Good morning, Legionnaires and veterans’ advocates, today is Wednesday, June 9, 2021, which is Donald Duck Day, National Earl Day, and Writers’ Rights Day.
Today in American Legion history:
June 9, 1921: Highly decorated World War I Army Col. Frederic W. Galbraith of Ohio is killed in an automobile accident in Indianapolis while serving as second national commander of The American Legion. A revered leader in the fight for veterans benefits and care, his death makes national news, and thousands attend his funeral in Cincinnati, where a memorial now stands in his honor.
June 9-10, 1944: The American Legion works feverishly to find U.S. Rep. John Gibson, who is at home in Georgia while the fate of the GI Bill is hung up in a House-Senate conference committee in Washington, deadlocked 3-3. If the tie cannot be broken, the legislation will die in committee. The Legion gets through to an operator in Atlanta who calls Gibson’s home every five minutes until he answers at 11 p.m. The Legion, assisted by military and police escorts, take Gibson on 90-mile high-speed trip through a rainstorm to the Jacksonville, Fla., airport where he is flown to Washington, arriving shortly after 6 a.m. He casts the vote to send the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 to the president’s desk and promises to make public those who vote against it, along with their reasons.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- Stars & Stripes: Republicans criticize Biden’s ‘massive funding increase’ for VA
- Associated Press: Hostage advocates concerned by US military pullout from Afghanistan
- Task & Purpose: Soldiers say the Army’s tuition assistance program is broken — and they’re getting stuck with the bill
- Modesto Bee: Air Force sergeant accused of killing two law enforcement officers trained with Calif. militia led by Army veteran, prosecutors say
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BY NIKKI WENTLING | STARS AND STRIPES | JUNE 8, 2021
WASHINGTON – Republican lawmakers voiced concerns Tuesday about President Joe Biden’s 10% budget boost for the Department of Veterans Affairs, and questioned whether the demand for VA services warranted billions of dollars more for the agency.
VA Secretary Denis McDonough testified before the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs to defend Biden’s fiscal 2022 budget proposal, which totals $296.9 billion for the VA – a 10% increase from 2021. Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., the ranking Republican on the committee, said he was concerned about the national debt and the rate of growth of the VA’s budget in recent years.
“The time has come to ask when the VA will be adequately funded,” Bost said. “Congress must always prioritize veterans, but there is a natural limit to how big any budget can be.”
In response, McDonough insisted that the department has experienced high demand for care during the last few months, and he believes the trend will continue.
“We’ve now seen in March, April and May a significant surge in demand for services in VA care and in community care,” McDonough said. “So much so that we’re watching very closely what that means for the overall budget numbers. … We’re in the midst of a wave.”
The $296.6 billion for the VA includes $152.7 billion in mandatory spending, which goes toward entitlement programs and does not go through the congressional appropriations process. The remaining $117.2 billion are discretionary funds, which must be considered by Congress.
Biden’s discretionary budget request includes $18 billion to improve the infrastructure of VA hospitals and clinics, as well as $260 million to help provide childcare resources to veterans.
The plan also calls for a significant increase to the VA’s suicide prevention efforts. The budget for these efforts would total $598 million, about $285 million more than in 2021. Some of that money would be used to expand the Veterans Crisis Line, a suicide hotline for veterans and their families.
The funding for suicide prevention would also go toward implementing a law Congress passed in 2020 that orders the department to provide free care to all veterans in a suicidal crisis. The measure also mandated that the VA create an education program for families and caregivers of veterans with mental health problems, and it requires the VA police force to undergo de-escalation and crisis-intervention training.
Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, said Tuesday that he supported the budget increase for suicide prevention. However, he questioned other increases in Biden’s proposal.
“The government response to everything is to throw money at it,” Nehls said. “It has to be about efficiency, too. We have to see a more efficient VA. … We have to make sure if we’re going to increase spending that we see a good return on that investment.”
McDonough also faced questions about why the VA needs another increase after receiving $17 billion from the American Rescue Plan earlier this year. About $14.5 billion of that money was planned for vaccine distribution, veterans’ health care, mental health care, staffing, suicide prevention, research and women’s health, as well as expanding telehealth, serving homeless veterans and stocking personal protective equipment.
