Zzz About VCS

DISAMBIGUATION NOTICE: This is the webpage for Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), a 501(c)(3) veterans service organization (VSO) based in Washington, DC – not to be confused with the “Veterans Coalition for Common Sense“ or “Florida Veterans for Common Sense“ or the “Florida Veterans for Common Sense Fund”.

In Brief

Veterans for Common Sense, Inc. is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) tax-exempt veterans service organization (VSO). Most contributions to VCS are fully deductible as a charitable contribution under Federal and State income tax laws. Please consult your individual tax advisor to determine how much of your contribution is deductible.

VCS is an all-volunteer organization.  VCS does not engage in partisan political activity of any kind.  VCS does not employ or retain any paid or compensated lobbyists or employees who perform lobbying activities.

Issues We Work On — VCS’s efforts include:

• VA Access — Ensuring veterans have appropriate access to VA healthcare, benefits, and services when and where they are needed
• VA Accountability — Ensuring VA is held accountable for the veterans it was created to serve in effectiveness, efficiency, transparency, and conformity with the law and veterans needs
• DoD Accountability — Ensuring DoD is held accountable for the troops under its control, including adequate and appropriate force protection on and off the battlefield
• Fixing and Fully Funding the VA — Ensuring the VA is modernized, adequately and appropriately staffed, and fully funded
• Opposing VA privatization
• Suicide — Improving veteran and military suicide prevention, education, and understanding
• Toxic Exposures — Ensuring justice for veterans with Toxic Exposures during their military service, including:
  • Accountability — Ensuring a full public accounting for all the effects and costs of toxic exposures; and
  • Treatment Research — Supporting medical research aimed at providing them with evidence-based medical treatments; and
  • Healthcare — Ensuring medical research is translated into effective, readily available, evidence-based treatment in VA and military health facilities; and
  • Claims — Ensuring a viable path for approval of VA claims for service-connection;
  • and
  • Never Again — Ensuring lessons learned to protect military servicemembers from future toxic exposures
• DoD/VA Medical Research — Ensuring military and VA medical research is aimed at improving the health and lives of affected troops and veterans and not at attempting to disavow government responsibility for their adverse health outcomes
• Veterans Education — Ensuring VA G.I. Bill funds are not wasted via for-profit or other education entities that target G.I. Bill recipients but fraudulently fail to provide educational outcomes required for certification, transferability of credits, etc.
• Costs of War — Ensuring government officials, the media, and the public fully understand all the costs of war
• Laws of War — Ensuring the legacy of WWII veterans is preserved through a full understanding of and adherence to the international laws of warfare created as a direct result of and to help preserve their hard-won victory — including outlawing torture
• Smart Power — Enhancing understanding of the immense value of strategic foreign aid (“smart power”)

What We Do — VCS engages in:

• Gathering, analyzing, developing, and publicizing data regarding issues we work on including through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests
• Public education
• Policy advising
• Public relations to help shape the public discussion
• Public speaking engagements, media interviews, op-eds, and letters to the editor to educate and raise issue awareness
• Testifying before Congress, governmental, quasi-governmental, national health, and other public entities
• Legislative and regulatory advising
• Serving as a representative of VCS on federal advisory committees and similar government bodies
• Sponsoring consumer reviewers for DoD medical research review panels
• Joining in lawsuits to force government agencies to follow the law
• Participating in Coalitions and with partner organizations that further shared objectives

Our History and Mission

In keeping with the writings of U.S. Revolutionary War patriot and author Thomas Paine, Veterans for Common Senses (VCS) strives to ensure that America’s national security and long-term prosperity are protected and enhanced for present and future generations.

With roots in Paine’s pragmatic ideals, VCS works to raise the unique and powerful voices of veterans for the betterment of current, past, and future members of the U.S. armed forces and the nation they protect.

Toward those aims, VCS collects, analyzes and disseminates information relevant to U.S. foreign policy, military policies, and veterans’ affairs for the use of the public in better decision making.

Veterans for Common Sense was founded in 2002 and incorporated in Washington, DC on September 17, 2003 by service-minded war veterans veterans who believe we, the people, are most secure when our country is strong and responsibly engaged with the world.

Since that time, VCS has been interviewed by and quoted in the national press on hundreds of occasions, provided expert information and testimony to numerous government, scientific, educational, and non-governmental organizations and entities, and testified before Congress on more than 30 occasions.