The White House believes a new initiative could put 20,000 veterans in jobs. Obama proposes new aid for vets

President Barack Obama on Friday ramped up his efforts to help unemployed veterans find jobs by calling for $6 billion in spending aimed at service members returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Veterans “are the Americans that we want to keep serving here at home as we rebuild this country. So we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that when our troops come home, they come home to new jobs and new opportunities and new ways to serve their country,” Obama said at Arlington Fire Station No. 5, a Northern Virginia firehouse that sent some of the first emergency responders to the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.


Obama and first lady Michelle Obama have made a point of reaching out to veterans and military families. But Republicans have countered by noting that the unemployment rate among veterans is higher than the national average and that not doing enough is being done to help them.

On Friday, Obama made clear “there’s more we can do” to help veterans find jobs, as he proposed the creation of a Veterans Jobs Corps program that would use $1 billion over five years to help as many as 20,000 veterans find work preserving and restoring federal, state, local and tribal lands.

He also called on Congress to increase funding in fiscal 2013 for programs that help communities hire police and firefighters, with a focus on prioritizing the hiring of veterans. He will include $4 billion in his 2013 budget to expand the Community Oriented Policing Services grant program and $1 billion for a fire and emergency response program. The programs would give preference to hiring veterans. Obama first proposed additional funding for these initiatives in his jobs bill.

Obama approved executive actions late last year to help veterans search for jobs, and one of the few pieces of the president’s American Jobs Act that cleared Congress was the adoption of tax credits for employers that hire veterans — up to $5,600 for hiring unemployed veterans and as much as $9,600 for hiring long-term unemployed veterans with disabilities related to their service.

Obama repeated a call he’s made before — most recently in his State of the Union address last week — to use some of the savings from the wind-down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to “do some nation building here at home, to improve the quality of life right here in the United States of America, and put our veterans to work.”

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who represented Colorado in the Senate until he was appointed to his current post, said Thursday that he sees the measures as likely to win support from his former colleagues on Capitol Hill.

“I think that there is great bipartisan support for our veterans,” he told reporters on a conference call previewing the president’s announcement. “We expect the Congress to act. … These are common-sense initiatives that take care of our 9/11 veterans who have served our country and are coming home.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement that Republicans “would be happy to consider any further ideas to help those who have sacrificed so much for our freedom.”

Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs committee, said he looks “forward to learning more” about the president’s proposals but did not say whether he would support expanding the COPS program, which has been a target for Republican cuts. “Veterans deserve nothing less than to have the opportunity to gain meaningful employment and to be first in line for any existing jobs program,” he said in a statement.

Not all of what Obama announced requires congressional approval. He is instructing the COPS and emergency response grant programs to give preference to communities that plan to hire post-9/11 veterans. Funding available for the police program totals $166 million for the rest of fiscal 2012, while the emergency response program has $320 million in grants to award.

Obama also announced the expansion of entrepreneurship-training initiatives that help retiring members of the military find civilian jobs.