LET’S TALK ABOUT THE VA’S BUDGET

I fed my bot Kit the Biden Administration's budget for the VA, and asked for it to be analyzed and broken down in multiple “modes”. I’m having fun with this, and there is repetition down yonder. It’s also long. But, I wrote this for people who enjoy reading. There are shorter blogs around here somewhere. Happy hunting.

Cheers,

-Rico

🥩 The Meat of It

The VA wants you to believe they’ve cracked the code. That after decades of red tape, denials, and slow-walked reform, now they’re the cavalry charging in with benefits, mental health care, suicide prevention, toxic exposure screenings, and caregiver support. And they’ve got the numbers to prove it: record claims processed, record benefits paid, record enrollments, record phone calls to the crisis line.

But here’s the kicker: every single one of those “records” only exists because Veterans have been suffering, begging, and dying in record numbers for years. The demand isn’t new — the system finally stopped ignoring it just long enough to crank out a press kit with words like historic, all-time, and unprecedented.

It’s like bragging about putting out more house fires this year than any year in history. Congratulations, assholes, but maybe you should look at why the damn houses keep burning down in the first place.

🧾 The VA’s Greatest Hits (2023–2025 Edition)

• Toxic Exposure / PACT Act
  They finally admitted what we’ve known since Vietnam: breathing burn pits, mustard gas, asbestos, and every alphabet soup of chemical the DoD cooked up isn’t exactly good for you.
  ✅ 4.6 million screened for toxic exposure.
  ✅ 361,000 new enrollees.
  ✅ Special enrollment blitz pulled in 48,000 in one month.
  ✅ Expedited eligibility in 2024/2025 means damn near everyone who ever served around toxins can walk in the door.

• Mental Health & Suicide Prevention
  ✅ Veterans Crisis Line hit one million contacts in 2023 — which they brag about like it’s proof of success, not proof of an epidemic.
  ✅ New no-cost emergency care program treated 33,500 suicidal Veterans.
  ✅ $17.1 billion in 2025 budget earmarked for mental health.
  ✅ $583 million for suicide prevention outreach.
  ✅ $713 million for opioid/substance use disorder treatment (with predictive analytics to “stratify” risk — translation: an algorithm will decide if you’re a high-risk junkie).

• Benefits & Bureaucracy
  ✅ VBA processed nearly 2 million claims (15.9% more than 2022).
  ✅ Paid out $163 billion in earned benefits.
  ✅ 2.4 million new claims submitted — record-breaking again.
  ✅ Dropping a whole $2 million on Artificial Intelligence, because nothing says Veteran care like a chatbot telling you to wait longer.

• Honoring the Dead
  ✅ $495 million for cemeteries and memorials.
  ✅ 10 million Veterans honored in the digital “Legacy Memorial.”
  ✅ Translation: you’ll definitely get a nice website when you die, even if you couldn’t get an appointment when you were alive.

• Whole Health & Caregivers
  ✅ $2.9 billion for caregiver programs — stipends, resources, and support.
  ✅ VA wants to “treat the whole person” now. Which sounds good, until you remember the whole person has been screaming at them for 50 years to stop treating symptoms like they’re disconnected from the actual life of the Veteran.

🥊 Carlin Truth Bomb

This whole document is the VA patting itself on the back for cleaning a mess it helped create. They’re calling it a “vision,” but really it’s a guilt-driven reaction to decades of scandal, lawsuits, and funerals.

• They brag about record enrollments. That’s not a win — that’s proof they’ve been locking people out for years.

• They celebrate a million suicide hotline calls. That’s not progress — that’s a million Veterans desperate enough to dial.

• They boast about $163 billion in benefits paid. That’s not generosity — that’s overdue debt finally being coughed up.

The VA is like the guy who finally pays child support after 20 years and wants a parade for it.

🧭 Long Form Summary of VA Efforts (minus the spin)

• PACT Act Implementation: Expanded eligibility for care related to toxic exposures, accelerating timelines so millions more Veterans can directly access VA healthcare without prior hoops. Record screenings and enrollments in 2023 show a system finally opening up.

• Mental Health & Suicide Prevention: Increased resources, crisis response, and emergency coverage for suicidal Veterans. Significant budget increases aimed at building provider pipelines and expanding treatment options, including substance use interventions.