Bost noted that the $17 billion, as well as $20 billion the VA received from the CARES Act last year, added to the VA’s largest-ever budget appropriation for fiscal 2021.
“I will always act to make sure that veterans have what they need,” Bost said in a statement after Tuesday’s hearing. “But veterans are taxpayers, too. They deserve to know that the massive funding increases VA is requesting are necessary, not wasteful.”
Biden’s proposal for the VA continues a pattern of increases for the department that lasted throughout the administrations of former President Barack Obama and former President Donald Trump. The agency’s budget has increased consistently since the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the early 2000s.
In 2009, the VA operated on a total budget of $90 billion. Under Trump, the agency’s yearly budget surpassed $240 billion, including mandatory and discretionary spending.
Eric Tucker, The Associated Press | 28 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Advocates for Americans held hostage overseas are raising concerns that the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan will make it harder to bring home captives from the country.
An annual report from the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, released Wednesday, examines the status of U.S. government efforts to secure the release of hostages and unlawful detainees in foreign countries. The report’s findings are based on interviews with former hostages and detainees or their representatives and relatives, as well as current and former government and military officials.
The report shows general satisfaction with changes instituted as part of a 2015 hostage policy overhaul, which included the creation of an FBI-led hostage recovery fusion cell and the appointment of a State Department envoy for hostage affairs. But it also raises potential areas for improvement, including more mental health and financial support for hostages and detainees who return from captivity. And it says more may need to be done to make hostage recovery a greater priority.
Among the concerns raised by hostage advocates interviewed for the report is that once American troops leave Afghanistan — a process the Biden administration has said will be completed by Sept. 11 — “it will become more difficult to generate the intelligence needed to find Americans and conduct rescue operations for current hostages held in the area.”
They include Mark Frerichs, a contractor from Lombard, Illinois, who vanished in January 2020 and is believed held by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network, and Paul Overby, an American writer who disappeared in Afghanistan in 2014.
“They also fear that the further reduction of U.S. physical presence in the country is an erosion of the leverage needed to make progress on resolving these cases,” the report states. “It is perceived by some advocates that securing the release of these hostages was not made a precondition for any settlement during the peace talks in Doha, Qatar with the Taliban.”
The departure of all U.S. special operations from Afghanistan will make counterterrorism operations, including the collecting of intelligence on al-Qaida and other extremist groups, more difficult. The administration hopes to be able to compensate through the military’s wide geographic reach, which has only expanded with the advent of armed drones and other technologies.
The administration has said it will retain a U.S. Embassy presence, but that will become more difficult if the military’s departure leads to a collapse of Afghan governance.
The top U.S. peace envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, has told Congress that he has repeatedly demanded the release of Frerichs and has “enlisted the support of senior Qatari and Pakistani officials on his behalf.”
The foundation behind the report was created by Diane Foley, whose son, James Foley, was killed by Islamic State militants in 2014 while in Syria as a freelance journalist. The deaths of James Foley and other Western hostages at the hands of IS operatives helped prompt the 2015 policy overhaul following complaints by hostage families that government officials had failed to sufficiently communicate with them and had even threatened prosecution if relatives tried to raise a ransom.
Task & Purpose: Soldiers say the Army’s tuition assistance program is broken — and they’re getting stuck with the bill
BY HALEY BRITZKY | JUNE 08, 2021
Two months after the Army recognized a breakdown in its tuition assistance program, many soldiers are saying that little progress has been made in helping them pay for classes and complete their educational goals.
The Army Tuition Assistance program is meant to help pay for “voluntary off-duty civilian education programs,” and is available to all soldiers. But according to Military Times, the service ran into an issue when it was switching from a system called GoArmyEd to a new platform known as ArmyIgnitED.
Maj. Ashley Bain, a spokeswoman for Army University, said in an email on Tuesday that ArmyIgnitED was expected to go live on March 8, but “problems with the transfer of many years of legacy data … prevented that launch.”
Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston also addressed the issue on Twitter in April, saying the Army is “doing everything we can to get the system back online.”
