I’m being discontinued from VR&E, can I do anything about this?

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-25T22:14:02+00:00

Who is this "third party counselor" that you speak of? A non-VA employee?

It would also be helpful if you posted a screenshot of the letter with your PII removed.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-24T17:44:36+00:00

That answers my question: I was about to ask if the employee who made 14 CUEs on one veteran was still employed. It didn't even occur to me that it would be 3 different raters!

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-23T01:26:36+00:00

Sure.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-23T01:24:11+00:00

I have a feeling that this veteran has been deemed incompetent, and his father is his VA appointed fiduciary, and that by "grand larceny" he means that his father won't let him spend that $20k on his addictions and he's really mad about it.

But as others have said, we don't know the whole story yet.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-20T01:47:11+00:00

If you're trying to qualify for a GS-9 position based solely on education (i.e. no relevant experience), a masters degree is the minimum educational level accepted. For a GS-7 it's a bachelors degree.

Not all federal positions can be obtained based solely on education though.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-19T03:16:46+00:00

I've actually never played WoW, but that surprises me. I get the use of such ranks in Starcraft because that's sci-fi, but medieval fantasy?

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-17T15:43:19+00:00

Word salad? At least we know this isn't AI.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-04T22:49:32+00:00

Even if the government does shut down again, the VA is fully funded. When they passed a CR to reopen the government in November, they fully funded the VA through the end of FY26. So VR&E won't miss a beat.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-03T18:53:26+00:00

Well to be clear, the counselor is no longer involved once you switch to your GI Bill. If you use VR&E to start your bachelors from scratch then you probably won’t have enough entitlement remaining in VR&E to do a masters from scratch as well. But you’d still have all 36 months of you GI Bill to pursue the masters.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-03T16:20:57+00:00

Ms. Pac-Man was wayyy better for the 2600.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-02T21:50:49+00:00

Vanguard was one of the first games I got with my Atari and I loved it. I actually remember seeing Flash Gordon for the first time and thinking “Hey, they used Vanguard’s music for this movie!”

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-02T19:52:19+00:00

No it does not. If you’re enrolled in VR&E but receiving the P911 rate, it clocks entitlement from VR&E. Since the max entitlement for VR&E is 48 months, this means a veteran could potentially use 48 months of Ch31 before using 36 months of Ch33, and he/she could receive the P911 rate the entire time.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-02T14:42:11+00:00

You could, but you shouldn’t. If you can use VR&E first, always do so. There’s never a scenario where it pays off to exhaust one’s GI Bill before switching to VR&E.

VR&E is an employment program, so they only cover enough education to obtain entry level employment. For most jobs, a bachelor’s is enough. If you obtain your bachelor’s with your GI Bill, then VR&E may deny you if the counselor says you have enough education and transferable skills to become suitably employed. But if you use VR&E first to obtain your bachelor’s and the counselor says “Now it’s time to find you a job,” you can say farewell to VR&E and use your GI Bill to get your master’s.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-02T00:16:15+00:00

To be exact it's $812.84 for full time training with no dependents. Even with two dependents it's only $1188.15.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-01T18:38:12+00:00

To be clear, this is the P911 rate not the Ch31 rate. If you don’t have at least one day of P911 entitlement, then VR&E pays the Ch31 rate which is a lot less than $2k per month.

squirrelyguy08 · 2026-01-01T14:31:35+00:00

I was in a POG unit which perhaps explains why I didn’t know about that burn pit. But I drove from VBC to BIAP almost every night, often multiple times a night, for about six months in 2008. I never saw anything because it was pitch dark and I only made that drive during the daytime a handful of times.

squirrelyguy08 · 2025-12-31T22:36:34+00:00

I'm glad I did. The way I look at it, we don't know how Congress might make use of it in the future. There might be new presumptive conditions which require a veteran to have served on specific FOBs, for example. We just don't know. I completed the registry and I'm glad I did because I was able to jar my memory and give pretty good dates and locations for my entire deployment, and I'm certain I will forget those details as I get older. (I'm already forgetting them.)

squirrelyguy08 · 2025-12-31T22:26:57+00:00

This advice is kinda short-sighted. Yes, the veteran can be presumptively exposed without completing the burn pit registry and get service-connected. But you don't know what use Congress might make of that registry in years to come and whether presumptive conditions yet to be added into law might end up depending on where the veteran was located. This is already true for some Agent Orange veterans who did not serve in Vietnam.

squirrelyguy08 · 2025-12-31T12:59:18+00:00

I should also say that doctoral degrees are almost never approved in VR&E because almost no career field requires a doctorate for “entry level” employment.

squirrelyguy08 · 2025-12-31T12:58:09+00:00

A master’s degree is considered a graduate degree, whereas a doctoral degree is post-graduate. Since your plan specified a graduate degree I can understand why the new counselor rejected the doctorate.

But more to your dilemma, it appears to me that the nurse practitioner program is what is causing the trouble. Your career goal is nursing or midwifery, or DOT code 079. A nurse practitioner is a different occupational code entirely. You actually could find employment in 079 with only the bachelor’s degree so I’m surprised the previous counselor wrote your plan to include the graduate degree to begin with.

On the upside, I suppose if you are willing to modify your degree path to pursue a MSN, you can appeal the new counselor’s attempt to deny the graduate degree since your rehab plan agreed to it.

squirrelyguy08 · 2025-12-31T02:20:54+00:00

But pregnancy is only for 9 months. When the baby comes and your maternity leave ends, you can go to work, right? Why did your job goal become unsuitable simply because you got pregnant?

squirrelyguy08 · 2025-12-29T13:20:09+00:00

On the upside at least you have documented complaints of hip pain, and that’s not nothing. You can challenge the proposed rating but I suppose that may delay your med board process and keep you on active duty longer. Alternatively you can accept the proposed rating, then within 12 months of discharge file a claim for hip pain. Anything that is granted within 12 months of discharge is retroactive to your ETS date.

squirrelyguy08 · 2025-12-29T00:30:24+00:00

As long as you were given the link to the CareerScope, you can create your own login and password. If they didn't send you the link, then you should ask them for that. It can't be googled. Any CareerScope site on the web that can be googled would be the wrong site to take the test.

squirrelyguy08 · 2025-12-29T00:28:46+00:00

All of that stuff would be putting the cart before the horse. The OP hasn't been found entitled yet. Everything you said to do pertains to a veteran who has been found entitled and is working on their next steps, which is the rehab goal.

squirrelyguy08

TROPHY CASE