Chapter 33 automation. We have made
    it easier for Veterans to access their education benefits and are
    processing claims for one tenth of the estimated pre-DGIB cost. We have
    achieved all of this while also accommodating additional requirements
    and changes to scope, including legacy data migration, data mart, and
    implementation of legislative and judicial mandates like VET TEC, Dole,
    and Rudisill that expand eligibility for GI Bill students.
        We understand and share the Committee's concerns about the Chapter
    35 claim backlog. Delayed payments are unacceptable. We recognize the
    significant impact that this has had on Veterans and their families. We
    have been working tirelessly with VA to help reduce the backlog and
    quickly get payments into the hands of eligible beneficiaries.
        There have been inaccurate reports of a system glitch causing the
    Chapter 35 backlog. These reports are not true. The system is working
    as required.
        There are many contributing factors to the backlog, but there are
    two key drivers:

              First, the number of unique Chapter 35 students
            increased by 19 percent year over year, increasing Veteran
            Claim Examiner, or VCE, workload, and

              Second, per requirements that VA decided in 2024,
            DGIB was designed to require a one-time manual validation, or
            reconciliation, of BDN data for all claimants migrated from the
            mainframe. And this takes VCE time.

        Since December 2024, and before manual data validation was
    required, DGIB successfully processed tens of thousands of non-Chapter
    33 claims for new beneficiaries and millions of claims overall.
    Throughout this time, DGIB continued to work as required. When it was
    identified that VCEs were unable to keep up with claim workload, we
    worked in close collaboration with VA to identify solutions that
    automate a portion of the manual data validation and decrease the
    backlog.
        To give you additional details:

        On September 23d, VA completed and approved new requirements for
    this automation, and we developed the system enhancements shortly
    after. VA completed the required user acceptance testing, approved the
    enhancements, and we deployed the new automation to production on
    November 15th. Since that deployment, we have automatically reconciled
    data for approximately 88 thousand claimants, greatly reducing the
    backlog. We remain focused on delivering on the promise made to
    Veterans. With the mainframe retired, we have completed all required
    major technical modernization. VA finally has a technology platform in
    DGIB that allows it to take full advantage of automations.
        Since the inception of DGIB in 2021, we have improved access to
    education benefits and utilization has increased, with 42 percent more
    requests for eligibility, generating billions of dollars of economic
    activity and creating new jobs. We continue to work with VA to increase
    automation and deliver education benefits faster, easier, and more
    reliably, which is what our Veterans have earned and deserve. Thank
    you, I look forward to your questions.

                 Prepared Statement of Ashlynne Haycock-Lohmann

        The Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) is the national
    provider of comfort, care, and resources to all those grieving the
    death of a military or veteran loved one. TAPS was founded in 1994 as a
    501(c)(3) nonprofit organization to provide 24/7 care to all military
    survivors, regardless of a service member's duty status at the time of
    death, a survivor's relationship to the deceased service member, or the
    circumstances or geography of a service member's death.
        TAPS provides comprehensive support through services and programs
    that include peer-based emotional support, casework, assistance with
    education benefits, and community-based grief and trauma resources, all
    delivered at no cost to military survivors. TAPS offers additional
    programs, including, but not limited to, the following: the 24/7
    National Military Survivor Helpline; national, regional, and community
    programs to facilitate a healthy grief journey for survivors of all
    ages; and information and resources provided through the TAPS Institute
    for Hope and Healing. TAPS extends a significant service to military
    survivors by facilitating meaningful connections to peer survivors with
    shared loss experiences.
        In 1994, Bonnie Carroll founded TAPS after the death of her
    husband, Brigadier General Tom Carroll, who was killed along with seven
    other soldiers in 1992 when their Army National Guard plane crashed in
    the mountains of Alaska. Since its founding, TAPS has provided care and
    support to more than 120,000 bereaved military survivors.
        In 2024 alone, 8,911 newly bereaved military and veteran survivors
    connected to TAPS for care and services, the most in our over 30-year
    history. This is an average of 24 new survivors coming to TAPS each and
    every day. Of the survivors seeking our care in 2024, 37 percent were
    grieving the death of a military loved one to illness, including as a
    result of exposure to toxins; 29 percent were grieving the death of a
    military loved one to suicide; and only 3 percent were grieving the
    death of a military loved one to hostile action.
        As the leading nonprofit organization offering military grief
    support, TAPS builds a community of survivors helping survivors heal.
    TAPS provides connections to a network of peer-based emotional support
    and critical casework assistance, empowering survivors to grow with
    their grief. Engaging with TAPS programs and services has inspired many
    survivors to care for other, more newly bereaved, survivors by working
    and volunteering for TAPS.
        Chairman Van Orden, Ranking Member Pappas, and distinguished
    members of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, the Tragedy
    Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) is grateful for the opportunity
    to provide a statement for the record on issues of importance to the
    120,000-plus surviving family members of all ages, representing all
    services, and with losses from all causes who we have been honored to
    serve.
        The mission of TAPS is to provide comfort, care, and resources for
    all those grieving the death of a military loved one, regardless of the
    manner or location of death, the duty status at the time of death, the
    survivor's relationship to the deceased, or the survivor's phase in
    their grief journey. Part of that commitment includes advocating for
    improvements in programs and services provided by the U.S. Federal
    Government--the Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Veterans
    Affairs (VA), Department of Education (DoED), Department of Labor
    (DOL), and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)--and State and
    local governments.
        TAPS and the VA have mutually benefited from a long-standing,
    collaborative working relationship. In 2014, TAPS and the VA entered
    into a Memorandum of Agreement that formalized their partnership with
    the goal of providing earlier and expedited access to crucial survivor
    services. In 2023, TAPS and the VA renewed and expanded their formal
    partnership to better serve our survivor community. TAPS works with
    military and veteran survivors to identify, refer, and apply for
    resources available within the VA, including education, burial,
    benefits and entitlements, grief counseling, and survivor assistance.
        TAPS also works collaboratively with the VA and DOD Survivors
    Forum, which serves as a clearinghouse for information on government
    and private-sector programs and policies affecting surviving families.
    Through its quarterly meetings, TAPS shares information on its programs
    and services as well as fulfills any referrals to support all those
    grieving the death of a military or veteran loved one.
        TAPS President and Founder Bonnie Carroll previously served on the
    Department of Veterans Affairs Federal Advisory Committee on Veterans'
    Families, Caregivers, and Survivors, where she chaired the Subcommittee
    on Survivors. The committee advises the Secretary of the VA on matters
    related to veterans' families, caregivers, and survivors across all
    generations, relationships, and veteran statuses. Ms. Carroll is also a
    distinguished recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the
    Nation's highest civilian honor.