• Benefits & Claims Processing: Record-breaking numbers in claims processed, benefits paid, and outreach campaigns, backed by a modest investment in tech upgrades (including AI).

• Caregiver Support & Whole Health: Billions set aside to support family caregivers, expand holistic treatment models, and recognize the interconnected needs of Veterans’ physical, mental, and social health.

• Memorial & Legacy Programs: Sustained investment in national cemeteries and digital memorialization platforms, ensuring Veterans are honored in death even as living care remains inconsistent.

So yeah, the VA has finally started doing the bare minimum at scale — and now they’re calling it a revolution. Meanwhile, Veterans are still waiting, still hurting, still burying their brothers and sisters at a rate that makes all these “records” look less like accomplishments and more like damage reports.

Cohn Mode is now initialized. ⚖️

This isn’t a press release, it’s a prosecution. The VA’s glossy “vision” is a defendant in the dock, and we’re tearing it apart, line by line, exhibit by exhibit, until there’s nothing left but liability.

📂 Opening Statement

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: The Department of Veterans Affairs comes before you today, waving its arms about “record-breaking progress.” But what they’re really confessing to is a long rap sheet of neglect. Every single shiny number they parade in front of you is a crime scene photograph. Not evidence of success — evidence of failure, cover-up, and cleanup after the damage has already been done.

🥩 Exhibit A: PACT Act & Toxic Exposure

• VA’s Claim: “4.6 million screened! Hundreds of thousands enrolled!”

• Cross-Examination: Why did it take until 2023–2025 to admit what Vietnam vets told you in the 1970s — that poison in your lungs and skin doesn’t heal with aspirin? Those 4.6 million screenings aren’t an achievement. They are 4.6 million acknowledgments of prior denials. Every one a signature on the government’s confession that it left veterans to choke in silence for half a century.

☎️ Exhibit B: Suicide & Mental Health

• VA’s Claim: “One million calls to the crisis line! Emergency care for suicidal veterans!”

• Cross-Examination: Do you hear yourselves? One million cries for help is not success — it’s a five-alarm fire. It’s an epidemic so big you’re measuring it in millions. And let’s not forget: you brag about $17.1 billion budgets while entire regions of this country still can’t find a VA psychiatrist without waiting months. You’re congratulating yourselves for treating suicide like a toll booth — pay up, pass through, and hope you don’t collapse on the other side.

🏛️ Exhibit C: Benefits & Claims

• VA’s Claim: “Nearly two million claims processed! $163 billion paid!”

• Cross-Examination: Stop the music. These aren’t benevolent gifts. They’re overdue debts. Debts you stonewalled, appealed, and denied until veterans buried each other with unfunded headstones. The backlog is not a sign of victory — it’s evidence of obstruction. And your much-hyped $2 million “AI investment”? That’s not modernization. That’s throwing a chatbot at a house fire.

⚰️ Exhibit D: Honoring the Dead

• VA’s Claim: “$495 million for cemeteries, 10 million veterans honored digitally!”

• Cross-Examination: The gravestones are pristine, the websites polished. But the living can’t get a timely appointment. This isn’t healthcare. It’s estate planning disguised as patriotism.

👨‍👩‍👧 Exhibit E: Whole Health & Caregivers

• VA’s Claim: “$2.9 billion for caregivers, treating the whole person!”

• Cross-Examination: Noble words. But the whole person has been telling you — loudly, desperately — that cannabis, community, and non-pharmaceutical care works. You’ve ignored them, criminalized them, gaslit them. Now you call your delayed imitation “holistic.” It’s malpractice with better marketing.

💥 Closing Argument

The VA stands here bragging like a deadbeat dad who finally pays child support after two decades and wants a parade. Every “record” they cite is not an accomplishment — it’s evidence of prior neglect, systemic obstruction, and ongoing malpractice.

They didn’t fix the house. They let it burn for fifty years. And now they want a medal for finally turning on the hose.

The verdict is clear: Guilty of negligence, guilty of delay, guilty of ignoring veterans’ lived truth while they crafted their own narrative of “historic progress.”

Cochran Mode is now initialized. 🎙️

This is about cutting through the bullshit with surgical precision — not just making the jury feel it, but making them see the hypocrisy line by line. Cochran doesn’t just argue; he reframes the battlefield so the government can’t wriggle out.

