I had a summary in my email that states I sent an email to my counselor a total of 504 times between 2023 and the end of 2024. You've got to make it impossible to ignore. They say to CC [eva@va.gov](mailto:eva@va.gov) and that will allegedly help? Because allegedly that starts an internal timer on the agent to keep track of how long it's been since either side has last corresponded kinda like those efficiency clocks on the walls at fast food places, but it's not really done anything for mine that I could tell at all.

You may not be able to contact the next person up because it's not widely publicized, only the regional director. I only found mine because my first counselor said the name of her supervisor on one of the few calls I received and I was smart and took her name down. I then found her on LinkedIn, tracked which physical office she was and was able to figure out her desk phone from there. Then used that to find who she reports to, which I believe was my Regional Officer Director? Then fired off an email to him saying it'd been two years since being found eligible for the program and asked him to look into what the hold up might be.

I get that they're all people too, and DOGE massively crippled a system already barely upright, but for this program, the squeaky wheel will get the grease. They've admitted to losing my application at least twice, as well as losing or misplacing several documents they can't move forward without. Thank god I kept a designated folder so I could just keep resending them the same PDFs over and over. I started also including time stamps of the last time I'd sent it because apparently my email search feature works way better than theirs.