In November, it will be 40 years since I received my honorable discharge as a captain after flying two tours of duty in Vietnam plus TDY there. I received orders for a distinguished flying cross, air medal with 29 OLCs, and Vietnam Cross of Gallantry w. Silver Star. I later flew as a civilian pilot in Laos and Cambodia during the last years of the war and wrote a book about my experiences in Cambodia (The Phnom Penh Airlift, published by McFarlane in 1990). Since 1968, I have pursued a career as a scientist in Europe and South America, always employed by foreign or international institutions. I have never been able to find even one job opportunity in the United States as a direct result of my service in the USAF.
Since returning to the United States in 1998, I have been involved in a long series of appeals and litigation against the federal government for job discrimination. It started in 1997 after I applied for a job with the U.S. Forest Service and was offered $20,000 to withdraw from the selection because, as a veteran, I was blocking the list for a much less qualified non-veteran the agency personnel wanted to hire. I became a one-in-a-thousand complainant that actually received assistance from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, and my case was posted on its website www.osc.gov in 1998 as a "favorable settlement" for a veteran.
In fact the Special Counsel only saw to it that one of the persons offering me the $20,000 bribe was protected from punishment of more than a one-week suspension without pay, and the other received only a letter of reprimand. Meanwhile, I was offered a job where a supervisor was hired away from the Department of the Interior just because she had experience firing people. As a whistleblower, I was dismissed for false reasons, and the Forest Service phoned other prospective employers to make sure that I was never hired to work as a scientist again.
Simply stated, it is a lie that veterans receive any preference in civil service employment. Kaye Coles James, the former director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was speaking about discrimination against veterans, and she admitted as she retired that that was the dirty little secret of her agency. It helps other federal agencies circumvent veterans' preference laws and lies to Congress and the public about it. I learned during my appeals that some civil servants are listed as five-point preference veterans who are not veterans at all.
Servicemen should get together and demand that Congress overhaul the entire system of veterans' employment protections. The OPM brags that the agencies it administers employ almost half a million veterans. This may or may not be true, but what is true is that in the mid-1970s, it employed 1.5 million veterans. That means that over a million jobs formerly held by veterans are now held by non-veterans, many of whom are extremely hostile toward former servicemen. If you do not believe that, just read their own postings on the Internet.
According to the reports the OPM sends to Congress, the large percentage of veteran it alleges federal agencies employ can be explained by the considerable numbers of veterans who work for the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, other DOD agencies, and the Department of Transportation. Many other departments and agencies employ far fewer veterans than they should. Some, like the EPA, Department of Education, and State Department, employ miniscule numbers, and the veterans are almost all in the jobs that pay so little that nobody else will do them.
If you are discriminated against by the government in employment or denied your preference rights, your first course in to file a complaint with the Veterans' Employment and Training Service (VETS) of the U. S. Department of Labor. What they do not tell you is that your complaint will not even be investigated, and after you wait for a few months, you will receive a notice that your complaint was without merit. In answer to a Freedom of Information Act request I made, I learned that VETS does not even keep records of all of its complaints. However, it had records of 1029 complaints it had received during the previous year, which was 2001, and of these, there was exactly one which was being litigated for the veteran. That would have given you a thousand to one shot of your complaint leading to some action from VETS.
VETS found that one of my complaints out of a large number I filed had merit, but the agency was required only to give me a letter of priority for the next selection, which was a year later. A supervisor simply had the application I filed with this latter discarded without even grading the examination. After the VETS investigation, the agency, which was the U.S. Geological Survey, changed some of the documents used for about 100 selections to eliminate apparent violations of hiring regulations. I strongly suspect that the VETS investigator informed them of these violations so that they could change the documents before submitting them to the Merit System Protection Board. This is felony obstruction of justice, which has been ignored by law enforcement agencies since it occurred. This underscores the fact that the federal government does not protect the legal rights of veterans or keep the promises it makes during recruitment.
After VETS finishes its complaint, the veteran may appeal to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel for assistance. After VETS investigated my complaints under veteran law, the Special Counsel dismissed my complaint on recommendation from VETS, even though VETS does not investigate complaints under the Whistleblower Protection Act, which should also have been investigated in view of my whistleblowing on the $20,000 job offer. Ironically, I am one of the only veterans for whom the Special Counsel claims to ever have obtained a "favorable settlement," but it would do nothing to protect me from reprisal after the Forest Service blacklisted me for reporting the bribe offer.
