In its current form, TAP is a “one size fits all” program, identical whether it’s delivered to a private or a general. It is delivered during the last few weeks of service, or after taking terminal leave, during a service member’s hectic process of moving his or her family. The presentation, by many accounts, fails to keep many attendants awake.

The new (mandatory) TAP program, introduced in July, has been described as a “reverse boot camp” delivered over five days. It will be not only streamlined (49 slides) to focus on navigating the VA system, financial planning, and military skills transition, but will also be tailored to the individual needs and career goals of participants – who will be able to take home a 270-page TAP reference afterward to consult in greater detail.

Retired Navy Reserve Capt. Ted Daywalt, president of VetJobs.com, the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ military job board, said he supports any effort to provide veterans with more jobs, but believes some of the VOW Act’s provisions to be shortsighted. “When you take a look at all of the work opportunity tax credits last year,” he said, “85 or 90 percent were in the low-wage fast-food industry.” For employers who require skilled work, overall expenses – training, and complying with the reporting and monitoring required by the law – may not be worth it.

Another problem with the VOW to Hire Heroes Act, said Daywalt, is that “it is geared more towards people coming off active duty – and that is not where the real veteran unemployment problem is. The bulk of the unemployment problem in the veteran world is in the National Guard. For the most part those coming off active duty are getting jobs – not that there aren’t people having a difficult time in a really bad recession. But the bulk of the 18- to 24-year-olds and 25- to 29-year-olds who are having trouble getting work are not those that came off active duty. It’s those that are participating in the National Guard and Reserve … They’re being called up so many times, nobody wants to hire them.”

The results of the VRAP so far may reinforce the idea that lawmakers miscalculated where best to direct resources; for the 45,000 VRAP positions funded for 2012, only about 12,200 veterans aged 35 to 60 had applied by July. An additional 54,000 slots are to be funded for the 2013 fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2012. It may simply be that the program is under-publicized, but the response is nevertheless a disappointment, because such benefits are increasingly difficult to fund. The Senate version of the VOW Act, which called for the program to be funded by a tax on Americans making more than $1 million a year, was ultimately rejected; ultimately the law’s provisions, including the VRAP, were funded by “existing funding mechanisms” at VA – including a hike in VA home loan fees.

Despite the obvious difficulties faced by any new funding proposal in the current fiscal climate, Obama persisted in proposing a new veterans’ employment program in his January State of the Union Address. The president called on Congress to create a Veterans Job Corps – a $1 billion effort to put 20,000 veterans to work over the next five years in public service jobs such as police, emergency medical technicians, and public works projects such as park maintenance and habitat restoration.

Two separate Veterans Job Corps Acts, composed by Democratic lawmakers in consultation with the White House, were introduced in the House and Senate in the spring and summer of election year 2012. The bills were not greeted with universal enthusiasm; in June, Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, said he thought the Veteran Job Corps was too expensive, with no guarantee that a veteran would be employed after the end of the program’s five-year term. He referred veterans instead to the already funded VRAP – a program, however, that explicitly excludes most Iraq and Afghanistan veterans on the criterion of age. In an election year, it remained unlikely that lawmakers would risk a stand on the Veterans Job Corps, or any further funding measure, before mid-November.

While waiting for legislative outcomes, the White House has launched numerous efforts to connect veterans with private-sector employers, most prominently the Joining Forces initiative. Launched in April 2011 with first lady Michelle Obama and second lady (and military mom) Jill Biden as ambassadors, the program challenged American companies to take advantage of the unique skills and strengths of military families – to hire 100,000 veterans or military spouses by the end of 2013.

On Aug. 22, 2012, the first lady announced that the program had already exceeded its goal: The 2,000 companies that had joined the initiative had hired or trained not only 100,000 veterans, but also 28,000 military spouses. To build on this momentum, the first lady announced, these companies had additionally pledged to hire 250,000 veterans and military spouses in the coming years.

In a public roundtable discussion following the first lady’s announcement, U.S. Navy Capt. Bradley Cooper, executive director of Joining Forces, said there was much more work to be done – by Congress as well as the White House and private sector – to meet this goal, including an expansion of the Pentagon’s Military Spouse Employment Partnership (MSEP).