New Hampshire veterans and their families who endured long waits for vital records received good news this week with the announcement that a backlog that grew to 600,000 cases nationwide during the pandemic has been cleared.
The announcement by the Biden administration means future requests for records related to a veteran’s retirement from service will be completed within a week.
All other requests for records must be available within 20 days, federal officials said.
U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., helped lead a three-year bipartisan effort that, at a critical stage in December 2020, gave the National Archives and Records Administration $50 million to address this records delay.
“The least we can do for the veterans who have sacrificed for our country is to ensure that they have timely access to their own records, which are often crucial to obtaining a wide range of services and benefits that they have earned and deserve,” Hassan said in a statement.
With the onset of COVID-19 in spring 2020, officials shut down the St. Louis-based U.S. National Personnel Records Center for three months. About 60 million paper records of veterans are stored at the NPRC.
The agency stayed open during the pandemic, but reduced staff caused the backlog to reach historic levels, officials said.
“I have worked for the National Archives for 35 years and the pandemic and subsequent backlog presented the greatest challenges of my career, but they also led to many fast-paced, transformative changes, particularly with regard to transitioning NPRC’s holdings and processes to an electronic environment,” NRPC Director Scott Levins said in a statement.
“We are routinely doing things today that were seemingly impossible before the pandemic and which position us for success for years to come.”
The agency has created a web link (vetrecs.archives.gov) to check on the status of a records request.
The records center annually responds to about 1.1 million requests for military service records from veterans and their families — more than 4,000 requests each workday.
The majority of NPRC records are still available in hard copy and can only be accessed in person by archive staff.
Many requested help
In 2021, the Union Leader profiled William Fuller of Littleton, who waited for months to receive documents qualifying him for veteran benefits 40 years after he had gone AWOL from the Army and suffered post-traumatic stress.
In 2021, Charlene Frye of Milford also found herself waiting for records.
For more than a year, she searched for the military records of her father, Norman Levesque. With Hassan’s help, Frye received the documents, but not before Levesque, 77, died in December 2020 from complications after contracting COVID-19.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Hassan were among 20 senators who negotiated the COVID-19 relief act that directed giving the center the $50 million.
The law also mandated this money could only be spent to reduce the backlog.
In January 2023, Biden signed a federal defense spending law Shaheen worked on that gave the center another $20 million.
That law further required the archives agency to come up with a timeline for erasing the backlog.
Hassan also has sponsored legislation to require digitizing all veteran records.
NPRC Director Levins said his agency has an agreement with the Department of Veterans Affairs to expedite the conversion of all existing veteran records to digital files.
Anyone seeking help with getting these records should file a request with her office, Hassan said.