If VETS and the Special Counsel do not assist a veteran, he or she may file an appeal with the Merit System Protection Board (MSPB). The MSPB has had administrative jurisdiction over discrimination complaints filed by veterans since the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) was passed in 1994 and jurisdiction over violations of veterans' preference since the Veterans' Employment Opportunities Act (VEOA) was passed in 1998. According to Vietnam Veterans of American and reports I have read on its own website, the MSPB has never made a ruling giving relief to a veteran. In a few cases, individual administrative judges have ruled in favor of veterans, but those decisions have been immediately overturned by the chief judges of the MSPB or the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Congress has publicly stated that both the MSPB and this court have a long record of deliberately repealing the most important provisions of the laws passed by Congress and deliberately misstating the clearly written intent of the laws. Last year, the House of Representatives passed a law to correct some of the worst abuses of the MSPB, but only where it applied to the Whistleblower Protection Act. Veterans are left with a system that will rule against them 100% of the time, no matter what the fact are and what the law says.
Veterans are not only denied their employment rights, they are slandered by the agencies. Agency spokesmen frequently refuse to use the work "veteran" in reference to federal jobs without modifying it in some derogatory way. It is always "marginally qualified veteran," "poorly-qualified veteran," "less experienced veteran," or something similar to show that the non-veteran applicant is gold and the veteran applying is just some toad trying to use his veterans preference to sneak into a job that he is not qualified to hold.
My experience with the appeals against the U.S. Geological Survey reveals another picture. On about 35 examinations, I received the highest scores and was at the top of the list or tied for first place. More than half of these examinations were classified as Merit Promotion, so I received the highest score without receiving any veterans' preference points. About 20 other examinations were discarded before the examination was scored because I had pointed out earlier that the selecting official had committed perjury on a sworn statement to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. I would have been first on another examination, which was not a merit promotion, but the agency "forgot" to add the 5 preference points to which I was entitled. In any case, since 2005, agencies have been free to use merit promotion to eliminate consideration of both veterans' preference and the relative scores on the examinations. Ironically, the United States Air Force is responsible for this "repeal" of veterans' preference, which had been enforced to a greater of lesser extent since 1944. In the case of Brandt v. Department of the Air Force, the final decision was rendered making it "legal" to hold both open and merit promotion selections at the same time to fill one vacancy. That means that if a veteran has the highest examination score on the open selection, that hiring certificate can be left unused and a non-veteran applicant can be selected from the merit promotion certificate, on which veterans receive no preference points and the examination scores can be disregarded.
The vacancies with the U. S. Geological Survey for which I applied are rated by the OSC as being equivalent to a full professor at a university or research institute. Such a job would normally required a PhD, many years of experience at the PhD level, and a large number of scientific publications and other achievements. As I learned during the hearings, more than half of the non-veterans hired had not even received a master's degree and fewer than 10% had earned a PhD. Nearly all had no publications to show for 10 to 25 years of civil service employment. A few had co-authored one or two short papers in their lifetime, usually related to work before the master's level. and only one had a respectable publication record, although the list was considerably shorter than mine. Only one had a management degree, and none had management experience except as a subordinate to a subordinate in a large bureaucracy. One had great issues with getting along with prople. He has spent six years in a graduate school without earning even a master's degree. However, he maintained a student draft deferment from 1966 through 1976, and that kept him out of Vietnam. All of them personally knew the selecting officials or members of the panels recommending who to hire. When a scientist sees that a person has been working in research for more than 20 years without obtaining enough results to write even one of two pages to publish in a refereed journal, he has to wonder what this person was doing to earn his pay for all of those years.
VETS suggested that two of the persons hired by the agency were five-point veterans, thereby showing that I must be wrong to conclude that the agency discriminates against veterans. After I obtained the DD-214 of one, I learned that he was not entitled to preference points. The second served for 22 months during the Vietnam War briefing families in the United States about the death of their sons in Vietnam. Although the agency withheld his DD-214, I strongly suspect that this service was with the National Guard and that he is also being kept on the agency rolls as a bogus veteran so that the OPM can wrongfully show a large percentage of veterans on the agency workforce in its reports to Congress.
After 40 years of experience fighting a corrupt system, it is clear to me that veterans who do succeed finding a civil service job will be working at the lowest pay grades, be passed over for promotion in favor of non-veterans, and find the atmosphere at work hostile, at best.
The only remedy I can see for this situation is for veterans to run for public office and help other veterans do likewise. Otherwise, I would suggest that returning servicemen leave the United States and look for work in another country. Remember, if you have trouble finding work, it is not your fault!
Charles W. Heckman, Dr. Sci.
Suggest reviewing the MSPB decisions at http://www.mspb.gov

