Not long ago hearings turned up huge pay benefits at the Agriculture Department offsetting cutbacks in services such as food safety inspection.

In more adventures with the Incompetence Pays motif, now we have the Veterans (Remember Support The Troops?) Affairs maladministrators scooping up the green stuff. And it isn't just mold, it's your tax dollars at play, not work.

Months after a politically embarrassing $1 billion shortfall that put veterans' health care in peril, Veterans Affairs officials involved in the foul-up got hefty bonuses ranging up to $33,000.

The list of bonuses to senior career officials at the Veterans Affairs Department in 2006, obtained by The Associated Press, documents a generous package of more than $3.8 million in payments by a financially strapped agency straining to help care for thousands of injured veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Among those receiving payments were a deputy assistant secretary and several regional directors who crafted the VA's flawed budget for 2005 based on misleading accounting. They received performance payments up to $33,000 each, a figure equal to about 20 percent of their annual salaries.

Also receiving a top bonus was the deputy undersecretary for benefits, who helps manage a disability claims system that has a backlog of cases and delays averaging 177 days in getting benefits to injured veterans.

This morning I was chatting with a vet who has had to appeal his requalification for disability downwards three times now, with all his medical assistants backing his claim. The Walter Reed review group included in its recommendations that the system for rating incapacity be looked at hard, in view of all the complaints that it shorted veterans on their disability ratings sheerly to save money at their expense.

This cabal is a disgrace. They are undermining our troops, and making this country poorer, to feed at the trough that they see when they talk about 'government'.