Just one of many ways, and not only as to the VA facilities but Federal and State buildings etc. as well. And boy could I make a huge list of overlooked and ignored infrastructure needs!
I did this a number of years back, but it wasn’t because of a collapsed economy. I came off some eight years on the road, mostly in the northeast some midwest and a few southern states, building and supervising the building of stores in the new enclosed Malls that had grown out of strip malls all over. I just happened to have hit a call for a carpenter to lay a couple of VCT floors at the VA facility in Syracuse and was one of two hired. After we finished that we were asked to stay on and work out of their maintenance office and shop doing repairs and preventive maintenance. We ended up working there for a year plus. The other carpenter, older then myself, stayed on, I left to go back into commercial Rebuilds and continued in Commercial and Residential for the years since, up to the collapse of it all and the to little going on now.