Is it Dr. Charles W. Heckman, MD or Charles W. Heckman, Phd or what? I don't understand how you are referencing your professional designation Sir. What is Dr. Sci??

Anyway, about your post. That is a long rant just to say your unhappy with civil service and the hiring process. Go back and read some older posts on this subject and you will see that most of us who are, or have been, in civil service will tell you that about 80 percent of the jobs are filled (preselected if you will) by hiring managers who know the applicant or he/she was personally recommnded to them.

Sorry if I am being blunt, but that is just how it is. So, now, knowing those simple details you have to get to know the people who do the hiring, that may be by networking, volunteering, etc. Veteran's preference does not have a lot of impact anymore, so many vets in the pipeline that it's almost a given for many applications. I have been in a position to see the hiring process play out a few times so I have some experience with it. A final thought on complaints and appeals. You will get a reputation as someone not to hire or someone to avoid by going that route, better to know/understand the process and work it to your advantage.

Your posting is a clear admission that the federal civil service is corrupt, in the sense of completely disregarding the law and committing fraud to protect the lawbreakers. During my appeals, I have had plenty of chance to learn the laws and regulations, and the hiring process which you describe and which I am also fully familiar with is illegal and in many cases could and should result in criminal prosecution of the supervisors who practice or condone it.
One law to refer to is 5 U.S.C. 2302, which governs the merit system and specifies prohibited personnel practices. Hiring preselected friends is a violation of 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(6), which prohibits giving any advantage to any person not specified by a law or rule or hurting anyone's chances of being hired, promoted, or retained. I have also had many applications I filed removed from selections through tricks, fraud, or other illegal actions, which is a violation of 5 U.S.C. 2302 (b)(4). When I was offered $20,000 to withdraw from a selection under threat that the selection would be cancelled if I refused the offer, that was a violation of 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(5), which induced the agency to suspend the person who made the offer for one week without pay and give her supervisor a letter of reprimand. The fact that filing complaints and reporting agency wrongdoing gets a person on a blacklist is well known to me and other whistleblowers, but that too is a violation of 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(8), just as any form of reprisal against a person for filing an agency grievance is a violation of 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(9). By the way, interfering in any way with the rights of any person to veterans' preference violates 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(11). These laws can be found, among other places on the Internet, at www.house.gov the website of the House of Representatives. Just go to U.C.Code and search for Title 5, Paragraph 2302 and related laws.
These are not the only laws that are routinely violated to keep veterans out of the federal civil service, but these laws are most specific to the civil service. I have recorded testimony of a GS-15 lying under oath and getting caught at it during an MSPB hearing, and I have sworn statements that were also shown to be lies. The MSPB never does anything about these kinds of crimes because its judges deny having any jurisdiction to prosecute civil servants for crimes they commit during hearings. I also have original hiring records that were submitted for hearing files after they were doctored, which is a felony called obstruction of justice. By the way, Special Counsel, Scot Bloch, who has become infamous for rejecting all complaints by veterans against civil service agencies, had the records and computers in his office confiscated by the FBI in May in anticipation of a possible indictment for obstruction of justice.
How do you tell a young serviceman or woman, who is about to return from Iraq or Afghanistan, that he should have been at home networking with civil servants if he wanted a civilian job with the government for which he just risked his life? How do you explain why more than a million jobs have been taken away from veterans and given to non-veterans since 1975? How do you suggest veterans support themselves if they are discriminated against by both private and public employers? Some veterans groups and several newspapers now report that suicide is the leading cause of death among servicemen in and recently returned from Iraq, and the suicides often are committed after the veteran and his family come to realize that they will lose a home or other property because they cannot pay their bills.
Federal agencies are frequently under pressure from Congress to hire veterans, so they do. What they do not report is that Jimmy Carter, no freind of the Vietnam veterans of his time, issued an executive order establishing a probationary year. Agencies use this to fire the veterans almost as fast at they hire them. I also know that agencies report that some of their employees are veterans eligible for preference, even though they have not earned preference under the law.
During my tour of duty in Vietnam, I saw much more combat that most veterans who served, and I am glad to have contributed to holding off the Communists, at least for a few extra years. As a civilian pilot, I witnessed some of the great suffering of the people caused by the Communist victory. However, I cannot also help feeling like a sucker for having fought for a government in Washington that maintains a civil service just as corrupt as that of any banana republic, albeit with much more money at its disposal to be corrupt with.
I do have non-veteran friends who work for the federal civil service, and none of them had to know anybody before they were hired. Off the record, civil servants have discussed the desire to keep veterans out of their agencies, often because they fear for their own jobs in case of a reduction in force if too many veterans with special retention rights are employed. In addition, many of the selecting officials I have encountered during my appeals were studying at universities where demonstrations took place frequently during the Vietnam War and groups of their fellow students organized trips to West Coast airports to spit at veterans, burned ROTC buildings, and taunted students who took part in the ROTC. As soon as the war ended, did they suddenly change their opinion of servicemen and veterans? Would they welcome "unrepentent" veterans as colleagues? In my experience, they do not. It may be different if the veterans works for the Department of Defense, but my experience has been with the Departments of Agriculture and Interior and several independent agencies.
There are differences in the way different groups of veterans are treated. For example, reports I have read suggest that retired military personnel are rarely discriminated against, while those of us who saw combat in Vietnam seldom succeed in being hired by the civil service at all. Vietnam Era veterans without combat experience seem to obtain jobs more easily, but many of them complain about individual acts of discrimination, as well. The veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are getting particularly bad treatment because after the Vietnam War, there was no precedent for discriminating against veterans in the civil servants, and World War II vets had been treated very well. Since the Vietnam War, agencies like the Merit System Protection Board and the Federal courts have seen to it that the laws assisting veterans have been gutted by discriminatory precedents, making it very difficult for a veterans whose rights have been violated to find any redress.
My degree is equivalent to a PhD but granted by the University of Hamburg in Germany. It is called Doktor der Naturwissenschaften (Doctor of Natural Sciences). I had first earned a Master of Science degree in New York, and later I became the first person from a non-German-speaking country to successfully complete a habilitation in biology at a German university. At least half of the non-veterans the civil service deems better scientists than I am, even though their examination scores were lower than mine, earned neither a PhD nor a master's degree, authored no scientific publications, and left no evidence of any work at all after 20 to 30 years of government employment.
Charles W. Heckman, Dr. Sci.

