It’s been more than a decade since Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel issued a 2014 memo calling for “liberal consideration” of discharge upgrade requests from veterans with symptoms of post-traumatic stress. But today, vets with discharges below honorable are still remaining in limbo for months or years, without access to full benefits of service and facing potential barriers to employment.

That’s according to a Government Accountability Office report published in July. The watchdog report, which evaluated nearly 22,000 cases eligible for liberal consideration that were closed between January 2018 and March 2024, found wild variance between the services in percentage of discharge requests granted, and similar inconsistencies in timeliness, with the Army in particular taking up to three ye

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