Show HN: New search engine and free-FOIA-by-fax-via-web for US veteran records

As someone who was the direct caregiver (guardian, POA) of a vet for 25 years, this assertion seems imagined.

It certainly doesn't reflect the factors that determine quality of care in the VA - that is, the factors that differentiate care between Tampa Bay's VA (very good) and Wichita or Atlanta (problematic).

You could argue they also shouldn't spend any money on computer security, investigating internal sexual harassment cases, or patching holes in their parking lot because that is just taking away money that could be used on veterans.

FOIA deters misconduct, corruption, and waste. Even in this context, doctors diagnosis/judgement of service members has come up for discussion.

A free society empowers the public, which is exactly what this information does.

Transparency fosters trust. When we can look inside institutions we are more likely to trust them. For the VA, that means looking at the treatments they are providing and how they are treating those they are supposed to serve. The VA has historically had very low public/veteran trust.

Access to information such as this fosters relevant discussions and debate. Especially for an entity like the VA which receive virtually all of it's funding from the government and needs to constantly (sadly) resell the public on the necesity of it's budget.

Were the VA (whose purpose is medical care of our veterans and is almost exclusively funded by us the taxpayers) to restrict access to... information about medical care to our veterans would be a huge issue for a free society.

My position is not deviant, extremist, nor alien to the concept/definition of the burdens/requirements of freedom promoted by the founding fathers.

Our data set from the VA contains data through mid-2020, and was turned over to us in 2022 after undergoing extensive double-checking by the agency, including through non-public VA sources, to confirm the veterans really were all deceased. There's a paper showing the agency's methodology on our site, which we FOIAed from them.

There are a significant number of deceased veterans whose data is *not* included in the BIRLS database, because they (or their family/heirs) simply did not have any contact with the VA concerning benefits in or after the 1970s, which is when the database was first starting to be built. That is, their files almost always still exist on a warehouse shelf somewhere, but they weren't active any time in the past fifty years so they didn't get pulled and indexed into the database. You can still make a FOIA request to the agency asking for one of those files, but the VA will have a lower chance of successfully finding the file, and it usually will take longer for you to get a response.

[1] 1850 is very likely an approximation. While there are certainly deceased veterans listed in the BIRLS database who had birthdates or deathdates in the mid nineteenth century and/or service in the late nineteenth century, they are relatively few. Many of them are actually veterans with likely birthdates or deathdates in the twentieth century whose data seems to have been initially recorded by the VA with a two digit year of birth or death or enlistment/entry, and then assigned to the wrong two digit prefix, causing an incorrect four digit year of birth or death or year of entry/enlistment into service.

In other words, the VA's historic data is very messy and is a great example of an actual Y2K issue.