Playing Catch-Up

No matter how often I think I'm fully aware of the extent to which the federal government just plain lags on updating its processes and procedures, I always manage to get surprised sometimes by a story about an agency that's stuck. In this case its the Veterans Affairs Department's struggle to computerize college benefits for vets:

House Veterans' Affairs Chairman Bob Filner, D-Calif., described the existing system as an "insult to veterans" and said swift, effective computerization is the only solution.

"It looks like we are going backwards rather than forward," Filner said to the summit panel. "No matter how much we raise the budget, no matter how many people we hire, the backlog seems to get bigger."

Of course Filner's right. The fact that most benefits programs, most bill-pay programs, etc., now operate mainly if not exclusively via computer processing means that expectations for turn-around are, quite reasonably, higher than they were when most folks were operating on paper. But federal agencies can't just decide to upgrade to meet market standards for these things. They've got to get approval and resources and support, first. And sometimes the urgency for that only builds when an agency has already fallen far behind.