The Floor at Winston-Salem ★ Premium
September 29, 2026 · 23 min read
In May 2012 VA's Inspector General walked the sixth floor of the Winston-Salem regional office and found 37,000 veterans' claims folders stacked on top of the file cabinets, the floor bowing under them. That fiscal year the average claim took 378 days. Last Tuesday VA reported three million claims completed this year at an average of about 76. The folder on that floor and the number in that release are the same object thirteen years apart, and what happened in between was built from parts any agency can buy, in an order the Department of War, Social Security, and the military disability system can copy.