Of the nearly 6,800 veterans enlisted in the $386 million Veteran Rapid Retraining Assistance Program, only 397 got new employment, the Washington Post reported Thursday.
According to people who spoke to the news outlet, some of the organizations used by the VRRAP were "disorganized" and would be inconsistent with syllabuses. Some veterans could not conclude their programs when the VA ended tuition payments to one of the institutions, Future Tech Career Institute, in February, per the report.
The program was established as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan signed into law by President Joe Biden in March 2021. The VRRAP was meant to cover "education and training programs approved under the GI Bill and Veteran Employment Through Technology Education Courses (VET TEC) that lead to high-demand jobs," according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
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The program pays for up to 12 months of tuition and fees for training, along with a monthly housing aid for eligible veterans, and is expected to expire in December.
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The American Rescue Plan and other COVID-19 relief efforts have been plagued with fraud allegations for various programs, including the Paycheck Protection Program. The VA has also been subject to controversy for years over findings of waste and mismanagement.
The offer to military veterans left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic was compelling: A year of online courses courtesy of the federal government. Graduates would be set up for good jobs in high-demand fields from app development to graphic design.
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"I jumped at it," said Jacqueline Culbreth, 61, an Air Force veteran laid off in 2020 from her job as a construction estimator in Orlando. "I was looking forward basically to upping my earning power."
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However, after more than a year after enrolling at the Chicago-based Future Tech Career Institute, Culbreth is no closer to her goal of landing a job in cloud computing. Like many former service members enrolled at the for-profit trade school under a pandemic relief program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, she soon found herself engaged in discouraging chaos.
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Schedules were confusing, and courses did not follow a set syllabus. School-provided laptops couldn't run critical software. And during long stretches of scheduled class time, students were left without instruction, according to interviews with Culbreth and 10 other veterans who attended the school.
In February, VA cut off tuition payments to Future Tech, leaving Culbreth and more than 300 other veterans in the lurch.
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