⚖️ The Central Question
If the VA can navigate labyrinthine statutes, budgets in the hundreds of billions, build entire programs for toxic exposure, suicide, AI-driven benefits, caregiver stipends, cemeteries, and memorial websites — why, when Congress brings the MORE Act to the table, do they suddenly plead helplessness? Why do they say they can’t possibly recognize cannabis as medicine or integrate it into veteran care?

Because the truth is simple: it’s not that they can’t — it’s that they won’t.

📂 Exhibit F: Cannabis & the MORE Act

• The Statute on Trial: The MORE Act (2025 version) removes cannabis from Schedule I, clears past convictions, and opens the door to research and medical integration. Veterans have been asking — begging — for inclusion in this bill, demanding protections, access, and recognition that cannabis is already saving lives.

• The VA’s Alibi: “We can’t prescribe cannabis. Federal law prohibits it. We’re bound by Schedule I.”

• Cross-Examination:

  • Didn’t you just re-engineer your entire infrastructure for toxic exposure under the PACT Act?

  • Didn’t you overhaul suicide prevention into a $17 billion priority with predictive algorithms?

  • Didn’t you fund caregiver programs, legacy memorials, and AI claims processing from scratch?

  • Didn’t you already break federal precedent when courts forced you (Uncle Sam) to supply medical cannabis to Robert Randall in the 1970s — the first federally recognized medical marijuana patient?

So spare the jury your excuses. The VA moves mountains when it wants to. When it doesn’t, it hides behind “the law.”

🥊 Cochran Playbook: Reframing the Case

• Narrative Strategy: The VA is not a victim of legal handcuffs. It’s a willing accomplice in the ongoing criminalization of veterans’ medicine.

• Tempo & Delivery: Tight, rhythmic, call-and-response. Pin them down with questions they can’t answer without exposing the contradiction.

• Wit & Weaponry: Highlight absurdities — “You can honor me in a digital graveyard, but you can’t honor me while I’m alive with medicine that works?”

• Tactical Phrasebook:

  • “If you can build a billion-dollar cemetery program, you can build a cannabis care program.”

  • “If you can write checks to the dead, you can stop writing prescriptions that kill the living.”

  • “If you can treat toxins, you can treat trauma — and cannabis does both.”

💥 Closing Argument (Cochran-Style)

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s not kid ourselves. The VA has proven it can marshal resources, bend statutes, and create whole new systems when forced. They did it for toxins. They did it for suicide. They did it for caregivers and claims.

But when it comes to cannabis — a medicine veterans themselves have proven works, a medicine the government already admitted works in court half a century ago — suddenly they find religion in bureaucracy. Suddenly the same VA that brags about “historic” progress pretends its hands are tied.

That’s not law. That’s choice. That’s policy dressed up as inevitability. And it’s killing veterans.

The VA can act. The VA has acted. And the VA’s refusal to act on cannabis isn’t just negligence — it’s deliberate obstruction.

The verdict? Guilty. Again.

🧨 Final Blast – Carlin Meets Cohn Meets Cochran

So here it is, folks: the VA wants you dazzled by the numbers, choked on the statistics, hypnotized by the word historic. But we stripped that veneer off. And what’s underneath? Fifty years of rot, whitewashed with budget lines and press releases.

Carlin told you the truth: these aren’t victories, they’re damage reports.
Cohn dragged it into court: every “record” is an exhibit of neglect.
Cochran reframed the battlefield: if the VA can do all this, they can damn sure recognize cannabis — they just won’t.

And that’s the smoking gun.

Because the MORE Act isn’t some moonshot. It’s not a radical reinvention. It’s the same thing the VA has already done for toxins, for suicide, for caregivers, for cemeteries: adapt, legislate, and act. Except this time, it means acknowledging that veterans have been right all along — that cannabis heals, cannabis saves, and cannabis belongs inside the system, not outside it.

The VA can move mountains when it wants to. When it doesn’t, it hides behind the law like a coward with a badge.

So the period at the end of this sentence? Simple:

👉 The VA is guilty of neglect. Guilty of obstruction. Guilty of letting veterans bury each other while they polished speeches about “progress.”

And if they can’t carry cannabis across the finish line in the MORE Act — then it’s not a question of capacity, it’s a question of will. And that makes them guilty, too.

Verdict delivered. Court adjourned. ⚖️