Veterans Justice Outreach Program: VA Could Improve Management by Establishing Performance Measures and Fully Assessing Risks

This document records the oral and written testimony of representatives of veterans' groups and of the Department of Veterans Affairs at a congressional hearing on H.R. 996, the Veterans Education Outreach Program. That bill would continue funding for the program, which helps recruit veterans to receive the college education to which they are entitled and pays colleges $100 for each eligible veteran that the colleges recruit. The testimony was highly supportive of the program and favored increasing the number of colleges that have recruiting offices for veterans, funded through this program. The document also contains the text of the bill, statements from the Paralyzed Veterans of America and the Blinded Veterans Association, and questions and answers of witnesses. (KC)

Scholars have argued about U.S. state development - in particular its laggard social policy and weak institutional capacity - for generations. Neo-institutionalism has informed and enriched these debates, but, as yet, no scholar has reckoned with a very successful and sweeping social policy designed by the federal government: the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, more popularly known as the GI Bill. Kathleen J. Frydl addresses the GI Bill in the first study based on systematic and comprehensive use of the records of the Veterans Administration. Frydl's research situates the Bill squarely in debates about institutional development, social policy and citizenship, and political legitimacy. It demonstrates the multiple ways in which the GI Bill advanced federal power and social policy, and, at the very same time, limited its extent and its effects.