"Win friends and influence people"

Those are actually wise words, wouldn't you agree?

Civil service and nepotism have become synonomous. It has more to do with who you know rather than your qualifications.

"Win friends and influence people" really hits the nail on the head. That is exactly the key to entry into the civil service.
The problem, however, it that the law demands that qualified people be hired to give good service to the public. Civil service selections are supposed to follow procedures designed to see to it that the best qualified persons be appointed, not just friends of senior civil service personnel. Where friendship determines who is hired, a serviceman risking his or her life for the country in foreign lands for a year or more is less likely to get a civil service job because he or she was not around to win the friends needed to get a job after leaving the service. His or her contemporaries who did not serve in the armed forces remain in the United States and are in a position to butter up the people with the power to give them jobs. That is why there are so many more homeless veterans than homeless non-veterans.
If a veteran receives the highest mark on a civil service examination after receiving his preference points, he or she should be hired. Supervisors who use tricks to keep veterans out of their agencies should be fired. The broken system has to be fixed before too many of our Iraq veterans are made homeless and destitute.

My experience was completely different as I knew no one at any of the jobs I earned from my first job as a Customs Inspector in 1991 working on the border to a career change to the Contract Specialist field. I left Civil Service in 2006 for a job with a contractor, and then returned to a totally different organization as a GS-12/13, again in the Contracting career field.

I have always found being humble, but confident, worked the best. Being articulate, understanding the job at least as well as those who were interviewing me, and NEVER copping an attitude was the way to get the job. My job was to not only show that I am a good person for the job, but that I would fit into their workforce. NOT make their workforce fit me. And to go in thinking you are better than they are is like going in with a big L on your forehead. I only know of a few people ever fired from Civil Service, the last was one of those who thought more highly of themselves than they should have, and was dissing her supervisor and leadership publicly.

To be honest, your lecturing way of communicating in this thread makes me believe you looked down on those you hoped to be employed by, or thought that simple veteran status and learning should win the day. I got my first job due to my military service (VRA), but it was also because I was stubborn about getting an interview WITHOUT getting obnoxious about it. It took 8 months to get that interview, and because my attitude was right, and I was prepared, I got the job offer within a few weeks of the interview.

Oh, and when they told me the only time that I could get an interview was from 0001 to 0800, I volunteered for 0300. When asked why, I told them that I knew that the border was busy from 0001 to 0200, and got busy around 0400 as the "lunche bunch" showed up, communting from Tijuana to San Diego and LA area jobs.

I was asked why I chose 0300 for the interview by both the HR person when they offered the interview, and by the interview panel. My answer showed I knew the job and its patterns better than any answer I could offer in the interview. It also showed I was willing to do whatever it took, and 10 years in that job, 7 tons of dope seized and the Law Enforcement Action of the Year (1999) award proved that it was more than just an impression.

Finally, the Civil Service tests are NOT a means of determining if you will be a good fit in a workforce. They are merely a way to winnow out some of the THOUSANDS competing for every Civil Service position. In the end, a Civil Service person is nearly impossible to fire, so they need to make very certain that a new hire will be a good fit. It is the applicants job to show that they WILL be a good fit.

No amount of chest decorations short of the MOH will get you past that, nor will your resume as military person, it is how well you can transition from being a leader to being a part of the Civil Service workforce, a much different job and work environment.