    CHAPTER 35 PAYMENT DELAYS

        The recent delays and incomplete payments in the Department of
    Veterans Affairs (VA) Chapter 35 Survivors' and Dependents' Education
    Assistance (DEA) Program represent not just a technical failure, but a
    deeply personal hardship for those who have already endured the
    greatest loss imaginable. TAPS is grateful for the Committee's
    attention to this urgent issue.
        Survivors' and Dependents' Educational Assistance, or Chapter 35,
    is an outdated education benefit created by the War Orphans'
    Educational Assistance Act of 1956 (P.L. 634, 84th Congress), and it
    has not had many improvements since then. The Forever GI Bill increased
    education benefits by $200 per month; however, that remains nearly half
    of the amount paid by the Montgomery GI Bill, and far less than the
    Post-9/11 GI Bill and Fry Scholarship. With the current rate of only
    $1,574 per month, Chapter 35 benefits barely make a dent in the cost of
    an education in today's economy.
        Those using DEA are dependents of a 100 percent disabled veteran,
    those who died of a service-connected death, and those who died before
    9/11, all of which are populations that traditionally receive fewer
    benefits than their active-duty, Post-9/11 counterparts.
        While the VA has made major improvements with the Digital GI Bill
    toward automation for Chapter 33 benefits, they only recently switched
    from utilizing COBOL to process most Chapter 35 claims. COBOL is a
    program from 1959 and is not widely utilized anymore. While we
    appreciate VA moving toward automation of Chapter 35 claims, the fact
    is that a total of 168,000 payments were significantly delayed for the
    fall 2025 semester.
        In August 2025, the conversion from COBOL to the new processing
    system triggered a technical glitch. The VA did not inform any external
    stakeholders of this glitch until September 2025, when they informed
    Congress that it would only impact approximately 900 students. It was
    not until Oct.1, 2025, when over 75,000 Chapter 35 recipients did not
    get paid, that the glitch became public knowledge. TAPS was made aware
    of this issue solely after students and institutions notified us of
    missed payments, rather than through any direct notification from the
    VA.
        At TAPS, we do not consider it unusual for educational benefits to
    be delayed until after October 5th for the fall semester or March 5th
    for the spring semester. We understand that the VA pays benefits in
    arrears and that earlier payments are often partial because students
    attend only a few days of classes in August and January. Until those
    dates, unless a student is experiencing hardship, we generally advise
    them to wait.
        However, we were surprised by the significant increase in inquiries
    this October. The VA announced that all education benefits would
    continue during the shutdown; they did not mention the technical glitch
    affecting Chapter 35 in that messaging.
        For the surviving families we serve, education benefits are more
    than financial support--they are a pathway to healing, stability, and
    renewed purpose after tragedy. Survivors should not have to relive
    crisis moments simply because a system update failed. When those
    benefits fail to arrive, the consequences are real, immediate, and
    deeply felt.
        Many of these students live month to month. Education benefits are
    not a supplement; they are a primary lifeline. When payments were
    delayed:

          Tuition deadlines were missed.

          Institutions of Higher Learning (IHLs) were left without
    information.

          Families were forced to borrow money or take on debt.

          Some students were forced to drop courses or delay
    enrollment.

        For a survivor or dependent already navigating life after loss or
    injury, this added burden is unacceptable.
        This is not the first time VA's Education Services has failed to
    properly implement an Information Technology (IT) update. In 2018, the
    VA experienced major delays and errors in housing and education
    payments due to problems implementing the Forever GI Bill. The Forever
    GI Bill required the VA to calculate the Monthly Housing Allowance
    (MHA) based on the location of the student's campus, not the location
    of the school's main campus. To do this, the VA needed a significant IT
    upgrade. That upgrade failed repeatedly, and the system could not
    process claims correctly. At its peak, the backlog reached over 200,000
    claims before the VA eventually acknowledged it could not meet the
    legal requirements set forward by Congress.
        What happened this fall is especially concerning, given the events
    of 2018--one of the most significant breakdowns in VA Education
    Services' history. What we learned in 2018 was the true human impact of
    how delayed payments translated to students being unable to afford
    tuition, fees, rent, and insurance. This committee even changed the law
    in 2018 (P.L.115-407) to ensure GI Bill beneficiaries cannot be
    penalized by schools--through dropping of classes or late fees--due to
    delayed VA benefit payments. That law has helped thousands of students
    during times when VA payments were delayed and heavily assisted the
    168,000 Chapter 35 beneficiaries whose payments were late this
    semester.
        While preventing students from being dropped from classes is
    critical, the law does not do anything when students can't pay their
    rent, car payments, or insurance. It doesn't prevent them from being
    evicted or having their car repossessed. Being made whole
    ``eventually'' does not prevent students from racking up late fees or
    fearing homelessness.
        As the primary organization supporting families of the fallen, TAPS
    heard from families across the country who were blindsided by the
    delays. They did what they were told to do: They applied early; they
    checked their status; they waited for payments--and the system failed
    them.

