The front page of today’s News & Observer features a major story titled “Well-paid staff, little help for soldiers” on the Citizen-Soldier Support Program, an obscure program run by UNC-Chapel Hill that’s supposed to provide assistance to local veterans when they return from active duty.
Among other things, the N&O notes that CSSP, which began with a $10 million earmark in 2004 from U.S. Rep. David Price, D-4th District,
has spent $7.3 million, but the money has accomplished little for
the people it was supposed to help. One-quarter of the money has gone to the university for overhead, and a large part of the rest has been
spent on well-paid consultants, six-figure salaries and travel.Half of the eight full-time employees are paid more than $100,000 a year, including a deputy director who has been reimbursed $76,000 for food,
travel and lodging when she commutes from her home in northern Virginia to North Carolina.
If some of this sounds familiar, that may be because you learned about CSSP in September’s Carolina Journal. Read it here.
Associate Editor David N. Bass, who reported the story for CJ, commented on a story from yesterday’s Daily Tar Heel about CSSP here.