$300M from GI Bill spent on training like grass-growing and making fake rocks, report reveals: ‘Get into this racket

‘I always wondered why the mob stuck to drug dealing and organized crime. Get into this racket. It’s easier money,’ says one critic

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The Department of Veterans Affairs was defrauded of more than $300 million in GI Bill funds that paid for largely worthless job training by for-profit trade schools — including one whose founder used taxpayer money to buy flashy cars and spend nearly $200,000 at strip clubs, according to a report Monday.

A since-shuttered program in New Hampshire received more than $2 million to teach military veterans how to grow grass, while another in the Granite State got nearly $18 million for classes in making fake rocks out of concrete, according to The Washington Post .

A third program, in Texas, collected $72 million for its six-week “boot camp” in heating and air conditioning repair, which a former student testified left him so poorly trained that he lost three jobs, the Post reported.

Barmak Nassirian from non-profit Veterans Education Success, which lobbies for improvements to the GI Bill, told the Post that the VA's oversight of trade schools "is so fundamentally flawed that almost anything goes at any price."

“I always wondered why the mob stuck to drug dealing and organized crime. Get into this racket. It’s easier money," Nassirian said.

In a statement to The Independent , VA press secretary Quinn Slaven said that all the fraud reported by the Post had already been “uncovered and adjudicated.”

Slaven said: “Federal law mandates that VA rely on State Approving Agencies to determine which schools are able to receive educational benefit payments. The problem is that many state-level bureaucrats have looked the other way for years as fraudsters robbed government programs blind. The White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud is moving at unprecedented speed and ferocity to root out the waste, abuse and criminal exploitation of government programs in these areas and others.”

The VA spokesperson also told the Post that the $300 million lost to fraud over the past decade was “less than 0.3 percent of VA’s educational budget” during that period.

More than 25 million veterans, service members and their families have used the GI Bill to pay for education, job training and other benefits since the program was established in 1944 to help veterans returning from World War II, according to the VA.

The GI Bill is widely credited with helping create America’s middle class, and the Post reported that taxpayers spent more than $11 billion to educate about 666,000 veterans last year.

The Post findings are the result of a 2024 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that gave it access to databases and more than 8,000 pages of documents from 20 successful fraud probes.

Former VA Inspector General Michael Missal, who held the job from 2016 until being removed by President Donald Trump in January 2025, told the Post the VA's education program was riddled with fraud. “We found lots of issues,” he said.

Missal's successor, the current Inspector General Cheryl Mason, also said that scammers who target veterans were “becoming more creative” and “sophisticated.”

“The VA is a whole pot of money. All the fraudsters see that,” she told the Post .

The worst case uncovered by the Post involved a Texas “boot camp” for aspiring heating and air conditioning technicians at the Retail Ready Career Center in Garland, a Dallas suburb.

It was founded by Jonathan Dean Davis, a high school dropout with a history of failed businesses that left him nearly $1 million in debt and facing a felony charge for bouncing a $25,000 check. In 2014, he conned the Texas Veterans Commission into letting him enroll veterans under the GI Bill and charge up to $20,000 per student for a six-week course, according to the Post .

After marketing the course across the country, Davis began collecting more than $1 million a month from the VA and ultimately enrolled more than 3,500 veterans. In 2017, a former employee filed a complaint with the Texas Veterans Commission that triggered a referral to the VA's inspector general, leading to Davis' 2020 indictment on wire fraud and money laundering charges.

Davis was convicted the following year after a trial in which the evidence included his purchases of a Lamborghini, a Ferrari and a Bentley, and his lavish spending at strip clubs.

Davis, who was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison and ordered to pay $65 million in restitution, has filed multiple appeals and denied any wrongdoing during a December interview with the Post at a federal prison in Seagoville, Texas.

While acknowledging that charging $20,000 in tuition for six weeks of training “sounds absolutely absurd,” Davis defended the cost by saying it also covered airfare, lodging, meals and a job-placement service.

Davis also accused prosecutors of “trying to show that I’m living a lavish lifestyle and that the students weren’t getting a quality education because I was too busy spending the money on a Lamborghini and a mansion.”

“You show me a law that it’s a crime to buy nice cars,” he said.

Since Davis’ sentencing, a retroactive change in federal guidelines has shaved 40 months off his prison term, and he’s scheduled to be freed in 2034, the Post said.

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