    IMPACT OF GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

        Initially, the VA attributed the technology failure to the
    shutdown, but it is important to note that the government shutdown was
    not a factor in August when the IT update failed. However, the shutdown
    did exacerbate the situation. Because of the shutdown, all of the
    resources students would normally rely on were unavailable. With the GI
    Bill Hotline closed, students had no avenue to seek assistance for
    hardships.
        The VA informed us that they had developed a ``communications
    plan'' to inform beneficiaries and IHLs about the IT failure, but the
    communications staff responsible for executing that plan in early
    October 2025 had been furloughed. However, not all communications
    personnel were furloughed, as the VA continued issuing press releases
    during the shutdown--yet they were still unable to communicate critical
    information to the 75,000 dependents who were not being paid and were
    left completely in the dark.
        TAPS submitted hardship cases to the same VA Education Services
    inboxes we have used for years, only to receive auto-generated
    responses stating: ``As a result of a lapse in appropriation, VBA non-
    furloughed personnel are limited to performing duties and
    responsibilities excepted by law. Requests for assistance may be
    delayed if they are not considered an excepted activity by law. I
    apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.''
        Ultimately, the only way we were able to assist certain hardship
    cases was by sending them directly to staff at the House Committee on
    Veterans' Affairs and having them submit the cases on our behalf. TAPS
    thanks the professional staff, especially Chase Bergerson, Allyson
    Horn, and Halle Sarkisian, for assisting our surviving families during
    this very difficult time.

    IMPACT STORIES

     Jonathan Mackey, Surviving Son of SSGT Matthew Mackey, Iowa National
                                     Guard

        ``I am currently a senior at Southeastern Louisiana University and
    have been using Chapter 35 education benefits for the past year. I
    appreciate the opportunity to share my experience regarding the use of
    these benefits this fall.
        ``My school certified my enrollment in July. I recognize that I'm
    among the students this semester who have received any Chapter 35
    payments, and I'm grateful. However, my issue has been underpayment.
    When my certification was first submitted, one of my classes was still
    waitlisted, so the VA initially recorded me as less than full-time. My
    school submitted a correction, but I was told that the VA was
    significantly backlogged in processing Chapter 35 amendments.
        ``Two weeks later, I received a random amount that still did not
    add up to the missing funding. My September payment was issued as the
    government shutdown began, again reflecting an incorrect amount. My
    school filed another amendment, but I was informed that due to the
    shutdown, no corrections would be processed for the foreseeable future.
    I was also told it could take months before the issue is resolved. The
    payments received this fall are completely random amounts that vary
    from less than half-time to less than three-quarters' time, even though
    I am a full-time student with 15 hours this semester.
        ``Meanwhile, my expenses continue. My November payment was for
    $839; this covers my rent, with $13 left to pay my bills and eat. I am
    one of five children, and four of us rely on VA education benefits we
    earned through my father's service and sacrifice. My mother, who
    forfeited her own earned benefits when she remarried, now works full-
    time to cover our health insurance while we finish our degrees because
    TRICARE Young Adult is not affordable for any of us. She also had to
    step in financially last year to help my siblings due to VA education
    issues. Now, she has to step in again due to my VA education issues to
    help meet essential expenses, creating significant hardship for her.
        ``What makes this even more difficult is the lack of communication
    and accountability. Calls to the VA education line go unanswered, and
    students were not informed of these processing delays prior to or
    during the shutdown. Now, we are told by our schools that we'll receive
    back pay, eventually, but delayed payments don't keep students housed
    or fed in the meantime.
        ``I did everything correctly, submitted my certification,
    maintained full-time status, and followed up with my school. Yet, I'm
    still facing months of uncertainty. This situation not only creates
    financial stress but also affects my ability to focus on my education.
        ``I hope my experience shows how these administrative delays impact
    real families--families of those who have already sacrificed so much.
    We're simply asking for timely processing, communication, and
    accountability, so that those of us using Chapter 35 benefits can stay
    focused on our education instead of survival.''

      Kaanan Mackey Fugler, Surviving Spouse of SSGT Matthew Mackey, Iowa
                                 National Guard

        ``I wish I could say this is the first time we've had issues with
    my children receiving their education benefits, but it isn't. This is
    the second year and the third consecutive semester that I've had to
    step in and cover my adult children's housing and living expenses for
    months, just so they wouldn't face eviction, repossession, or loss of
    credit, all because of delays and underpayments from the VA.
        ``When my husband died, I had 5 little ones at home. I put my
    career on hold to support his service, and then spent the next 15 years
    raising our family. The gaps in my education and work history have
    permanently affected my earning potential. Although I used my education
    benefits, my survivor benefits were meant to help offset not only the
    loss of Matt's income but also the years I couldn't work because of our
    military life.
        ``Today, even with a master's degree, I work full-time and earn
    around $20 an hour. Out of that, I pay health insurance for two of my
    children because it's cheaper than TRICARE Young Adult, which is
    totally unaffordable. What's left of my paycheck often goes toward
    covering the shortfall when their benefits don't arrive. It's a
    financial hardship for all of us.
        ``When students use Chapter 35, they have to pay tuition up front.
    They're told they'll receive $1,574 per month as full-time students,
    and they budget accordingly. When payments don't arrive, or arrive in
    random, reduced amounts, these students and their families are left
    scrambling.
        ``We keep hearing, `You'll get back pay.' But back pay doesn't help
    when students are sitting in their classes and apartments, wondering
    how to pay for food or rent today. Even if we were able to reach
    someone at VA Education Services, Jon wouldn't meet the definition of
    `hardship' because I stepped in to prevent an eviction or utility
    shutoff.''

