President Obama appointed retired U.S. Army Gen. Eric Shinseki as secretary of veterans affairs, and Shinseki was confirmed on Jan. 20, 2009.

He testified before the House Committee on Veterans Affairs on Feb. 4 and outlined several initiatives his office was tackling, including reducing the backlog in claims.

"Let me just give you a picture of what the disability claims process looks like," Shinseki said. "If you were to walk into one of our rooms where adjudication or decisions are being made about disability for veterans, you would see individuals sitting at a desk with stacks of paper that go up halfway to the ceiling. And as they finish one pile another pile comes in. There are 11,100 people doing this today for the Veterans Affairs Department, good people. Hard to do this rather challenging job in which they're trying to apply judgment to situations that occurred years ago and, in some cases, situations that they don't have the full appreciation for the context of combat. ... In the last two years we've hired 4,000 additional adjudicators. This year we're hiring another 1,100 to address the backlog problem.

"In my opinion, this is a brute force solution and we need to very quickly take this into an IT format that allows us to do timely, accurate, consistent decisionmaking on behalf of our veterans. And this is part of what the backlog is about," Shinseki said.

Shinseki then discussed in detail the challenges and logistics of improving the VA's electronic records system.

So reducing the claims backlog is on Shinseki's "to do" list, and his plans to hire 1,100 additional workers is enough for us to move the Obameter to In the Works.