Nearly $400 million in covid aid went to a veteran retraining program as part of the American Rescue Plan. Only 397 landed jobs.
The offer to military veterans left unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic was tantalizing: 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.
As of Aug. 1, only about 6,800 veterans had enrolled in the program, far fewer than the 17,250 Congress created it to serve, the agency said; just 397 had landed new jobs.It was the largest burst of spending in U.S. history — two years, six bills and more than $5 trillion intended to break the deadly grip of the coronavirus pandemic. The money spared the U.S. economy from ruin and put vaccines into millions of arms, but it also invited unprecedented levels of fraud.
in 2012 after Illinois officials concluded that the school — then doing business under a different name — had submitted false reports and misled veterans. The school regained its eligibility in 2017, Future Tech said in a statement. Under VRRAP, it charged VA more than $25,000 per student per year, according to a tuition statement seen by The Post — just under the federal cap of $26,000 and about $7,000 higher than other computer boot camps approved by the program.
“This decision disrupted the training for more than 300 veterans when just a handful had issues that could and should have been dealt with individually,” the company said. “We will never know what could have been achieved.”rolled out in 2012 — the Veterans Retraining Assistance Program, or VRAP — also failed to attract students and was widely regarded as a flop.
“We wanted this done sooner than it actually got passed. Now you have people saying, ‘Is it really needed? No one is using it,’ ” said Tom Porter, executive vice president for government relations for the nonpartisan Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, which was involved in crafting the legislation.James Ruhlman, VA’s deputy director for program management for education, acknowledged that the agency had a limited view of veteran unemployment during the pandemic.
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