     Julie Wargo, Surviving Former Spouse of SPC Michael Wargo, U.S. Army
                                    Veteran

        ``The delay in the receipt of Chapter 35 benefits that my daughter
    receives caused an extreme amount of stress this fall. Every year, we
    sit down with spreadsheets, countlessly going over scholarship
    opportunities and funding to be able to pay for her nursing program at
    a State college. Her Chapter 35 benefits are a vital component of
    paying for her tuition.
        ``This October, when the benefits were not received on time, we
    scrambled to find any funding we could come up with to make sure we
    paid the tuition. Without complete payment, she would not have been
    able to register for the spring semester, and she could have
    potentially lost her spot in a rigorous program. She reached out to her
    State senator, but got no response from his office. She spent countless
    hours on the phone with the VA, trying to understand what was going on,
    and was given the runaround.
        ``We were left in the dark until the end of October, when the first
    payment was made just 2 weeks prior to the tuition deadline that
    enabled her to register for spring classes. This just served as another
    reminder of the loss our family faced 12 years ago.''

        Emma Deghand, Surviving Daughter of MSG Bernard Deghand, Kansas
                                 National Guard

        Emma, a student at Highland Community College, contacted TAPS on
    November 4, 2025, after not receiving a single payment for Chapter 35
    benefits for the fall 2025 semester, which began on August 18, 2025.
    She stated she was unable to make ends meet and was worried about being
    evicted from her apartment. When we contacted VA Education Services on
    her behalf, requesting hardship assistance, we received the following
    response:
        ``Thank you for contacting us. As a result of a lapse in
    appropriation, we are unable to continue performing duties and
    responsibilities at the Department of Veterans Affairs. We apologize
    for any inconvenience this may cause. You may leave a message and we
    will respond when appropriations are in place, and we are able return
    to a duty status. If this is an urgent matter, there are many VA
    services that remain operational and may be able to assist you. To
    access VA's Human Capital Contingency Plan, please go to VA Contingency
    Plan for a full list of functions that are continuing and those that
    are suspended during this time.``
        On November 7, 2025, TAPS forwarded Emma's information to the House
    Committee on Veterans' Affairs majority staff, who were able to help
    expedite her hardship claim. As a result of the Committee's assistance,
    Emma was paid on November 10, 2025--nearly two and a half months later
    than she should have been.

    RECOMMENDATIONS

            1. Make the GI Bill Hotline an Essential Service During
            Government Shutdowns: During the shutdown, impacted students
            had no way to file hardship cases because the GI Bill Hotline
            was closed. Designating the hotline as an essential service
            will ensure that, in the event of future shutdowns, students
            retain access to support and do not go without benefits.

            2. Designate All Education Claims Processors as Essential: It
            took several weeks for the VA to bring claims processors back
            during the shutdown, leaving 75,000 dependents without a single
            payment. Treating education claims processors as essential--
            consistent with how other Veterans Benefits Administration
            (VBA) claims processors are treated--will help ensure that
            already-funded programs continue to operate as intended.

            3. Resume Monthly Stakeholder Calls: VA Education Services
            previously held monthly stakeholder meetings to provide updates
            on the Digital GI Bill, backlogs, and upcoming program or IT
            changes. These meetings have not occurred since December 2024.
            Reinstating them would keep stakeholders informed, allow for
            regular dialog, and strengthen accountability.

            4. Create an IT Rollout Plan that Avoids the Start of Academic
            Terms: This is the third time in 7 years (fall 2018, spring
            2025, fall 2025) that a VA IT update rollout failed and caused
            delays in student payments. The VA must develop a plan that
            ensures systems are fully functional before implementation and
            avoid releasing major updates at the beginning of semesters,
            when failures have the greatest impact on students.

        5. Publicly Share Testing Protocols for New IT Rollouts: The VA
    does not currently disclose its testing procedures for new IT systems
    prior to launch. These protocols should be made public and reviewed by
    the Committee to reduce the likelihood of future failures.

    CONCLUSION

        TAPS thanks the leadership of the House Committee on Veterans'
    Affairs, their distinguished members, and professional staff for
    holding this hearing. TAPS is honored to testify on behalf of the
    thousands of surviving families we serve.