He urged soldiers to “continue to be patient as we expect to have the technical [issues] with the program resolved within the next couple of weeks.” Bain told Military Times that the goal was to have the new system up and running “in time for soldiers to enroll in May classes.”
Now it’s June, and many soldiers are still running into problems trying to determine how the Army will pay for their classes and how they’re supposed to continue their education. It’s unclear exactly how many soldiers are being impacted by the ArmyIgnitED issues, but the system’s website says there are over 100,000 soldiers enrolled in the program.
A May 3 Facebook post from ArmyIgnitED has over 200 comments from people asking for help, clarification, updates, or generally sharing their frustrations about the program.
“I never thought I would potentially end up in education debt in the Army,” said one man who claimed he could owe over $1,500 for his courses. “I [might] as well have left years ago.”
Another man said he completed his degree on May 12 and has paid his portion of the tuition, but the Army hasn’t paid for two classes under the ArmyIgnitED system. His diploma is being “held up because the payment has not been made,” he said.
A month ago, someone else commented that he’d finished two classes two weeks prior and his school was still waiting for payment from the Army.
“I registered for those classes on GoArmyEd 11 weeks ago, and still no payment,” the person said. They commented again on Monday that in the month since their original comment, “nothing has happened.”
A lengthy post on the Army Reddit community said there are “classes going back to December that aren’t being paid,” and soldiers are running into problems not being able to register for courses, and are receiving bills from the school. Bain said on Tuesday that soldiers “should not be incurring tuition costs,” pointing to the Army’s exception to policy — essentially an “IOU” for colleges and universities.
A post on Facebook from Fort Riley Educational Services said the exception to policy is a place-holder of sorts for the course’s tuition, and “is in place so when the system is up, soldiers will be able to submit a waiver request for [tuition assistance] to cover those courses.”
But the Army will “not reimburse soldiers directly” after they submit a waiver request, the Army IgnitED Facebook page said, and instead will “pay schools that invoice the Army … and the school will refund the soldier in accordance to their refund policy.”
Bain confirmed on Tuesday that the exception to policy allows soldiers to enroll in classes directly through their school, and the schools would then bill the Army for those classes. She said the process has been in place except for eight days in April during which it was suspended “to acquire some visibility with enrollments.”
“We know it’s working because over 81K Soldiers have enrolled in over 255,500 classes this fiscal year,” Bain said. “The Soldiers who are experiencing issues should reach out to their assigned Education Center/Office.”
But the Reddit post said that in these cases, “soldiers are the ones on the hook, on paper, for these courses. It’s no surprise there is hesitancy to believe the Army totally will have their back on this one.”
Bain said it’s likely that the tuition program won’t be fully functional — as in, able to operate without the exception to policy in place — until early in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year, which begins on July 1. But the longer the issue persists the more soldiers believe they are being screwed, leading to some taking issue with the Army’s “People First” strategy, saying the breakdown in tuition assistance undercuts the service’s dedication to helping soldiers.
“I will tweet at every single commander who uses the hashtag #peoplefirst,” one person said on Reddit. “Every. Single. One.”
Modesto Bee: Air Force sergeant accused of killing two law enforcement officers trained with Calif. militia led by Army veteran, prosecutors say
BY ERIN TRACY | THE MODESTO BEE | JUNE 9, 2021
MODESTO, Calif. (Tribune News Service) —A California man organized and led an armed anti-government militia that included one member, a U.S. Air Force airman, who allegedly killed two law enforcement officers last year, according to federal court filings.
Jessie Alexander Rush, 29, who organized the group known as the Grizzly Scouts, gave himself the title of major and held trainings near his residence in Turlock preceding the killings of Federal Protective Service Officer Dave Patrick Underwood in May 2020 and Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller the following month, according to the filings.
Air Force Sgt. Steven Carrillo has been charged with the murders, while Rush and three others were indicted in April on federal charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice by destroying evidence related to the murder investigations.
Recent court filings, first reported by The Santa Cruz Sentinel, detail conversations and activities among Rush and other Grizzly Scout’s members, who federal prosecutors allege continued to plot more deadly attacks on law enforcement.
