From battlefield to benefits office: A better deal for our warfighters and veterans
Opinion>Opinions - Technology
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill
From battlefield to benefits office: A better deal for our warfighters and veterans
Comments:
by Rep. Jeff Crank (R-Colo.), opinion contributor - 05/25/26 2:00 PM ET
Comments:
Link copied
by Rep. Jeff Crank (R-Colo.), opinion contributor - 05/25/26 2:00 PM ET
Comments:
Link copied
FILE – The seal is seen at the Department of Veterans Affairs building in Washington, June 21, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)
Every day, American veterans seek the benefits they earned in service to the nation, and for far too many they get an unacceptable answer from the Department of Veterans Affairs: Wait.
Wait while your files move between agencies that cannot reliably share data. Wait while claims are lost, duplicated, or routed to the wrong desk. Wait while the federal government, the most powerful institution on Earth, struggles to confirm what any veteran can tell you in five minutes: where they served, what they did, and what they are owed.
This is not a failure of will but of infrastructure. And it is part of a larger pattern, one that stretches from the veteran waiting on a claim in Denver to the warfighter waiting on a resupply in South Korea. The same government that cannot reliably track a service member’s records after they hang up the uniform is the same government that cannot reliably track every component in the weapons systems we hand them while they wear it.
We owe both ends of that lifecycle better. And blockchain technology, deployed seriously and carefully, can help us deliver it.
Blockchain, at its core, is unglamorous. It is a method of keeping records that multiple parties can trust without needing to trust each other. Once an entry is written, it cannot be quietly altered or lost. Every authorized participant sees the same ledger at the same time. For a veteran whose discharge papers, medical history, and benefits eligibility must pass through the Department of War, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, and any number of state agencies, that property is the difference between a claim resolved in weeks and a claim resolved in years. For some, it is the difference between life saving care, and a fatal failure of our government.
Imagine a system in which a service member’s records are written, at the moment of their creation, to a secure ledger accessible to the agencies that will need them later. No more lost files in St. Louis. No more conflicting versions of the same document. No more veterans asked to prove, decades after the fact, that they were where they said they were. The technology to do this exists today, but Congress has yet to deploy it.
None of this will be easy. Federal modernization efforts have a long and sobering history of cost overruns and abandoned platforms. Any serious blockchain initiative at the VA or the Pentagon will require careful piloting, rigorous procurement standards, clear privacy protections for personal data, and a willingness on the part of Congress to fund the work and oversee it honestly. I am prepared to do that work, and I believe colleagues on both sides of the aisle are as well.
What I am not prepared to do is tell another generation of American heroes to wait.
Jeff Crank represents Colorado’s 5th District in Congress and is a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
Add as preferred source on Google
Tags
American veterans
Blockchain Technology
Department of Veterans Affairs
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Comments:
Link copied
More Opinions - Technology News
See All
Opinions - Technology
NASA is forging a nuclear path to Mars
by Mark R. Whittington, opinion contributor
1 day ago
Opinions - Technology
/
1 day ago