There’s a building in Washington, D.C., that’s mostly empty space. The Pension Building, as it was known when it was commissioned by Congress in 1881, fills an entire city block. Like an M.C. Escher fever dream, columns of every size rise in stacked colonnades around a stupendously massive atrium.
By the time the last of the 15 million red bricks had been stacked six years later, there were enough offices ringing the edges of the building to house 1,500 clerks serving 324,968 pensioners, mostly Civil War veterans. The building was grand by design, a memorial to the fallen as well as a place of honor for surviving Union soldiers, their widows, and their orphans. Service pensions were a big deal in Washington in the 1880s; they made up almost one-third of the federal budget. Forty percent of the legislation introduced in the House in the 49th Congress and 55 percent in the Senate consisted of special pension acts.
These days, meeting obligations to veterans is less of a priority. Sure, there’s still grandstanding about how “only the best is good enough for our troops.” But in 2014, news leaked out that the Veterans Health Administration (VHA)—which currently consumes 38 percent of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ $182 billion budget, and which was previously celebrated by Democrats as an exemplary experiment in single-payer health care—was falsifying patient records in an effort to cover up long and occasionally fatal wait times for appointments.
President Barack Obama’s administration responded to the crisis quickly—and ineffectively. In October of last year, then–Veterans Affairs (V.A.) Secretary Bob McDonald could be found bragging that two-thirds of the system’s medical centers had new directors. But in fact, those fixes were little more than an enormous game of musical chairs, writes Katherine Mangu-Ward.
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