Guess what is older than the internet, John McCain's political career, most Global War on Terror veterans, and Belize?

Did you know that over 90% of VA pension claims are processed with a program that was created in 1978?

To give you an idea of how old the Benefits Delivery Network (BDN) really is, we would like to point out a couple of its most admirable features:

1. When using BDN, the user cannot use a mouse to navigate the program because the mouse was not invented until 1981. That means that in order to use the program, the user can only use the keyboard to tab between different fields.

2. While only one of eleven computer programs a common Veterans Benefits Administration employee is expected to use on a daily basis, BDN is also the least user friendly. No historical record is created for any change made to a veteran's benefits, which means VA either makes mistakes or is forced to keep large paper records. And while there isn't anything necessarily wrong with keeping hard-copies, it becomes a pretty big problem when a veteran's claim for benefits is delayed by months because their folder is located at a different office thousands of miles away.

3. And lastly, BDN is arguably the best program the VA has. This isn't because of the several amazing reasons previously listed, but rather because it is the only reliable program. You see, much like every other government project, the creation of every support program at the Department of Veterans Affairs was assigned to the corporation of the lowest bidder. This means constant crashing, unreliable access, and inaccurate data collection.

What is the VA?

Did you know that the federal government spends more money on the Department of Veterans Affairs than on Education, Transportation, Science and Technology, Energy, Foreign Affairs, Administration of Justice, and Agriculture?

That's right! But the real question is: where does this $68 billion per year go? That is the purpose of this blog. We want to show you all of the government inefficiency, red tape, and ass-backwardsness that the 22 million American veterans and 250,000 VA employees deal with on a daily basis.

As a forewarning, we are not veterans, we are not Republicans or Democrats, and we do not have anything against veterans. We are simply angry about how the law, corporate culture, and government have changed a program designed to help those who fought our country's wars into the government agency in which the term "red tape" originated.