And more than 60% of the people I am working with are veterans, with a retired Col., at least 5 enlisted vets from the AF, myself a former Navy vet and ARNG retiree, and a few Army enlisted as well. No Marine Corp vets yet, but I am hoping to see at least one in the next group hired.

So perhaps you have faced a different environment than I have. I rather doubt it, the difference is how you handled the environment. Maybe you should look at the problem that way for a change.

Dear DW,
You were lucky and found a small group within an agency predominantly composed of veterans. When you imply that there was something about my attitude that kept me from being hired, you are wrong. From 1983 through 1997, I received the highest score on a series of civil service examinations but was never even interviewed. I never met or spoke with the people making recommendations or selections, and they had no information whatsoever about me other than what I placed on my resume. The field of science in which I worked overseas was rated by the Department of Justice as a field in which a shortage exists, which gave preferential immigration rights to foreign nationals with my skills. On most of the civil service certificates on which my name appeared, there were fewer than 10 qualified applicants. As an American citizen, I was denied selection and even an interview because of my service in Vietnam, something which I have to believe because everyone chosen and doing the choosing avoided the draft in one way or another during the Vietnam War or was too young at the time to have faced the draft.
At my first interview in 1997, I was told off the bat that I would not be selected and was offered $20,000 if I would withdraw voluntarily so that a less qualified non-veteran could be selected. I was told that if I refused, the selection would be cancelled. The U.S. Forest Service was forced to offer me an equivalent job, from which I was fired because I had disclosed the bribe offer and criticized a junk science project that was costing the taxpayers at least $208,000.
Contrary to what you wrote, it is not difficult to fire federal civil servants. More than 8000 are fired each year, including many who are dismissed in reprisal for reporting gross waste or illegal activities. No matter how justified their cases, almost every whistleblower loses the appeal before the Merit System Protection Board, something Congress has attested to in writing after investigations by the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight.
No, I did not look down on the civil servants in the agencies to which I applied, but I certainly do now. The reason is that (1) I have recorded testimony in which two of these senior government employees committed perjury and were caught at it during cross examination, (2) the records show that many of the persons working in jobs that normally required a PhD and an extensive publication record never even earned a master's degree and have written nothing after a long career as a "scientist," (3) many of those who were of draft age during the Vietnam War found highly creative ways of dodging the draft, and (4) several civil servants have clearly expressed the belief that they are above the law and are free to violated it any time they wish. For these reasons, I have to look down on these civil servants more than I do on ordinary criminals because they are betraying the trust of the public, which is paying them generous salaries. They are also hiding behind "sovereign immunity" to escape any consequences for their wrongdoing.
I am certainly not the only veteran who has been wrongfully denied the right to fairly compete for federal employment. On their websites, both Congress and the Government Accountability Office have reported the following as fact:
1. Every month, there are about 700,000 veterans unemployed and seeking work;
2. Every night, between 225,000 and 250,000 veterans have to sleep on the street or in homeless shelters;
3. Tens of thousands of employment discrimination complaints have been filed by veterans without the Department of Labor assisting even one of them;
4. The Department of Labor listed only jobs paying less than $25,000 per year as "suitable for veterans."
These facts fail to reveal the full impact of employment discrimination against veterans because those veterans who have failed to find employment over the long term are not even listed as unemployed in the statistics. Organizations that assist the homeless estimate the number of homeless veterans at 350,000 and allege that Congress underestimates the real number. One veterans' service organizations estimated that about 600,000 veterans are homeless at one time or another during any given year.
The fact that you were fortunate does not negate the problem that many federal agencies make it a sport to find ways to avoid hiring veterans and to eliminate those already working through using "designer RIFs" during reductions in force.

Small group? Not really, as I have now worked in 6 different locations with 4 different agencies and each has a majority of the CS employees either veterans, minorities or others specifically hired by programs such as the Outstanding Scholar program.

I do not deny that you had the problems you described, but I would like to know where you found the numbers you are quoting. In a military that has not exceeded approximately 1.7 M since 1993, those number seem to be not reported in context or misreported in some way. Yes, .7 M might be looking, but on average, how many are considered long term unemployed and how many are considered to have chronic health problems that prevent them from working?

When I was in the military, we outprocessed somewhere around 2-4% of our command's sailors for drug abuse, which if applied to the total over 15 years might come up with the numbers you quoted. To be honest, many of the vets I met when I supported Operation Standdown in SD were substance abusers or emotionally/mentally ill to the point where they could not work. Many of those are self inflicted (not all, many), so to use those as statistics on how the system is evil is not valid.

I would like to research this a bit more, so would you please reply with the links for your numbers above?

