to sell the american rescue plan to the american public. see, willie, he s still got it. he can sing! he s still got it. he s you know, mind s working great there. that s a great cover of johnny cash. i would like to see some of his others, maybe. maybe go all the way toward the end of johnny s career. do the full catalog. i like it a lot. good morning and welcome to morning joe. it is thursday, march 18th. let s get straight to the news. the suspect arrested in the murder spree at the three spas in atlanta has been charged. 21-year-old robert long faces eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault. police say he killed four people inside one spa, three people inside another, and one person inside a third. officials say he was arrested while on the way to florida to possibly carry out more attacks. six of the eight victims were asian women, leading to speculation that the spree may have been part of a rise in anti-asian hate since the coronavirus p
shortchanged on their forever gi bill benefits, thanks to a computer glitch. and reports say the va was never intending to pay them back. what some say. here to react, dan caldwell, a retired marine and iraq war vet. i ve seen some big headlines that say vets are going to be shortchanged on their gi bill benefits. we know there were changes to the gi bill. walk our viewers through what the truth is of this issue. so what happened is last year president trump signed into law a really great bill called the forever gi bill. it updated the gi bill and strengthened it. however the va bureaucracy, particularly in the va veteran s benefit administration wasn t able to update its systems in time for this current semester so they could properly pay veterans on time the benefits that they earned, particularly their housing stipend which veterans use to pay for things like food and rent. you alluded to the v a s computer system.
garri garrick, they were investigating the va long before i got into the picture. and he has diligently worked against the va stonewalling him all the time and without his efforts, again, you wouldn t know my name. elizabeth: you know, you had brought up an interesting point, you said 15 years ago there were, what, 900 va administrators. today, how many are there, sir? close to 10,000 and very few of them contribute to actual clinical work. the overhead is just tremendous and i would not see that in the private sector. you need more worker bees and less supervisors. elizabeth: that s sort of what that s what i m going for here. with would the florida congressman go in that direction? if so, what would he be up against? he would be up against the va bureaucracy who has been hard on the last three secretaries to say the least. but i really do think that he could drain the swamp there and
will uphold that. dr. foote, at the end of the day, who do you blame? that s tough because there s certainly a lot of that to go around. the va bureaucracy has engaged in cover-up and still doing cover-ups now. their delay and deny policy just really needs to come to a stop. and they need to be more transparent. they need to grant interviews when interviews are requested and explain themselves. as long as they continue it s like a secret club for the senior executive service. once you get into that you no longer have to answer to anybody, it seems. why do you think that eric shinseki, secretary of veterans affairs, that he should stay in that position? well, that s a complicated question. i think the greatest danger is if he leaves, then it will shift the focus away from correcting the problem to who the new chief of staff is going to be. he knows he should know who he can count on in that
only certain things in the va bureaucracy freezes up because they wait for the next group. these problems are systemic. they go across administrations. that s why the va needs fundamental reform. what happened i read the memo. this should have stopped. i mean, in 2010, the nine-page memo came out. cease and desist order to all directors to all of the medical center directors and told them what the problems were and told them to stop it and they didn t do it. they just let it go. that for me shows that they didn t care or didn t know what to do and that shows a level of incompetence. it s more than shinseki. it s an epidemic failure of leadership in the va that needs to be rooted out and fixed. stay with us. i want to go to the phone. we have chairman jeff miller, congressman, republican from florida. congressman, thanks for joining