Push to hire veterans causes confusion

Officials at House hearing say the law is too complex.

WASHINGTON — One in three people hired by the federal government is now a veteran, but the Obama administration’s aggressive push to reward those who served is causing confusion and resentment among job applicants and hiring staff.

That’s what federal officials and advocates for veterans told lawmakers at a House hearing last week on how well the White House’s seven-year effort to push former service members to the head of the long federal hiring queue is working.

The veterans preference program is bringing record numbers of former soldiers into federal agencies. But experts acknowledged that the hiring process is generating tension and misunderstanding around who is qualified to jump the line.

“The bulk of the problem is a lack of understanding of the law,” Michael M. Michaud, assistant secretary for the Veterans’ Employment and Training Service at the Labor Department, told a panel of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

“It’s a very complex law,” Michaud said. “Some veterans think that because of veterans preference they will automatically be hired in the federal service. But you could have several very well-qualified candidates and they’re all vets and one gets hired and the others don’t.”

The growing presence in government of men and women with military backgrounds is the biggest federal effort to reward military service since the draft ended in the 1970s. President Barack Obama pushed agencies to increase hiring of veterans starting in 2009, in response to the bleak job prospects many soldiers faced after coming home from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Veterans benefit from preferential hiring for civil service jobs under a law dating to World War II. But the Obama administration increased the extra credit they get to give them an even greater edge in getting hired. The government has set hiring goals for veterans at each agency, and managers are graded on how many they bring on board, officials said.

The Labor Department received about 600 complaints in fiscal 2015 from veterans who were turned down for federal jobs across the government, Michaud said.

Under the rules, hiring managers are supposed to choose a veteran over a nonveteran as long as both are equally qualified for the job.

But it is nearly impossible to tell whether veterans who don’t get hired are the victims of bias by hiring managers, incompetence or simply are not as qualified as nonveterans competing the for same job, federal officials said. An applicant must prove that a hiring manager “knowingly” passed him or her over to win an appeal if the applicant is turned down.

“How do you discover if someone acted out of bounds on the rules knowingly?” asked Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, chairman of the House panel’s subcommittee on Economic Opportunity, which held the hearing.

The answer: You really can’t.

“You can satisfy every affirmative action in the book and hire vets, but you’re not $ going to get virtually any managers who have been disciplined or fired for violating the rules,” said Rick Weidman, head of government affairs for the Vietnam Veterans of America. He said managers will not be punished for improper hiring practices “until you take the word ‘knowingly’ out of the law.”

Carin M. Otero, associate deputy assistant secretary for personnel planning at the Department of Veterans Affairs, told lawmakers that the government has intensified training for hiring officials in the veterans preference law. But lawmakers and advocates said the system is vulnerable to mistakes.

“People apply for a job and they don’t get the job, and there’s sort of a myth that veterans preference is a guarantee of any job in the federal government,” acknowledged Aleks Morosky, deputy director for legislation at the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“People are upset because they didn’t get hired, but they don’t necessarily understand the system either.”

‘The bulk of the problem is a lack of understanding of the law . ... Some veterans think that because of veterans preference they will automatically be hired in the federal service.’