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On 15 April 2016 the web site Ending the Fed (ETF News) published a breaking news item reporting that President Obama had taken $2.6 billion from veterans' programs and allocated it to assist Syrian refugees: Breaking was an odd lexical choice for this report, considering that the very same article had been published by the web site Red Flag News several months earlier. News was even a less apt descriptor, given that what was reported bore little resemblance to actual events. The $2.6 billion figure cited here did not represent money cut from veterans' programs by President Obama (or anyone else); rather it was the amount of an unexpected budget shortfall reported by theDepartment of Veterans Affairs in June 2015, a potential crisis that Congress worked to stave off: Aid to refugees was an entirely separate story which was apparently conflated with the VA shortfall. In a 21 September 2015 daily press briefing, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest fielded questions about aid to Syria and U.S. acceptance of Syrian refugees. In response to a question about the latter, Earnest mentioned a $4.5 billion figure, but that number referenced money designated to help address the dire conditions inside Syria and to aid the more than 4 million Syrian refugees scattered across the region — not to provide assistance to Syrian refugees coming into the U.S.: In short, the two stories were misleadingly paired to suggest President Obama had personally taken money allocated to veterans and given it to Syrian refugees. In fact, the $2.6 billion shortfall at Veterans Affairs was neither the work of the Obama administration nor an issue that went unaddressed, while the $4.5 billion figure was an entirely separate allocation made as part of the United States' ongoing efforts to assist the humanitarian crisis in Syria.
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