                           Statements for the Record

                                  ----------

                Prepared Statement of Veterans Education Success

        Chairman Van Orden, Ranking Member Pappas, and Members of the
    Subcommittee:

        We thank you for the opportunity to present this statement for
    consideration at this hearing, which includes a review of recent
    critical failures in the delivery of higher education and veterans'
    education benefits. Veterans Education Success is a nonprofit
    organization with the mission of advancing higher education success for
    veterans, service members, and military families, and protecting the
    integrity and promise of the GI Bill and other Federal education
    programs.
        In this statement, we address this timely and important hearing
    topic, ``Detrimental Delays: Reviewing Payment Failures in VA's
    Education Programs.''
        Unfortunately, payment delays are nothing new when it comes to
    education benefits at the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA). At
    the beginning of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, the U.S. Department of Veterans
    Affairs (VA) was forced to issue emergency payments of up to $3,000 to
    more than 25,000 veterans who were left without their funds.\1\ The
    following year, delayed payments persisted, and nearly 50,000 veterans
    continued to experience difficulties with VA's failures.\2\,
    \3\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ Philpott, Tom. ``VA, lawmakers share blame for GI Bill delay,''
    Stars and Stripes, (Oct. 17, 2009), https://www.stripes.com/news/2009-
    10-17/military-update-va-lawmakers-share-blame-for-gi-bill-delay-
    1991955.html.
        \2\ Daniel, Lisa. ``VA Seeks to Eliminate Claims Processing
    Backlog, Official Says,'' Army.mil, (Dec. 18, 2010), https://
    www.army.mil/article/49646/
    va_seeks_to_eliminate_claims_processing_backlog_official_says.
        \3\ Scholarships.com. ``GI Bill Backlog Continues into Spring,''
    Scholarships.com Blog, (Jan. 8, 2010), https://www.scholarships.com/
    blog/gi-bill-backlog-continues-into-spring.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        More recently, while implementing the Forever GI Bill, VA
    experienced major IT failures in the fall of 2018.\4\ Housing payments
    for as many as 180,000 student veterans were delayed due to computer
    system updates and processing issues.\5\ A separate--but all too
    familiar--breakdown occurred in 2023 under the Biden Administration:
    VA's rollout of the digital enrollment system reportedly triggered an
    unexpected gap in housing payments.\6\ We testified that ``VBA publicly
    announced a technical flaw that resulted in more than 280,000 student
    veterans' being delayed on their monthly housing allowance (MHA) GI
    Bill payments. For nearly 4,000 of these veterans, VBA had to work with
    the U.S. Department of the Treasury (USDT) to mail hard-copy checks to
    the individuals to ensure continuity of on-time payments.'' \7\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \4\ Veterans of Foreign Wars. ``Delayed Housing Payments Impacting
    180,000 Student Veterans,'' VFW Archives, (Oct. 2018), https://
    www.vfw.org/media-and-events/latest-releases/archives/2018/10/delayed-
    housing-payments-impacting-180000-student-veterans.
        \5\ Id.
        \6\ Garcia, Joseph. ``Update on Post 9/11 GI Bill MHA Delayed
    Payment for March 2023,'' Veterans Benefits Administration, (Apr. 19,
    2023), https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USVAVBA/bulletins/
    355e1e1.
        \7\ Veterans Education Success. ``Statement for the Record
    Submitted to the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs 118th Congress,
    First Session,'' (Apr. 26, 2023), https://vetsedsuccess.org/wp-content/
    uploads/2023/04/Veterans-Education-Success-Statement-For-the-Record-
    SVAC-4-26-2023.pdf.

          Problem: VA's education benefit systems continue to
    experience recurring payment failures that destabilize GI Bill
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    students' lives.

          Solution: Congress should require VA to implement
    reliable technical safeguards, transparent timelines, and actionable
    contingency plans for any failure to administer education benefits as
    otherwise anticipated.

        The recurring theme of ``technical glitches'' that inevitably
    leaves thousands of GI Bill students missing their education benefits
    is simply unacceptable. While VA always has an excuse for the error,
    the impact of these debacles falls on veterans and their families, who
    are forced to shoulder the burden of VA's repeated failures.

          Problem: VA's repeated characterization of major payment
    disruptions as isolated ``technical challenges'' hides systemic
    weaknesses in planning and delivery of benefits.

          Solution: VA must adopt more rigorous testing of
    technology solutions and independent verification of efficacy. VA
    should also implement staged technology rollouts that prevent failures
    from reaching students in the first place.

        Continuing the trend of IT failures and poor communication, VA once
    again left students scrambling this fall. Students who depend on
    Chapter 35 Survivors' and Dependents' Educational Assistance (DEA)
    experienced a sudden interruption in their payments. These benefits are
    fundamental to whether a student can remain enrolled, maintain housing
    stability, and cover the daily costs of attendance. When those funds
    disappear, the consequences are immediate and personal, as we saw over
    the course of this fall semester.
        In Florida, the Hayward family found themselves caught in this
    payment breakdown.\8\ Wayne Hayward is a Marine Corps veteran who is
    permanently and totally disabled from his service. His daughter,
    Rachel, had prepared to begin training as a commercial diver and
    underwater welder in Texas, organizing her move and relying on Chapter
    35 payments to make it possible. When her benefit did not arrive, and
    the GI Bill hotline was shut down, there was no clear way for the
    family to understand what had gone wrong or how long the disruption
    might last. Months of planning suddenly hinged on whether an IT
    malfunction at VA could be resolved in time for her to start school.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \8\ Hersey, Linda F. ``Computer `Glitch' Delays Higher-Ed Payments
    for Veterans' Dependents and Survivors,'' Stars and Stripes, (Oct. 16,
    2025), https://www.stripes.com/veterans/2025-10-16/veterans-gi-bill-
    payments-shutdown-19448904.html.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Jonathan Mackey, a senior at Southeastern Louisiana University,
    publicly described how his benefit amount dropped without warning.\9\
    He received $839 for the month, which barely covered his rent, leaving
    him with roughly $13 for groceries and other expenses. He explained
    that he was trying to focus on completing his degree while hoping
    someone at VA would eventually answer the phone and explain why his
    housing support had been reduced.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \9\ Dille, Grace. ``VA Tech Issue Delays GI Bill Payments for
    Thousands of Students,'' MeriTalk, (Nov. 10, 2025), https://
    meritalk.com/articles/va-tech-issue-delays-gi-bi, leaving him with
    roughly $13 forll-payments-for-thousands-of-students/.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Another student wrote to us to describe the difficult position she
    faced as a result of the delays: ``I have not received one of my
    payments and it's almost 90 days. I had my vehicle repossessed last
    week and I am facing eviction with late fees that are mounting[.] I am
    attending out of State school and I have no family near me. I am in
    dire need of assistance please help me. I can't get any answers from
    the emails I sent and the phone calls that go unanswered. I checked the
    VA benefits website and it shows that my benefits are eligible, but
    they have not issued any payments. This goes back to August. This is
    affecting my life tremendously.''
        What made this situation more damaging was not simply the payment
    disruption, but the utter lack of communication. VA was aware in August
    about the risk of payment delays.\10\ VA later described the payment
    failure as being the result of a technical malfunction of their IT
    rollout.\11\ Once students became aware of missing payments, no one
    could get answers because the GI Bill hotline was classified as non-
    essential during the Federal Government shutdown.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \10\ Krupnick, Matt. ``'Complete nightmare': Student veterans,
    advisers say VA cuts are derailing their educations,'' The Hechinger
    Report, (Aug. 12, 2025), https://hechingerreport.org/complete-
    nightmare-student-veterans-advisers-say-va-cuts-are-derailing-their-
    educations/.
        \11\ See note 8.

