Fire the employee who broke the rules? Sure. Fire the bureaucrats up the line, and scapegoat the political appointees at the top? Fine. But none of that will prevent this from happening again - at the VA or anywhere else.

There's a real solution to this problem. And once you politicians have finished your Memorial Day speeches, you have the power to make that solution a reality.

You just have to pass a law dictating that all U.S. government agencies protect Social Security numbers as sensitive information and make them available to employees only on a need-to-know basis.

That way, people like that VA employee wouldn't lose millions of Social Security numbers in a burglary. They wouldn't lose them because they couldn't take them home. They couldn't take them home because they'd never have access to them in the first place.

Do they need them? Of course not. No employee needs a pile of 26.5 million Social Security numbers. Most government employees don't use Social Security numbers for Social Security- or tax-related work anyway. It's just a convenient way to keep track of who's who, so they don't confuse one John J. Jones born on July 4, 1960, with another John J. Jones with the same birth date.