Again, I do not dispute your experience, but I have been in small large commands in DC, SD, GA and now in TX, and I have never seen anything that would lead me to believe there is a conspiracy to keep military veterans out of the Government.

When she left her job as director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Kaye Coles James stated that getting around veterans' preference laws to avoid appointing veterans is the "dirty little secret" of the civil service that the office she headed is supposed to administer.
The information you seek is not easy to find, but it is out there in public records. The best places to start are the websites of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Government Accountability Office (GAO). There is also an annual report filed by the Office of Personnel Management to Congress on the hiring of veterans. Be cautious with these reports, however, because each one tells what a good job the agency does in hiring veterans. You have to look at the numbers to see the real situation. For example, where the OPM brags that the percentage of veterans working in the federal civil service is far greater than the percentage employed in the private sector, it is necessary to look at the numbers to see why. The agencies within the Department of Defense employ large numbers of veterans, which offset the extremely small numbers of veterans employed by departments and agencies like the Department of Education, Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the OPM itself, to mention a few. However, nearly half of the civilian employees of the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and other DOD agencies never served on active duty in the armed forces, in spite of the fact that a veteran would have experience more relevant for almost all of the jobs than a person unfamiliar with the armed forces.
Another source of supplemental information is the breakdown of the 2000 census, which was released by the government several years ago. It may be still on the Internet. It is interesting to note that information is provided in this report on drug abuse by veterans. The census results show that veterans are far less likely to abuse illegal drugs than those who did not serve in the armed forces. It notes that alcohol is the form of substance abuse that most veterans who abuse substances are likely to choose.
Vietnam Veterans of America expressed some criticism of the 2000 census, however, because many homeless veterans were not even counted. Effort would have been required for the census takers to track down persons without addresses.
I have also personally noted that many statistics seem to be doctored by agencies that employ veterans. Some civil servants who are not veterans with preference rights are listed as as if they were in agency records. I discovered this by obtaining copies of DD Forms-214 during my litigation. One hiring official for the Department of the Interior stated at a hearing that he does not know whether or not he himself is classified as a Vietnam Era. He was in the National Guard during the war, and his unit was called up, but he does not know whether his service is classified as active duty. Even though he does not know, the Department of the Interior claims to know whether or not every one of its employees is a veteran.
A poor agency to consult for information is the United States Department of Labor, but there are a few DOL reports that were issued over the years that make some important conclusions. One of those I found noted that Vietnam Era veterans who did not serve in Vietnam are employed at a rate comparable to that of non-veterans, while those who did serve show a significantly lower employment rate. The reason for this can be found in a paper written by Bordieri and Drehmer in a psychology journal, I believe in 1982. The citation can be found on the Internet, but I do not have it at hand. In this paper, research results are provided showing that personnel specialists for major corporations were more likely to recommend hiring a veteran who did not serve in Vietnam than one who did. They provided the specialists they surveyed with identical resumes except for one showing service in Vietnam and the other showing service only in the USA. In a significant number of cases, the veteran who did not serve in Vietnam was recommended for hiring, while the one who did not was not recommended. The resumes and veterans were fictitious, but the authors concluded that service in Vietnam was a significant barrier to finding employment in the United States.
Candid conversations with state employment specialists provided me with more insights into the problem. Three different specialists told me bluntly that I would not be hired for any position in science or education because every search committee includes at least one person who dodged the draft during the Vietnam Era and would "feel uncomfortable working with a veteran." Added to this is the fact that the civil service is required by law to give veterans preference, so non-veterans look on veterans as unwanted competitors.
I believe that if you start by looking through the GAO reports at www.gao.gov and go onto www.house.gov and search under "veterans" among reports and testimony before the Committee on Government Reform and Accountability, you will find most of the statistics mentioned. Finally, it is helpful to go to www.mspb.gov and read some of the decisions, all of which are against veterans because veterans never win appeals before that agency. Note that a few veterans have received initial decision in their favor, but these decisions have been quickly overturned by the Board itself or the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. There is even a case, Azdell et al. v. OPM, in which non-veteran applicants for administrative judge positions, including those on the MSPB, appealed as a class to completely eliminate veterans' preference is selections for those positions.
Veterans returning from Iraq are receiving worse treatment that Vietnam War veterans did because of the fact that many precedents have already been established for violating the spirit and letter of laws designed to give veterans an even playing field when seeking employment. There are some recent GAO reports about this, and there is even one case on the Department of Justice website where the government is suing a private employer for discriminating against an employee because he was sent to Iraq. The Department of Justice would be on the other side if the employer were a federal agency.

If federal agencies are not hiring military personnel for their civil service jobs, then how is the following true?

