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OAN Guest Commentary – Tim Kaiser
Friday, March 7, 2025
America loves to pay lip service to its veterans. We get the patriotic commercials, the staged political speeches, and the endless parade of empty gestures every Veterans Day. But when it comes to actually standing up for those who fought, bled, and sacrificed for this country, the system is rotted to its core.
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The VFW and American Legion, once the backbone of veteran advocacy, have become little more than social clubs that pander to political correctness while turning their backs on the war-fighters they claim to represent. Instead of demanding real change, they shake hands with corrupt politicians, put out meaningless press releases, and refuse to hold the government accountable for its abject failure to care for those who served.
Veterans today face a system that is indifferent at best and actively hostile at worst. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is a bureaucratic nightmare, riddled with incompetence and corruption. Veterans wait months, even years, for life-saving medical care while the VA burns through taxpayer money on diversity training and administrative bloat.
The VFW and American Legion should be on the front lines, waging war against this broken system—instead, they’ve sold out. These organizations should be bulldozing the barriers that prevent veterans from getting the care and benefits they earned, but they have become complacent, weak, and compromised.
The so-called “Big Six” veterans service organizations—Disabled American Veterans, Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Paralyzed Veterans of America, Amvets, and Vietnam Veterans of America—are seeing their influence wane. Despite being chartered by Congress and woven into American life, their membership has been in steady decline for decades. The VFW, for example, peaked at 2.2 million members in 1992 and has hemorrhaged nearly a million members since then. While they briefly halted their membership slide in 2018, it does not erase decades of failure and irrelevance.
The reasons are clear: younger veterans see these groups as relics of the past, organizations more concerned with maintaining their clubhouse culture than actually fighting for veteran needs. With VA benefits more accessible online, and new, leaner organizations like Student Veterans of America and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America gaining ground, the old guard is being left behind.
Instead of adapting, groups like the VFW and the American Legion continue to throw galas and host bar nights at their halls—such as VFW Post 1970 on Charlotte Pike—while their advocacy efforts grow weaker by the year.
Where is the Outrage? While these so-called veteran advocacy groups wine and dine with bureaucrats, veterans are struggling with: Suicide rates that continue to skyrocket while the VA shrugs its shoulders. Homelessness that disproportionately affects those who served, while NGOs prioritize housing illegal aliens. Predatory government policies that target veterans for gun confiscation under the guise of “mental health concerns.” A disgraceful backlog of benefits claims, leaving veterans to fend for themselves against a government that delays, denies, and hopes they die before seeing a dime.
Meanwhile, the VFW and American Legion do nothing. They should be waging war on Capitol Hill, demanding accountability, exposing corruption, and rallying Americans behind our war-fighters. Instead, they play nice, bow to political correctness, and pat themselves on the back for doing the bare minimum.
Veterans do not need more parades, free appetizers at chain restaurants, or hollow platitudes from people who never served a day in their lives. They need action. They need a system that values them as much as it values funding foreign wars and handouts for non-citizens. They need leaders with the spine to fight for them, not bureaucrats who are content to sit on their hands.
It’s time for a reckoning. The VFW and American Legion must stop being lapdogs for the establishment and start acting like the warrior organizations they were meant to be. If they refuse, they should be replaced by groups that will actually put veterans first.
New organizations, like Team Red, White, and Blue and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, have shown that younger vets want action, not stale traditions. They want service-driven advocacy, not political glad-handing. The Big Six are relics of a bygone era, and if they refuse to reform, they deserve to wither away.
No more excuses. No more delays. No more betrayals. America’s war-fighters kept their promise to this country—now it’s time for this country to keep its promise to them.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Tim Kaiser is a former White House staffer and political appointee under President Donald Trump, where he served as Deputy White House Liaison for USAID and Senior Advisor at HHS. A U.S. Army veteran and former recon sniper, he now works as a government services recruiter for Booz Allen Hamilton, leading talent acquisition for intelligence, cybersecurity, and defense programs supporting the U.S. Navy and intelligence community.
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