          Problem: Students, families, institutions, advocates, and
    Congress were left uninformed, even though VA knew about the risk of
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    payment delays weeks before they occurred.

          Solution: VA should be required to provide proactive,
    plain-language notifications to students, schools, and oversight
    entities whenever payment risks are identified.

        Congressional staff contacted organizations like ours to verify
    reports that GI Bill payments were not being disbursed. That outreach
    underscores the core issue: stakeholders outside VA were forced to
    determine the extent of the problem on their own because VA did not
    communicate it openly, even though it knew the risks to families. The
    absence of clear information created confusion for schools and exposed
    students to housing insecurity.
        It is also important to view this incident in context. As discussed
    earlier, this was the third significant technology transition involving
    GI Bill payments in recent years that has caused considerable payment
    delays during implementation. Each was scheduled at the beginning of an
    academic term, when even minor interruptions can quickly lead to
    adverse outcomes for students. Modernizing systems is essential, but
    modernization that jeopardizes the delivery of core benefits is
    misguided. When the scheduling of VA's actions guarantees maximum
    disruption if anything goes wrong, the planning has already fallen
    short.

          Problem: VA continues to schedule major system changes at
    the start of academic terms, when even minor disruptions would create
    maximum harm.

          Solution: Congress should direct VA to avoid releasing
    education benefit system upgrades during critical enrollment or
    disbursement windows and require independent certification of readiness
    before launch.

        There are practical steps VA should adopt to ensure this is avoided
    moving forward. Education benefits delivery must be treated as an
    essential function that does not pause when other parts of government
    do. A continuity plan is needed so that if one system fails or is
    offline, another is ready to take over. Institutions should receive
    clear guidance to avoid penalizing students for late payments due to
    circumstances beyond their control. Most importantly, when VA becomes
    aware of a significant risk to on-time payments, it should proactively
    share that information with students, institutions, policymakers, and
    advocates before financial harm occurs.
        Student veterans, survivors, and their families do not view their
    education benefits as optional. Oftentimes, they plan their lives
    around these benefits because that is what they were told they could
    count on. VA must build on the lessons learned from these failures to
    reestablish trust with GI Bill students.

          Problem: Without stronger accountability and basic
    execution on benefits delivery, VA will continue to erode student trust
    in the GI Bill.

          Solution: Congress should strengthen oversight
    requirements, mandate transparent performance metrics, and ensure that
    students are not left bearing the cost of VA's failures.

        Thank you for your attention to this issue and for your continued
    oversight as VA works to restore confidence in its delivery of
    education benefits. Veterans Education Success stands ready to support
    the Subcommittee in any way that helps protect the students and
    families who depend on these programs.
        In summary, the five solutions we propose are for VA to:

          Implement reliable technical safeguards, transparent
    timelines, and actionable contingency plans for any failure to
    administer education benefits as otherwise anticipated;

          Adopt more rigorous testing of technology solutions and
    independent verification of efficacy; implement staged technology
    rollouts that prevent failures from reaching students in the first
    place;

          Provide proactive, plain-language notifications to
    students, schools, and oversight entities whenever payment risks are
    identified;

          Avoid releasing education benefit system upgrades during
    critical enrollment or disbursement windows and require independent
    certification of readiness before launch;

          Finally, for Congress to strengthen oversight
    requirements, mandate transparent performance metrics, and ensure that
    students are not left bearing the cost of VA's failures.

        Finally, as the higher education industry continues to evolve in
    these unique times, we also emphasize the importance of maintaining
    high standards of quality. Student veterans, taxpayers, and Congress
    must expect the best outcomes from the use of hard-earned GI Bill
    benefits. We look forward to discussing and reviewing these topics and
    are grateful for the continued opportunity to collaborate on them.
        We appreciate the opportunity to share our views with the
    Subcommittee, and look forward to continued collaboration.