MSPB: Competitive hiring on the decline
By Brittany R. Ballenstedt
Federal agencies are turning less often to the traditional competitive hiring process to fill white-collar positions, potentially hurting the government's ability to achieve a diverse workforce, according to a new report by the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The report, released last week, found that managers used competitive examining for 28 percent of hires in fiscal 2005. That figure never rose much higher than 50 percent during the previous decade, but 28 percent was the low mark. Competitive hiring had dropped to about 30 percent in fiscal 2002, driven largely by new hiring authorities at the Transportation Security Administration. But then it rose to around 40 percent in fiscal 2003 before the latest decline.

Thirty-six percent of new hires in fiscal 2005 were brought in using the three most common exceptions to competitive procedures: authorities under the 1998 Veterans Employment and Opportunity Act, the Veterans Reemployment Act and the Federal Career Intern Program. Another 36 percent were hired under other exceptions, such as the Presidential Management Fellows program and direct-hire authority.

Full story: http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=40577&dcn=e_gvet

If the two largest exceptions to job competition in governement hiring was the VEOA and VRA (I was a VRA hire initially in 1991), then overall the Federal Government IS hiring a significant amount of vets. If you are down in the weeds, that may not be apparent, but overall, that is the case. Your specific difficulties I cannot speak to, but in my case I am surrounded by vets, and have been in all of my civil service jobs. And that has been in both the DOD and DHS organizations.

I'm sure you guys have seen it but here is a link to VetsInfo Guide on OPM's website:

