At VA, a blogger criticizes from the inside

Back from a 15-month deployment to Iraq, Alex Horton penned a 1,000-word rant against the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“How many obscene scandals, misappropriations and misdiagnoses does it take to see there’s a rotten core at the center?” the 23-year-old soldier wrote on his war blog from Austin in 2009. He was in his fourth semester at community college, and VA was holding up money he needed for rent and schoolbooks under the new GI Bill.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

Cast Your Vote

His unsympathetic VA counselor “provides the same level of care you would expect from a Tijuana back alley vasectomy,” Horton wrote, expressing a frustration felt by generations of veterans.

What happened next was a watershed for one of the government’s most maligned bureaucracies.

Veterans Affairs hired Horton to keep blogging — about itself.

The agency hopes to use the Internet — and a critic operating from the inside — to help turn around its reputation as obstructionist, antiquated and overwhelmed. The goal is not just to answer veterans’ questions faster and in real time but also to open the bureaucracy to scrutiny. Although they’ve gotten a slower start than the private sector, federal agencies are interacting with citizens on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, a big change for many used to more-controlled communication.

At first Horton said no when the department’s new-media director tried to recruit him last spring. “Then I thought, this might be an opportunity,” he said.

He quit school and a part-time job corralling grocery carts at Costco and drove his Ford Ranger to the District, where he rents an English basement on Capitol Hill.

Instead of blogging without pay in a dusty Internet cafe in Mosul, Horton makes $47,500 a year to write full time from a ninth-floor cubicle at VA headquarters on Vermont Avenue NW. Now 25, he arrived with instant credibility with veterans, who followed his must-read war blog, Army of Dude, during the U.S. troop surge for its unvarnished, eloquent dispatches.

But his job has an inherently awkward dynamic — work for “The Man” and risk selling out (“Now I suppose he will be busy spewing government propaganda,” one military blogger wrote after his hiring); become too critical and irk your bosses.

Brandon Friedman, who oversees the five-member new-media team created last fall, said: “I told everyone upfront, Alex is not here to flack for the agency but to help facilitate our communication with our clients.”

VAntage Point launched last Veterans Day. It has taken on some fundamental issues: The labyrinthine claims backlog, VA’s paperbound culture, the wave of mental health problems confronting returning troops, access to health care, how civilians should talk to veterans, suicide, homelessness.

The blog, anchored by Horton with contributions from other writers, gets about 3,000 hits a day, the agency said. The posts also appear on the VA Facebook page, which now has 112,000 fans, the largest of any Cabinet agency.

A fellow veteran, Friedman had admired Horton’s war blog. But he was nervous when he approached his boss about hiring him. “He can be kind of controversial,” Friedman told Assistant Secretary Tammy Duckworth.