     Information Required by Rule XI2(g)(4) of the House of Representatives

        Pursuant to Rule XI2(g)(4) of the House of Representatives,
    Veterans Education Success has not received any Federal grants in
    Fiscal Year 2025, nor has it received any Federal grants in the two
    previous Fiscal Years.

               Prepared Statement of Student Veterans of America

        Chairman Van Orden, Ranking Member Pappas, and Members of the
    Subcommittee: Thank you for inviting Student Veterans of America (SVA)
    to submit a statement for the record on this important hearing titled
    ``Detrimental Delays: Reviewing Payment Failures in VA's Education
    Programs'' today.
        With a mission focused on empowering student veterans, SVA is
    committed to providing an educational experience that goes beyond the
    classroom. Through a dedicated and expansive network of on-campus
    chapters across the country, SVA aims to inspire yesterday's warriors
    by connecting student veterans with a community of like-minded chapter
    leaders. Every day these passionate leaders work to provide the
    necessary resources, network support, and advocacy to ensure student
    veterans, military-connected students, their families, caregivers, and
    survivors can effectively connect, expand their skills, and ultimately
    achieve their greatest potential.
        SVA thanks the Subcommittee for considering this issue that would
    impact student veterans, military-connected students, their families,
    caregivers, and survivors in higher education.

    Introduction

        Chapter 35 beneficiaries throughout the Nation started off their
    Fall 2025 semester without receiving their Monthly Housing Allowance
    (MHA) due to various technological issues. These students turned to the
    Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Education Service for help through
    their counselors or through the GI Bill Hotline. However, the Federal
    funding interruptions that began on October 1, 2025, halted these
    critical operations that student veterans rely on to stay enrolled and
    housed.
        In 2025, the GI Bill remains one of the most powerful tools for
    veteran success, offering pathways to higher education, economic
    mobility, and long-term well-being. For many transitioning service
    members, the GI Bill serves as their first interaction with VA, making
    it a defining moment that shapes their trust in the whole of VA. A
    smooth, transparent experience encourages veterans to explore the full
    range of VA services, from mental health care to career resources,
    while bureaucratic hurdles discourage engagement. If fully optimized,
    the GI Bill can serve as the ``front door'' to VA, ensuring that
    veterans not only succeed in education but also remain engaged in the
    broader network of programs designed to support them throughout their
    lives. The past several years has seen significant advancements in the
    administration of the GI Bill, including IT infrastructure
    improvements, automation of benefit processing, and expanded student
    veteran support services.\1\ Some of these services include the GI Bill
    Hotline (GIBH) and Vocational Rehabilitation Counselors (VRCs).
    However, on October 1, 2025, the interruptions of Federal funding
    paused these critical VA Educational Service operations that student
    veterans relied on to stay enrolled and housed.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. (n.d.). Transforming the
    GI Bill experience. Digital VA. Retrieved February 19, 2025, from
    https://digital.va.gov/delightful-end-user-experience/transforming-the-
    gi-bill-experience/.

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    GI Bill Hotline

        As of February 2024, nearly 840,000 students were receiving some GI
    Bill benefits, with almost 600,000 of them enrolled at campuses with an
    SVA chapter. \2\, \3\ The GIBH is the only place where a
    student can speak with a live representative about any question they
    have regarding their GI Bill education benefits. The GIBH is open
    Monday through Friday between 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET by dialing 888-
    GIBILL-1 (888-442-4551).\4\ By calling that hotline, a student can
    speak with a VA representative, knowledgeable in education benefits, to
    verify payments, fix billing errors, and get real-time benefit guidance
    when they are unable otherwise. When the interruptions of Federal
    funding forced the GIBH to close on October 1, 2025, it had potentially
    left roughly 840,000 students using VA education benefits with nowhere
    to turn when their monthly benefits were delayed - risking eviction or
    withdrawal. Students utilizing Chapter 31 Veteran Readiness &
    Employment (VR&E) were impacted even further to the hotline closing
    when all VRCs were also furloughed on October 3, 2025 \5\.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \2\ According to the VBA Annual Benefits Report Fiscal Year 2023,
    updated February 2024, there were 843,135 recipients combined of the
    Post-9/11 GI Bill (chapter 33), MGIB-AD (chapter 30), MGIB-SR (1606),
    DEA (chapter 35), and VEAP (chapter 32).
        \3\ The number of those receiving GI Bill benefits reported by
    campus in the VA's GI Bill Comparison Tool dataset were cross-
    referenced with campuses present in the SVA system of record as having
    an SVA chapter.
        \4\ U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Benefit
    Administration Education and Training Contact Us, https://
    www.benefits.va.gov/gibill/contact_us.asp.
        \5\ U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Human Capital Contingency
    Plan, last updated Oct. 3, 2025, https://department.va.gov/contingency-
    planning/human-capital-contingency-plan/#table-3-va-functions-to-be-
    suspended-by-administration-or-staff-office.

