Tertius News is an AI-native newsroom: an AI model reads the source articles linked below — on this story, all of them from one outlet — and extracts what that outlet reported, claim by claim. How this works →
GAO Report: Defense Department Lacks Resources to Complete All Required Cognitive Assessments
By Tertius News AI Desk1 distinct · 1 masthead · 1 articleVersion 1Coverage Published
The S. Department of Defense does not have enough staff or technology to complete cognitive assessments for all high-risk, active-duty service members, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The report found that only 86% of required assessments were completed last year.
The assessments are part of an effort to monitor the brain health of service members exposed to blasts. They were ordered in the wake of a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023, carried out by Army Reservist Robert Card. Card killed 18 people in the attack. He had been repeatedly exposed to blasts as a Reservist, and forensic testing found he had a brain injury, raising questions about whether the injury was related to his military service.
The GAO report highlights a gap between the Department of Defense's mandate and its capacity to fulfill it, underscoring challenges in ensuring comprehensive brain-health monitoring for service members in high-risk roles.
The Department of Defense lacks enough staff or technology to complete cognitive assessments for all high-risk, active-duty service members.
The conclusions are from a new Government Accountability Office report.
Only 86% of required assessments were completed last year.
The assessments monitor the brain health of service members exposed to blasts and were ordered after a mass shooting in Lewiston by Army Reservist Robert Card.
Card killed 18 people in Lewiston in October 2023 and was repeatedly exposed to blasts as a Reservist.
AI-extracted; can misattribute a claim — see Methodology.
Each row is one claim, attributed to the outlet whose wording states it most clearly. Confidence rates how directly the source text states the claim — explicit and unhedged rates high; hedged, pieced-together, or internally inconsistent statements rate lower. It does not measure whether the claim is true. Status is Contested when two claims on this page negate each other; otherwise it counts the distinct outlets we found asserting that specific claim — so a single-source claim can still show high confidence, and a multi-source claim can show medium. Every one of those outlets is named beside the status, so you can check the count against the list. For claims extracted before we began storing that list, the row says so: it names the outlet the claim is quoted from and states that we have not recorded which outlets backed it. Outlets wrote at different times, so a figure that evolves — a casualty count, for example — can legitimately differ between rows; check the "as of" time next to each claim's source.
Claim
Confidence
Status
ClaimThe Department of Defense lacks enough staff or technology to complete cognitive assessments for all high-risk, active-duty service members.