More than a decade has passed since then–Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel issued a 2014 memo instructing the services to apply “liberal consideration” when reviewing discharge upgrade requests from veterans with post-traumatic stress.

Yet despite that directive, many former service members with discharges below honorable are still waiting for years, stuck in limbo without access to the full benefits of their service and often facing barriers to employment.

A recent Government Accountability Office report, published in July, sheds light on this ongoing challenge. The watchdog examined nearly 22,000 cases eligible for liberal consideration that were closed between January 2018 and March 2024.

What the report revealed was stark: timelines for decisions varied dramatically between the services, and in some cases, wait times were getting worse.

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The Army’s performance stood out as particularly concerning. The Army Discharge Review Board took an average of 34 months to adjudicate liberal consideration cases in 2024, compared to just 14 months in 2019. The Navy’s board averaged 16 months at its peak in 2023, up from 11 months in earlier years.

The Air Force had the fastest process, with adjudication times ranging from four months in 2021 and 2022 to 11 months in 2019.

Outcomes also varied widely. The Air Force denied around 80 percent of requests, making it the least favorable branch for veterans seeking relief. The Navy’s boards were more moderate, granting 27 percent of cases at the Naval Discharge Review Board and 13 percent before the Board for Correction of Naval Records.

The Army, by contrast, approved the highest proportion, with 39 percent of cases granted by its Discharge Review Board and 26 percent by its records correction board.

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The GAO also found troubling gaps in transparency. Boards frequently failed to explain their decisions clearly, and less than half of required decisions were posted to the public online reading room. While the Defense Department accepted some recommendations to increase transparency and consistency, it rejected others.

Officials resisted calls to establish a single joint review board, calling that idea premature, and they also opposed setting mandatory timelines for adjudication.

“Litigation requirements and congressionally mandated reviews and associated processes have significantly tasked the review boards,” officials wrote in a statement prepared by the Office of the Under Secretary of War.

“The Secretaries of the Military Departments require flexibility to allocate resources appropriately and ensure the most efficient overall processing across the review boards of all the matters subject to their review.”

For veterans like Kristofer Goldsmith, none of this comes as a surprise. Goldsmith, an Army veteran, received a general discharge after a suicide attempt tied to post-traumatic stress from his service in Iraq, where he documented dead and mutilated bodies.

He spent nearly two decades fighting to change the system for himself and others. His own upgrade to an honorable discharge did not arrive until 2019 — twelve years after he left the Army and after applying four separate times.

Situations like his are “extraordinarily common,” Goldsmith said. Data collected by the Veterans Legal Clinic in 2016 underscores his point. It found that 6.5 percent of veterans who served between 2002 and 2013 were ineligible for benefits, a dramatic increase from 2.8 percent of Vietnam-era veterans and just 1.7 percent of World War II veterans.

“We were fighting unpopular wars for quite a while, and at the end of the day, commanders, even even some of the best ones, are forced to look at their troops as numbers,” Goldsmith said.

“They have to get their their units ready for deployments. When we were going through the Global War on Terror, where a unit would be one year on, one year off with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, that meant there was no time for people to to be rehabilitated, whether that was medically or … whether it’s related to PTSD symptoms.”

Advocates argue that despite the Hagel memo and subsequent legislation, little incentive exists for the Defense Department to prioritize these veterans. “Short of a PR crisis that affects recruiting, which this issue has never risen to, the DoW … will always look at it as dollars,” Goldsmith said.

Retroactive pay and benefits for upgraded discharges are seen as expenses that do not provide the department with a tangible return.

The delays are unlikely to improve anytime soon. Rochelle Bobroff, director of the National Veterans Legal Services Program’s pro bono initiative Lawyers Serving Warriors, warned that cases are increasingly taking three to four years.

She pointed to staff reductions and slowing processes at every level. “I can’t say whether things will get worse, but I don’t expect things to get better,” Bobroff said.

Her organization assisted with around 200 discharge upgrade cases last year and is on pace to handle a similar number this year. The reasons for discharges are wide ranging. A positive drug test for marijuana can result in a “bad paper” discharge, as can military-specific offenses like fraternization.

In some cases, military sexual trauma or other causes of post-traumatic stress are not considered in the review process, despite the liberal consideration standard. “We have some very strong cases where we feel liberal consideration has not been applied,” Bobroff said. “We’ve taken some to court.”

For veterans considering a discharge upgrade, Goldsmith offers two key pieces of advice: do not attempt it without a lawyer, and be prepared for the process to be re-traumatizing, since documenting one’s experiences can reopen old wounds.

He also believes new accountability measures could make a difference. Tracking “metrics for a veteran’s success” and tying them to the commander they served under could create incentives for leaders to prioritize rehabilitation over separation.

“If the Army, back in 2007 had looked at me and treated me differently and maybe focused on rehabilitation, physical and mental, you know, maybe I’d still be in the Army,” Goldsmith reflected. “Instead, I’ve spent the last 20 years talking about the cost of service that most other people don’t talk about.”

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