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Vocational Rehabilitation Counselors (VRC)

        VR&E, Veteran Readiness and Employment, program has continually
    evolved to better serve veterans and service members with service-
    connected disabilities. This unique program is designed to help them
    prepare for, secure, and sustain meaningful and suitable employment.
    VRCs are responsible for approving academic plans, authorizing
    reimbursement stipends for educational supplies, and guiding employment
    readiness.
        In December 2024, SVA has previously testified on the crucial role
    that VR&E plays in workforce reintegration and how its inconsistencies
    in service delivery have often left veterans in precarious financial
    and academic situations.\6\ SVA conducted a survey of its members about
    their experiences with the VR&E program.\7\ A majority of respondents
    said they would recommend the program to other service-connected
    disabled veterans seeking to prepare for, find, and maintain
    employment.\8\ However, the most significant barrier identified was
    communication, nearly one-third reported they could rarely reach their
    VRC, and only one in four had consistent access.\9\ These gaps have led
    to delayed approvals, interrupted stipends, and stalled career
    progress.\10\ What was once already a strained system had reached a
    standstill amidst the lapse in Federal funding, and was further
    exacerbated by the closing of the GIBH. This had left many student
    veterans uncertain about their ability to continue their training,
    secure meaningful employment, and provide for their families.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \6\ Student Veterans of America, EXAMINING the EFFECTIVENESS of the
    VETERANS READINESS and EMPLOYMENT (VR&E) PROGRAM, December 11, 2025.
    https://docs.house.gov/meetings/VR/VR10/20241211/117750/HHRG-118-VR10-
    20241211-SD003.pdf.
        \7\ Student Veterans of America, 2024 VR&E Exploration Survey.
        \8\ Id.
        \9\ Id.
        \10\ Id.

    Chapter 35 Survivors' and Dependents' Educational Assistance (DEA)
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Beneficiaries

        GI Bill beneficiaries utilizing their Chapter 35 VA Educational
    Benefits include children and spouses of veterans or service members
    who have died, been captured or are missing, or are totally disabled
    from a service-connected disability.\11\ The payments help eligible
    students pay for school or cover expenses while training for a job.
    Full-time students enrolled in this program receive nearly $1,600 each
    month from VA. SVA, amongst our veteran and military serving
    organizations allies, have started to hear issues amongst their
    membership on VA system failures that have compounded in light of the
    shutdown causing nationwide delays in education payments for dependents
    and survivors relying on Chapter 35 benefits.\12\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \11\ U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Survivors' and
    Dependents' Educational Assistance, last updated Aug. 4, 2025, https://
    www.va.gov/family and-caregiver-benefits/education-and-careers/
    dependents-education-assistance/.
        \12\ Linda Hersey, Computer `glitch' delays higher-ed payments for
    veterans' dependents and survivors, Oct. 15, 2025, https://
    www.stripes.com/veterans/2025-10-16/veterans-gi-bill-payments-shutdown-
    19448904.html.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        SVA heard from several Chapter 35 recipients who experienced
    significant delays in receiving their fall semester payments. One
    family reached out to us about their communications via the GIBH
    throughout the month of September with the goal of resolving their
    issue before their daughter started their term in November. VA
    instructed the family to continuously check in using the GIBH
    throughout the following weeks of October. However, their calls went
    unanswered once the GIBH halted, resulting in the daughter's enrollment
    might be impacted. It is without question that these delays have
    created real financial strain and uncertainty; many are now struggling
    to cover basic living expenses such as rent, utilities, and
    transportation. Others are facing the difficult prospect of taking on
    additional debt or withdrawing from classes to avoid falling further
    behind financially.

    Recommendations

        With the GIBH closed and VRCs furloughed, students had no direct
    path to resolve payment issues or confirm their benefit status. This
    has led to uncertainty, financial strain, and the risk of withdrawal of
    students across the country. Below are several recommendations from SVA
    to ensure this will not happen again.
        First, VA needs to designate staffing for the GI Bill Hotline and
    VRCs as an ``essential service'' and protect these services from future
    funding interruptions. This would ensure that that students retain
    access to support services and do not go without benefits. Second, SVA
    urges VA to provide timely communications in a transparent and plain
    manner to students, schools, Congress, and the veteran/military serving
    organizations when the risk of payment delays are known weeks in
    advance before occurring. Last, SVA recommends VA adopt an IT rollout
    plan that avoids the start of a new academic term and add/drop class
    period. The beginning of a term poses the highest risk to students if
    that system does malfunction. The add/drop period are when school
    certifying officials can confirm a students' course enrollment for the
    term. Implementing changes at a different time would allow VA to fully
    test and stabilize its systems before they are implemented to the
    masses.
        These recommendations will ensure that students will continue to
    get their benefits in a timely manner but also have a trusted VA
    resource to help them when they are in a significant time of need.
    Transparency and accountability must be held to the highest standard
    when the livelihood of student veterans, military-connected students,
    family members, caregivers, and survivors are at risk. We need to
    ensure that VA IT modernization efforts do not create more problems
    than they solve. When systems fail, student veterans are the ones to
    suffer the consequences. Modern technology can be used to make VA
    benefits easier, faster, and more reliable to access and process. If
    these upgrades are implemented properly, student veterans can focus on
    their education and career goals rather than spending time navigating a
    broken outdated system.
        SVA welcomes any communication with VA to assist in disseminating
    timely information to students when an issue arises. Additionally, SVA
    would appreciate the GI Bill Stakeholder meetings to return to their
    regular cadence. These meetings have historically been a valuable and
    effective forum for veteran-and military-serving organization
    engagement and an important tool for highlighting educational benefit
    issues early.
        The continued success of veterans in higher education in the Post-
    9/11 era is no mistake or coincidence. In our Nation's history,
    educated veterans have always been the best of a generation and the key
    to solving our most complex challenges. Today's student veterans carry
    this legacy forward.
        We thank the Chairman, Ranking Member, and the Subcommittee Members
    for your time, attention, and devotion to the cause of veterans,
    military-connected students, their families, caregivers and survivors.

               Document for the Record Submitted by Chris Pappas

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

               Questions for the Record Submitted by Abe Hamadeh

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

       U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Response to Questions for the
                                     Record

    [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

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