The Citizen Soldier Support Program needs to shape up fast or risk losing its funding and being terminated, university officials say in new documents obtained by Carolina Journal.
On Aug. 17, Kimrey Rhinehardt, vice president for federal relations at UNC general administration, sent an e-mail to UNC system president Erskine Bowles about a recent internal review of the CSSP. That review, first reported on by CJ in late August, identified a number of problems in the program, among them a spotty record on personnel matters and history of misappropriating funds to irrelevant activities.
In her e-mail, Rhinehardt set a late October deadline for the program?s leadership to make improvements, or face elimination:
I think that the CSSP leadership should be permitted a supervised opportunity to dramatically improve the Program subject to review by their National Advisory Committee and Review Committee. If momentum does not tend toward progress by October 23, 2009, then remaining federal funds should be returned and the program should be terminated.
UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp made similar remarks to the UNC-CH Board of Trustees last Thursday. ?We need this program to show dramatic improvement in a short period of time to remain viable,? he said.
The CSSP is funded by nearly $10 million in federal defense dollars, including a $5-million earmark obtained by N.C. Congressman David Price, D-4th, in 2005. The program is meant to help veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
As CJ, and later the News & Observer of Raleigh, revealed, the program pays half of its full-time employees six-figure salaries, has paid a Kansas-based consultant hundreds of thousands for ?critical thinking,? and allows one of its staffers to live out-of-state and be reimbursed for travel between her home and Chapel Hill. Yet the program has a dubious record of accomplishments.