http://www.opm.gov/veterans/html/vetsInfo.asp

When I look at the websites of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and Department of Labor (DOL) on the Internet, I see plain fraud. Apparent exception to this are all agencies of the DOD and the Department of Transportation, which hire far more veterans than the percentage of veterans in the workforce. Anyone working for these agencies can expect to have many colleagues who qualify for preference as veterans. Nevertheless, I still suggest that even these agencies hire too few veterans. According to OPM reports several years ago, slightly more than 50% of the civilian employees of the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, were veterans, presumably with preference eligibility. This was at the time our servicemen were leaving for Iraq. Nevertheless, it is fair to ask why nearly 50% of the employees of these departments should be non-veterans. Where are they getting people who never served in uniform with experience changing tank treads in the field, repairing F-16 enginges, or operating the computer systems that only the armed forces use? Apparently, a civilian with any of the skills remotely related to the needs of out armed forces would be hired in preference to a veteran. How else would the large percentage of non-veterans in departments primarily with military missions be explained?
Before servicemen started coming home from Iraq, preference-eligible veterans constituted about 11% of the workforce. There is a long list of federal departments and agencies in which the number of veterans employed is less than 11%. Since veterans are supposed to be given preference in all departments and agencies, the percentage of veterans on the workforce of every one should be significantly above 11%. The statistics given to Congress by the OPM, however, show that a large number of individual departments and agencies employ far fewer veterans than should be expected. The Department of State, which should be able to make use of the knowledge and experience of veterans who served long tours of duty overseas, employs a miniscule percentage of veterans. It maintains its own personnel section, and its employment statistics are not provided by the OPM. Among those agencies administered by the OPM, some of the worst are the Department of Education, Environmental Protection Agency, Peace Corps, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Small Business Administration, and the Office of Personnel Management, itself, to mention a few.
Not mentioned is the fact that veterans are more often than not grossly underemployed, performing the dirty work for the agencies at the lowest pay grades. For example, before my Merit System Protection Board hearing in 2000, I demanded documents from the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the United States Forest Service showing the level at which each Vietnam War veteran was employed. The great majority of these employees were at the levels of GS-5 and GS-7. At the time, almost all of these veterans were at least 50 years old, at which age they should be near the peaks of their careers. GS-5 pays a pretty shabby salary for a person with 20 to 30 years of experience. It indicated to me that veterans are simply not being promoted in the civil service.
In comparison, the non-veterans being hired as supervisory scientists by the Department of the Interior from 2003 through 2007 at the level of GS-15, which would demand a PhD and plenty of high quality scientific publications with any private employer, were plainly unqualified for the jobs they were hired to fill and would not even have been considered for such a job by any university, research institute, or museum in the United States. Only about 10% of them had earned a PhD, and more than half had not even earned a master's degree. One had maintained a student deferment for 10 years during the Vietnam War but flunked out of graduate school after 6 years without even receiving a master's degree. Fewer than 20% of those hired had ever even co-authored a scientific publication, and many had already worked for federal agencies as scientists for 20 to 30 years. Could anyone imagine a salesman working for an insurance company for 20 years without even selling one policy?
Of course, the first thing these agencies allege when asked why their veterans are not being promoted beyond GS-5 is that it is hard to find veterans qualified for the more demanding jobs. They keep quiet about the fact that their non-veterans at GS-15 and above, in the executive positions, have no more education and experience than the veterans being passed over. Why?
One of the great problems I encountered in my appeals against the Department of the Interior was the fact that most of their selections were made on a non-competitive basis. These were not filled under any special veterans' hiring authority but rather under the so-called "merit promotion," for which only current civil service employees and veterans are permitted to apply. The Merit System Protection Board, in its decision in Brandt v. Department of the Air Force, decided that agencies are free to ignore veterans' preference by holding simultaneous competitive selections and merit promotions. In case a veteran has the highest score on the competitive hiring certificate, the agency simply returns the certificate without hiring anyone and selects the less qualified non-veteran it wishes to hire from the merit promotion list, on which examination scores are not listed. It was particularly reprehensible for the Air Force to have been the agency that secured this decision, which virtually eliminates veterans' preference from civil service selections.
If non-competitive selections are made 72% of the time, that is because the agencies do not want to hire veterans, now because it wants to hire more. Those veterans who are hired under special hiring authorities are all hired temporarily, permitting the agency to get rid of them after a year just by failing to renew their contracts. This permits the OPM to show Congress that many veterans are working in the civil service, while keeping quiet about the fact that they will not be given career positions. After a year, it is easy for the agency to simply let the veterans employed under special hiring authorities go and hire a new batch under the same authority. During the middle 1980s, the U. S. Department of Education showed that 0.1% of its employees were Vietnam Era veterans in its report to Congress without clearly showing that both of the veterans were working on such temporary contracts.
The "probationary year," introduced by President Carter, gives agencies a further chance to get rid of veterans while keeping the percentage of veterans on the workforce respectably high. One official working for Vietnam Veterans of America told me that the U.S. Postal Service made it a specialty of hiring disabled veterans and telling them they are no longer needed a short time before they had completed a year. Instead of a job, these disabled veterans found that they had simply entered a revolving door.
Another problem is that agencies lie about the number of preference-eligible veterans they employ. Every time I have obtained copies of the DD-Forms 214 of the employees who agencies claim to be Vietnam Era veterans, I have found that a number of them are not legally such veterans at all.
The greatest fraud on the OPM and DOL websites is found in the way they describe how veterans preference is enforced. First, they report that if a veteran feels his preference rights have been violated, he can file a complaint with the Veterans' Employment and Training Service of the Department of Labor (VETS). This is true, but what the websites do not tell the veteran is that VETS does not even assist one of every thousand veterans who files a complaint. Some of my complaints have been dismissed on such grounds as, "The agency failed to return the telephone call" from VETS.
Next, the veteran may contact the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC). Ironically, the OSC placed a report on its website in 1998 that one of my complaints resulted in a "favorable settlement for a veteran." At the time, it was claiming to assist about 1 of every 800 veterans who filed complaints with it.
Between 2002 and 2005, it received about 6000 complaints from veterans and whistleblower without even investigating one of them. Special Counsel Scot Bloch is now facing indictment for obstruction of justice over another matter.
Finally, after VETS and the OSC have wasted several months of the veteran's time and incited the agencies to take further reprisal against him, the veteran is free to take his appeal to the Merit System Protection Board (MSPB). The MSPB, which itself is an agency with a miniscule percentage of preference-eligible veterans working for it, has had administrative jurisdiction over complaints from veterans since USERRA was passed in 1994. Since then, it has never provided meainingful relief for any veteran in any of its final decisions. Several times when local administrative judges have ruled that agencies must hire a veteran, that decision has immediately been overruled by the chief judges.
Decisions of the MSPB can be appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which Congress has repeatedly criticized for failing to uphold the laws according to the stated intention of Congress. That means that the veteran always loses, and the decision will likely be used as a precedent to deny other veterans their rights.
The criticism of the civil service boils down to one very important fact: In the mid-1970s, 1.5 million civil servants were veterans and today, fewer than 500,000 are. Those million jobs correspond approximately to the roughly one million Vietnam Era veterans who have been made destitute and faced homelessness at some time during their lives. From all reports by Congress, the veterans from Iraq are facing even worse prospects.
All federal departments and agencies are required by law to promote the "national priority" specifically written by Congress to give maximum employment opportunities to veterans. Many civil servants are openly violating the law, and the lawyers employed by agencies like VETS, the OSC, and the MSPB are openly scoffing at laws demanding preference for certain veterans and deliberately keeping veterans out of the civil service.
Our country can only claim to provide liberty and equal opportunity to its citizens if it maintains a rule of law. When any civil service is free to capriciously show his contempt for our servicemen by blackballing them for civilian government employment with a federal department or agency, we have ceased to be under the rule of law.