Most members of the Grizzly Scouts are still at large, federal prosecutors said. The group identifies with a loosely-affiliated, nationwide militia movement that uses the name “Boogaloo” and favors Hawaiian shirts and violent rhetoric, but the Scouts’ activities appear to be more carefully plotted, the Sentinel reported.
Rush, along with Robert Jesus Blancas, 33, of Castro Valley; Simon Sage Ybarra, 23, of Los Gatos; and Kenny Matthew Miksch, 21, of San Lorenzo, are charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.
The court filings were submitted in the case against Rush and his co-defendants as part of a failed attempt to keep all four defendants in jail pending trial, the Sentinel reported. A federal magistrate ultimately decided three of them, including Rush, were not a danger to the community and did not pose flight risks.
Rush was released to his residence in Turlock on a $50,000 bond co-signed by his wife, according to the filing. Attempts by The Bee to reach him by phone and email were not successful.
The Sentinel reported the filings not only confirm Carrillo as one of the militia’s roughly 25 members, but detail the group’s alleged activities in mid-2020: trainings near Rush’s home in Turlock, the creation of a “Quick Reaction Force” or QRF, and plans to send a member to scout disguised as a member of Antifa to a protest in Sacramento.
The filings allege that, in a document titled “Operations Order,” the militia described law enforcement officers as “enemy forces” and spoke of the possibility of taking prisoners at the protest.
The operations order named Rush and Miksch as part of a “Quick Reaction Force” that would be sent in if the man they sent into the protest ran into trouble. The QRF members were required to carry a rifle and pistol and extra magazines.
The orders said, “POWs will be searched for intel and gear, interrogated, stripped naked, blindfolded, driven away and released into the wilderness blindfolded with hands bound,” according to court documents.
Rush previously served in the U.S. military, making him the second known member of the militia, along with Carrillo, with military experience, according to the Sentinel. Rush’s Linkedin page says he served in the Army. The most recent job listed was a security position at a bar in Turlock that closed two years ago.
Rush allegedly messaged another group member, “the gov spent 100s of thousands of dollars on training me, im gonna use that sh—.”
“Towards the end of May and beginning June, the Grizzlies’ discussions of attacks on law enforcement matured,” according to the court filings.
In late May Carrillo allegedly messaged Ybarra that he wanted to commit a “cartel style” attack and the two met to discuss the plan. Ybarra admitted to FBI agents that he met with Carrillo in his van and they assembled an assault rifle together.
Two days later, Carrillo allegedly opened fire at a guard booth at a federal building in Oakland, killing Underwood and wounding his partner as they stood guard during a protest over the police killing of George Floyd.
Prosecutors said Carrillo used the protest as cover for the crime and for his escape.
The search for Carrillo ended eight days later when he allegedly ambushed and killed Gutzwiller and injured four other officers in Santa Cruz County as they surrounded his home.
Between the two killings, members of the Grizzly Scouts continued to discuss posing as members of “Antifa” and killing police officers as a way to kick off an all-out confrontation between the police and those groups, according to court documents.
On the day of the shooting in Santa Cruz County, Carrillo allegedly messaged Grizzly Scout members asking them to come to his aid.
Some replied that they were too far away. Rush advised him to delete the data on his phone and evade capture.
Prosecutors said the Grizzly Scouts erased group discussions on their phones about planned attacks on police and moved to a different platform to communicate.
According to the court documents, it was clear the group was mad at Carrillo for making it more difficult for them to operate.
“ ‘He removed our platform and robbed our message’ Rush moaned. ‘Unfortunately we would almost have to wait for the next one,’ he said, meaning the next opportunity to spark civil war,” the document says.
During a search of Rush’s Turlock residence in August, investigators seized three pistols, one with an extended magazine, a disassembled assault style rifle, numerous high-capacity magazines and ammunition, a bullet-proof vest, helmet, knife and a radio.
Rush and his co-defendants were scheduled to make their first court appearance in May but the hearing was continued to July 13 to give their attorneys time to review a “substantial amount of discovery” and discuss with their clients plea offers from federal prosecutors, according to a court filing.
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